The Greatest Art Form: Video Games and the Evolution of Artistic Expression

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What is Art?

In my view the great value of art lies in its power to prompt us to share experiences, worlds, beliefs, and differences. And our affective experience of art provides a terrain upon which these singular worlds, beliefs, and differences may be mapped.

- Peter de Bolla, Art Matters

In the beginning of his book that posed the age-old question, what is art?, Leo Tolstoy details his observations of the the inner-workings of an opera rehearsal. In his descriptions, he observes the toil, the sweat, the tears, and the time invested by the countless individuals involved in its production, from the stage workers, to the lighting crew, to the dancers and singers, costume designers, conductors and directors, writers and producers. He notes not only the amount of hours of work invested by each individual, but also the scolding, frustration, and intolerance by which the individuals involved in the production exhibit towards one another.

Tolstoy notes that all of this amount of labor, time, and hostility is produced in service of an opera that tells the tale of a king who disguises himself as a beggar in order to woo the woman he loves, who indeed falls for him despite being in despair that her lover is impoverished. Luckily for her, the king eventually reveals his true identity, and all is well as the story ends. The tale is told with grand, coordinated dances on-stage, with actors and singers in flamboyant costumes, all which Tolstoy remarks resembles absolutely nothing from the real world in which he actually lives.

Yet despite the intense labor, and the ridiculousness of the play's story, Tolstoy notes that such productions and labors are important enough to civilization that countries devote large sums of resources funding theaters, art museums, conservatories, drama schools, performances, and concerts. He notes that hundreds of thousands of workers devote their lives to satisfying the demands of art.

Tolstoy attempted to understand this phenomenon in 1897 as he himself endeavored to tackle the age-old task of defining exactly what art actually is, as well as how, why, or if, it should be useful to society. He was not the first to do so, and of course would not be the last. In reality, the question of how to decide what precisely is the product that society calls art has been answered by countless individuals over thousands of years, from philosophers to writers, from critics to scientists, from religious figures to politicians. The question is as old as recorded history, with figures like Plato and Socrates writing and reflecting on the nature of art over 2,300 years ago.

While over two millenniums of recorded human history have not been able to come to a consensus on what exactly defines art, nor have they been agreeable on which forms or individual productions can be considered works of art, there is no question that artistic creation is a task that human civilization highly values, both as a tool of mass communication as well as a means by which we create testaments of the human experience and condition for a given time and a given place.

What has made the creation of art both unique and complicated over the past century is that for the first time in over two thousand years, technology has given way to two new forms of art in such a short period of human history that our society, as a whole, is barely beginning to digest these new mediums and redefine our understanding of artistic expression. The first of these two forms, of course, was film. The second, which has only existed for the lesser part of the last forty years, is what can best be described as interactive digital motion pictures, or what have been popularly titled video games.

The reason behind my renaming of video games as interactive digital motion pictures is not in an attempt to coin a new term by which society can now refer to them. Rather, in the context of discussing the nature, history, and discourse of artistic expression, it is appropriate to understand that the term video game originates from a time when the video game was nothing more than a white dot on a screen moving back and forth between two vertical white lines, in a game known as Pong. Yet the video game form as it is seen today no more resembles that original form than the Academy Award Winner for Best Picture in 2013 resembles the Roundhay Garden Scene from 1888, widely considered to be the oldest surviving film in existence. What both the Roundhay Garden Scene and Pong represent is not art, but rather the birthing of technologies and concepts that would give rise to new forms of artistic expression and communication in a society where the only known forms of art had been resigned to literature, paintings, sculpture, music, and theater for the majority of known history.

Comparing the development of both film and video games is significant because the very discussion surrounding the video game medium and its role (or non-role) as an art form is no different than the discussion that originally surrounded, and in many ways continues to surround, the film medium. In his book, Film: An International History of the Medium, Robert Sklar elaborates on the way in which the discourse on the film medium in its early years began to transform from a discussion about technology and entertainment into a serious discussion about new artistic expression:

In the decade after 1910... motion pictures were said to be the first new art form of the modern era. They spoke in images accessible to all nations, all ages, all stations in life. Philosophers linked the movies with their theories of perception and knowledge; psychologists compared the movies to dreams. Avant-garde writers and visual artists drew on formal properties of cinema for their own work... Here was a new medium and art form of almost unlimited potential, in the eyes of many, yet in its everyday reality it remained predominantly an inexpensive popular entertainment, produced for profit. That it could be commerce was already amply proven; that it could be art - could achieve aesthetic significance for its practitioners and spectators - was becoming more certain year by year. Whether it could be both at once, and in what proportion, was a matter of contention and continues to be so to the present day.

