A couple of weeks ago I received the news that Video Games where now officially accepted as an Art Form by the National Endowment for the Arts project. In practical terms this means that Video Game projects can now apply for endorsement from this institution; in more philosophical terms it makes a strong statement in the long and tired argument of whether or not Video Games are, or will ever be, an Art Form. So, for my first blog entry I thought I'd drop my two cents on the subject.
So, what is Art anyway?
Now, in order for this discussion to make any sense at all, I believe I should start by sharing my personal rough definition of art. For me, Art is a form of expression deliberately designed by the author (or authors) to communicate or evoke an emotional reaction. The fact that the expression is deliberate does not mean that the message it carries is fully consciously known or determined by the author; some unconscious manifestations can, and often do, appear in artistic creations. The fact that the audience for the piece receives the message that the creator intended is not guaranteed either; as all forms of human communication, the interpretation of a work of art is completely subjective and depends entirely on the cultural context of the audience. In much the same way, the success of a piece of art in evoking the expected response depends greatly on it's artistic quality. Inversely, one of the measures for the quality of a piece of art could be it's ability or inability to evoke in it's audience the expected emotional response.
So, long story short, Art is an expression, an attempt to transmit a message, in it's purest form, an emotion or a feeling.
One thing I'd like to make very clear is that, to me, the classification of something as a Form of Art, is not by any means related to the quality of the thing itself, it's the same as saying whether or not something is a pineapple: an object either is a pineapple or it is not, but that does not mean it's good or bad. In the same way, if we say that music is an Art Form, then Rebecca Black's Friday is as much a piece of art as Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Stating that something is a "work of art" is not a qualitative statement, merely a classification.
About the "language" of a Form of Art
So now that we got the definition part out of the way, I'd like to talk about the "language", to me this is the means trough which a piece of art transmits it's message to the audience. In music the language is a rhythmical pattern of different sounds that the creator can arrange in order to evoke a certain emotion, in drawing and paint, the language is a static visual representation using materials on a media. Now, when we get to the Cinema, things get a little more complicated, Cinema is a composite art form, since it includes photography, music, acting, writing, and in many cases, several forms of either digital or traditional illustration and animation, but the artistry in cinema does not reside in any of this elements in themselves, but rather in the combination of this elements to create an entire ensemble that when complete, transmits the message that the creators intended.
So what would be the language of video games? video games have often been compared to movies when discussing whether or not they should be considered a form of art, because just as movies, video games are a composite art; they too combine music, imagery, animation, and they often borrow much from the tried and true language of cinema. But the language of games is very different from that of movies, in a video game you are not told a story, you live the story, therefore the language of games is that of gameplay, the creators of a video game communicate their message through the use of gameplay mechanics, of playable surroundings, of environmental music that reacts to your actions, it is through the combination of this elements that a game should evoke the desired emotions in the player.
The use of cinematic sequences in video games is the equivalent of written text in early silent movies, it is a piece of a completely different form of communication being used as a means to go around a shortcoming. Early movies also borrowed much from theater, since it was the closest form of art that was already established at the time. Over the years however, Movies have come to find and develop their very own language, form which now games borrow so much. In the case of video games, cutscenes and cinematic sequences are an example of the lack of experience in this new form of communication, a game's story should not be told to you through texts and cutscenes, it should be told in the media's own language, and that is gameplay; excellent examples of this are games like Portal, Call of Duty (only the real ones, those by Infinity Ward) and Left 4 Dead, in these games you live through the story, it happens to you and around you, I believe that the success of these games is due to the recognition, even if unconsciously, of the fact that they are early examples of what this emerging form of art could eventually become, they are the Casablanca and Citizen Kane of the Art of this century.
