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| 03.17.2007why is the debate on 'videogames as art' old and useless?
This letter to the editor comments on the Brian Ochalla’s feature “Are games art? (Here we go again…)”, which re-proposes the age-old question on the artistic value of videogames. I am writing out of frustration in still witnessing attempts to analyze the videogame medium through unjustifiable and hardly effective categories.
I will try to prove why an artistic approach is just another symptom of the immaturity of the discourse on games.
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Two, in my opinion, are the causes of the definitive dispute “Are videogames art?”.
• The first reason, as pointed out a few times in Bryan Ochalla’s feature, is the youth of videogame; a phase that, since the early modernism, implies the attempt of defining and affirming the identity of the medium itself.
This happens in relative terms within the boundaries of digital entertainment, which is to say in the broader interpretative category of “media studies”, and in the absolute terms of the “fight for survival” of the forms of expression: which use values or testimonial values make videogames desirable and necessary?
• The second igniting cause of the conflict, I believe, is a certain rush. People working in development, in the field of critic, in the press, gamers, lovers and sympathizers all often seem anxious of taking and defending their position in what appears to be an inevitable clash between those who support the idea that videogames are a form of art and who is sure they are not.
The diffuse belief according to which the cultural promotion of videogame must take place in the specific “battlefield” of art is, however, quite arbitrary and certainly arguable.
Why not adopt, for example, an economic legitimization criterion instead of the artistic one? Not only that would be a social strategy which is broadly used in other fields of contemporary culture, but the idea itself of measuring quantitatively the diffusion and the consensus of digital entertainment through sales figures would not present either technical difficulties or the sterile subjectivity which makes Tim Schafer go “Here we go again…”.
Similarly, what would impede to evaluate the presence and influence of the videogame medium on the collective conscience through statistical measurements? Similar methods have already been resorted to (for example in market analysis) as effective analytical tools in pre-election polls, the participated urban design, and so on…
Moreover, it is highly indicative how, apart from very rare occasions, in the debate “Videogames: art or not art”, hardly anyone specifies the definition of “art” they are relying on. To the institutional definition of George Dickie? The one illustrated by Plato in his “Republic”, to the technical theory of art of Robin G. Collingwood or what other?
A vest number of studies and definitive attempts, in the course of history of culture, failed in replying in a rigorous and comprehensive manner to the question “what is art?”
The failure of such descriptive theories led philosophers (Ludwig Wittgenstein is probably the most known example) and aesthetic scholars to consider the whole project of defining the term “art” badly conceived.
Even more so, I believe it would be impossible to logically support the idea of basing a consistent part of the debate on games on a subjective, unproductive and maybe naive “question of art”.
My hope is that both the field of critic and game studies, as well as the press, will progressively abandon normative theories to study games (even more so when vaguely defined) to resort more thoroughly to a descriptive and mature approach.
- Stefano Gualeni, Ludology Docent at the “International Game Design and Architecture” course of NHTV University, Breda (NL).-Stefano Gualeni
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