From: Natasha Vita-More (natasha@natasha.cc)
Date: Sat Sep 09 2000 - 15:59:19 MDT
Art Form for the Digital Age
by Henry Jenkins
"Video games shape our culture. It’s time we took them seriously.
Last year, Americans bought over 215 million computer and video games.
That’s more than two games per household. The video game industry made
almost as much money from gross domestic income as Hollywood.
So are video games a massive drain on our income, time and energy? A new
form of “cultural pollution,” as one U.S. senator described them? The
“nightmare before Christmas,” in the words of another? Are games teaching
our children to kill, as countless op-ed pieces have warned?
No. Computer games are art—a popular art, an emerging art, a largely
unrecognized art, but art nevertheless.
Over the past 25 years, games have progressed from the primitive
two-paddles-and-a-ball Pong to the sophistication of Final Fantasy, a
participatory story with cinema-quality graphics that unfolds over nearly
100 hours of play. The computer game has been a killer app for the home PC,
increasing consumer demand for vivid graphics, rapid processing, greater
memory and better sound. The release this fall of the Sony Playstation 2,
coupled with the announcement of next-generation consoles by Nintendo and
Microsoft, signals a dramatic increase in the resources available to game
designers.
Games increasingly influence contemporary cinema, helping to define the
frenetic pace and model the multi-directional plotting of Run Lola Run,
providing the role-playing metaphor for Being John Malkovich and
encouraging a fascination with the slippery line between reality and
digital illusion in The Matrix. At high schools and colleges across the
country, students discuss games with the same passions with which earlier
generations debated the merits of the New American Cinema. Media studies
programs report a growing number of their students want to be game
designers rather than filmmakers.
The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art
shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century. I will admit that
discussing the art of video games conjures up comic images: tuxedo-clad and
jewel-bedecked patrons admiring the latest Streetfighter, middle-aged
academics pontificating on the impact of Cubism on Tetris, bleeps and zaps
disrupting our silent contemplation at the Guggenheim. Such images tell us
more about our contemporary notion of art—as arid and stuffy, as the
property of an educated and economic elite, as cut off from everyday
experience—than they tell us about games.
New York’s Whitney Museum found itself at the center of controversy about
digital art when it recently included Web artists in its prestigious
biannual show. Critics didn’t believe the computer could adequately express
the human spirit. But they’re misguided. The computer is simply a tool, one
that offers artists new resources and opportunities for reaching the
public; it is human creativity that makes art. Still, one can only imagine
how the critics would have responded to the idea that something as playful,
unpretentious and widely popular as a computer game might be considered art.
In 1925, leading literary and arts critic Gilbert Seldes took a radical
approach to the aesthetics of popular culture in a treatise titled The
Seven Lively Arts. Adopting what was then a controversial position, Seldes
argued that America’s primary contributions to artistic expression had come
through emerging forms of popular culture such as jazz, the Broadway
musical, the Hollywood cinema and the comic strip. While these arts have
gained cultural respectability over the past 75 years, each was
disreputable when Seldes staked out his position.
Readers then were skeptical of Seldes’ claims about cinema in particular
for many of the same reasons that contemporary critics dismiss games—they
were suspicious of cinema’s commercial motivations and technological
origins, concerned about Hollywood’s appeals to violence and eroticism, and
insistent that cinema had not yet produced works of lasting value. Seldes,
on the other hand, argued that cinema’s popularity demanded that we
reassess its aesthetic qualities.
Cinema and other popular arts were to be celebrated, Seldes said, because
they were so deeply imbedded in everyday life, because they were democratic
arts embraced by average citizens. Through streamlined styling and
syncopated rhythms, they captured the vitality of contemporary urban
experience. They took the very machinery of the industrial age, which many
felt dehumanizing, and found within it the resources for expressing
individual visions, for reasserting basic human needs, desires and
fantasies. And these new forms were still open to experimentation and
discovery. They were, in Seldes’ words, “lively arts.”
Games represent a new lively art, one as appropriate for the digital age as
those earlier media were for the machine age. They open up new aesthetic
experiences and transform the computer screen into a realm of
experimentation and innovation that is broadly accessible. And games have
been embraced by a public that has otherwise been unimpressed by much of
what passes for digital art. Much as the salon arts of the 1920s seemed
sterile alongside the vitality and inventiveness of popular culture,
contemporary efforts to create interactive narrative through modernist
hypertext or avant-garde installation art seem lifeless and pretentious
alongside the creativity that game designers bring to their craft.