What is particularly significant about Sklar's passage is that, with film and its relationship to artistic expression, the concepts of both commercial and artistic potential were critical in the beginning discourse of film as art, and as Sklar himself notes, the discussion on what level film can be at once art, entertainment, and commercial, has yet to be settled even among art critics and scholars. This reality, of course, comes as no surprise in the larger world of art, where those very same questions have been, and continue to be, raised among the other legacy art forms.

In today's discourse on the concept of video games as art, we have seen popular film critics like the late Roger Ebert showing skepticism about the notion of video games being an art form; he claimed that video games can never be art, and noted repeatedly that no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets. His central issue, as he noted in his posting on his Online Journal from April 16 of 2010, is with the interactive element of video games; this element, according to Ebert, creates problems because with interactions come rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. With artistic creations like a story, a novel, a play, dance, [or] a film, Ebert argued that those are creations you cannot win; you can only experience them. However, Ebert also contended that he had never actually directly experienced, or played, any video game that is argued to be art, and instead based his judgements on videos he watched of various games.

The issue with entertaining an argument against any creative medium being an art form without actually directly experiencing the art form itself is akin to entertaining a critical argument on the film Citizen Kane from a critic who had never actually seen the film, but has only read synopses and plot summaries of the film itself. Moreover, much in the way that Ebert's own film industry had to argue in order to begin to shift the discourse on film towards that of serious art, it is critical to look at art beyond the lenses of the familiar art forms. Artistic expression is not simply bound to the rules created by literature, music, painting, sculpture, or theater. That is because, quite simply, art and technology are inextricably linked.

The printing press was fundamental to the advancement of the literary artistic mediums, both in terms of consumption and the individual artist's ability to produce art. For the artist, the notion of audience took on an entirely new meaning, as artistic creation was able to be shared and distributed at a scale never before imagined. The invention of new musical instruments allowed artistic expression in music to become more complex, layered, and multidimensional in meaning, sentiment, and intake. Moreover, the invention of recorded sound, and later mass distribution of recorded sound by means of consumer media devices such as records, then cassettes, then compact discs, and finally digital music files, all contributed to the way in which artists conceived musical expression, since their audience, methods, and artistic freedom exponentially grew with each technological advancement. Painting and sculpture were affected and expanded by the advent of new tools for the artist, including chemical developments and compositions, new materials, and of course reproduction of artistic products.

In reality, art simply cannot exist without technology, and as a result, art is, and will continue to be, both complicated and exponentially expanded by the advent of new technologies. Without technology, whether in its most basic or advanced forms, art cannot be created, shared, preserved, or developed. Likewise, without the development of new technologies, artistic expression is unable to evolve. And because society's acceptance of the predefined art forms remained unchallenged until only the last one hundred years, when new technologies gave birth to the film and video game forms, the link between art and technology had largely been ignored.

Film, of course, has been greatly affected, expanded, and evolved through numerous technological developments over the past century, first with the creation of photography, then with the motion camera itself, then with the discovery of editing, sound recording, then once again with the discovery of color recording, the invention of more compact and mobile cameras, mobile microphones, improvements to film projectors, and even the creation of computers and the use of digital photography, enhancements, and effects. As noted by Lewis Jacobs in his book, The Emergence of Film Art, technological improvements led to the deepening and extension of camera and editing technique, so that by 1910 movie making had advanced from a scientific curiosity to a creative enterprise, involving planning, selecting and organizing subject matter and technique into compositions with esthetic interest. He continues with his discussion on how both technology and innovation continued to affect film's ability to create artistically significant productions, noting that such films were distinguished by a bold and imaginative grasp of camera usage for psychological, dramatic, and poetic effects, and by structural innovations in editing that generated powerful forces in their impact upon audiences.

Such expansions to artistic potential with the medium came again with the advent of color and sound, despite early problems with adaptation of the new technologies that left many critics skeptical that these new technologies actually enhanced the artistic merit of films. Similar to the ways in which we see film critics of today show skepticism about how the new uses of the technology in the video game form enhance artistic expression, Jacobs relates that critics during the time when sound began to be utilized in film developed tendencies of