[GRWC8] High Art [Article]
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 5:51 pm
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Anonymous wrote:High Art
The games industry is one that desperately wants to be appreciated. It’s like the new kid at school who brings in some cakes on his first day in the hope of achieving a rapturous critical reception from his new peers, music, film and literature. Creating this kind of fuss is all well and good, it starts you off on the right foot, but nobody’s going home that day thinking ‘that piece of Battenburg has totally changed my perception of life’.
Despite bringing in more annual revenue than the music industry, gaming culture and close to everything it produces is shunned by those looking from the outside in. All the while, new films, books and albums are being created and celebrated by society, so why aren’t games welcome at the party. For a number of reasons really, but most prominently because we ourselves, who like to wallow in gaming culture, can’t decide what qualifies as art. So let’s take a perusal through some unlikely candidates to see if we can’t fumble our way to some kind of conclusion.
One of the most famous definitions of art, which we have now thankfully moved on from, is something that has no purpose other than itself. Though this is a rather restrictive definition that rules out anything from the entire entertainment industry, it is one that allows us to look at video games in a new light that proves useful for this article, so allow me to briefly indulge the concept. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you Carnival Games on Wii.
I, like many of you, have never played Carnival Games. I’ve never even seen it in action and certainly couldn’t pick it out of a line-up based on screenshots, why? Because it’s not a good game, as one of the most poorly reviewed titles on the Wii, Carnival Games steadfastly fails to entertain. The most likely reason behind this is not because the developers are useless, but rather that little to no thought was put into the game being enjoyable. Here is a game then that was created purely to be. To just sit there on the shelf of thousands of game stores nationwide, like a nice watercolour, hoping to be picked up by those who just thought it looked good. What purer form of art is there than that?
Now the gaming community may completely disagree with that last submission, but I put it to you that we gamers are a daft bunch. We rule out hoards of games based on a couple of screenshots (I seem to have done just this for Carnival Games), we argue endlessly on message boards over infinitesimal differences in review scores and we spend enough money on yearly updates to keep EA happily in the black. Ask a gaggle of a hundred gamers what game they think qualifies as art and chances are you’ll get a hundred and one different responses. Give them a bit longer to think on the subject and Ico will probably be one of the most commonly suggested titles. Why Ico? Well besides the simple yet satisfying gameplay and weepy narrative, it looks pretty and I’ll stick my leg out and say that this is what was at the forefront of people’s minds making the suggestion. That’s all well and good, but ask anyone educated to any degree of art appreciation (which I should probably make clear that I am absolutely not), what elevates something to the level of a piece of art and physical attractiveness will be very low down on that list. A more pertinent quality is the way a subject engages with a piece of art and the purity of emotion *vomits* expressed. This is probably why so much modern art leaves us scratching our heads. With this in mind my second nomination of a game representing high art is Gears of War.
Aggression, it’s not a pretty emotion but it is a vibrant one, it also happens to be one that Gears of War serves up in spades. You can only really see it when watching someone else play Gears, but on or offline with 360 controllers in hand gamers become a sweaty, shouty, shaky mess. Unlike any other game Gears of War gets your heart pumping, even though the Locusts are only collections of pixels you loathe those subterranean sapiens. The games narrative is pretty pitiful but when you’re embroiled in the action, the visceral aggression of everything on screen just makes it come alive. Bizarrely, saving humanity matters. You’ll grit your teeth as you chainsaw through flesh, you’ll perspire as you desperately dash to revive a fallen comrade and you’ll flail your arms wildly when a shotgun shreds your legs from your torso. If modern art is all about the way any given person engages with it, then Gears of War’s adrenaline pumping aggression activator is one of the finest examples around.
I’ve only scratched the surface here of possible interpretations of art in games, worrying that a longer piece of pretension might have sent some of you to sleep. I don’t really have expected to have changed anyone’s mind one way or another, and even if I have it’s only gamers reading this so there’s little impact to be had. Regardless of this, I hope to have got at least one person thinking and maybe inspired them to look at something from another perspective. A third century Greek once said ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, and the same is true for art. Nobody can tell you that this is good art and that isn’t, you’ll make your own interpretations either way within a matter of seconds of viewing. These were some of mine, I hope you liked them. Now where’s that cake?
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