Much of what Seldes told us about the silent cinema seems remarkably apt
for thinking about games. Silent cinema, he argued, was an art of
expressive movement. He valued the speed and dynamism of D.W. Griffith’s
last-minute races to the rescue, the physical grace of Chaplin’s pratfalls
and the ingenuity of Buster Keaton’s engineering feats. Games also depend
upon an art of expressive movement, with characters defined through their
distinctive ways of propelling themselves through space, and successful
products structured around a succession of spectacular stunts and
predicaments. Will future generations look back on Lara Croft doing battle
with a pack of snarling wolves as the 21st-century equivalent of Lillian
Gish making her way across the ice floes in Way Down East? The art of
silent cinema was also an art of atmospheric design. To watch a silent
masterpiece like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is to be drawn into a world where
meaning is carried by the placement of shadows, the movement of machinery
and the organization of space. If anything, game designers have pushed
beyond cinema in terms of developing expressive and fantastic environments
that convey a powerful sense of mood, provoke our curiosity and amusement,
and motivate us to explore.
Seldes wrote at a moment when cinema was maturing as an expressive medium
and filmmakers were striving to enhance the emotional experience of going
to the movies—making a move from mere spectacle towards character and
consequence. It remains to be seen whether games can make a similar
transition. Contemporary games can pump us full of adrenaline, they can
make us laugh, but they have not yet provoked us to tears. And many have
argued that, since games don’t have characters of human complexity or
stories that stress the consequences of our actions, they cannot achieve
the status of true art. Here, we must be careful not to confuse the current
transitional state of an emerging medium with its full potential. As I
visit game companies, I see some of the industry’s best minds struggling
with this question and see strong evidence that the games released over the
next few years will bring us closer and closer to the quality of
characterization we have come to expect from other forms of popular
narrative.
In the March 6 issue of Newsweek, senior editor Jack Kroll argued that
audiences will probably never be able to care as deeply about pixels on the
computer screen as they care about characters in films: “Moviemakers don’t
have to simulate human beings; they are right there, to be recorded and
orchestrated.... The top-heavy titillation of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft
falls flat next to the face of Sharon Stone.... Any player who’s moved to
tumescence by digibimbo Lara is in big trouble.” Yet countless viewers cry
when Bambi’s mother dies, and World War II veterans can tell you they felt
real lust for Esquire’s Vargas girls. We have learned to care as much about
creatures of pigment as we care about images of real people. Why should
pixels be different?
In the end, games may not take the same path as cinema. Game designers will
almost certainly develop their own aesthetic principles as they confront
the challenge of balancing our competing desires for storytelling and
interactivity. It remains to be seen whether games can provide players the
freedom they want and still provide an emotionally satisfying and
thematically meaningful shape to the experience. Some of the best
games—Tetris comes to mind—have nothing to do with storytelling. For all we
know, the future art of games may look more like architecture or dance than
cinema.
Such questions warrant close and passionate engagement not only within the
game industry or academia, but also by the press and around the dinner
table. Even Kroll’s grumpy dismissal of games has sparked heated discussion
and forced designers to refine their own grasp of the medium’s distinctive
features. Imagine what a more robust form of criticism could contribute. We
need critics who know games the way Pauline Kael knew movies and who write
about them with an equal degree of wit and wisdom.
When The Seven Lively Arts was published, silent cinema was still an
experimental form, each work stretching the medium in new directions. Early
film critics played vital functions in documenting innovations and
speculating about their potential. Computer games are in a similar phase.
We have not had time to codify what experienced game designers know, and we
have certainly not yet established a canon of great works that might serve
as exemplars. There have been real creative accomplishments in games, but
we haven’t really sorted out what they are and why they matter.
But games do matter, because they spark the imaginations of our children,
taking them on epic quests to strange new worlds. Games matter because our
children no longer have access to real-world play spaces at a time when
we’ve paved over the vacant lots to make room for more condos and the
streets make parents nervous. If children are going to have opportunities
for exploratory play, play that encourages cognitive development and
fosters problem-solving skills, they will do so in the virtual environments
of games. Multi-player games create opportunities for leadership,
competition, teamwork and collaboration—for nerdy kids, not just for
high-school football players. Games matter because they form the digital
equivalent of the Head Start program, getting kids excited about what
computers can do.
The problem with most contemporary games isn’t that they are violent but
that they are banal, formulaic and predictable. Thoughtful criticism can
marshal support for innovation and experimentation in the industry, much as
good film criticism helps focus attention on neglected independent films.
Thoughtful criticism could even contribute to our debates about game
violence. So far, the censors and culture warriors have gotten more or less
a free ride because we almost take for granted that games are culturally
worthless. We should instead look at games as an emerging art form—one that
does not simply simulate violence but increasingly offers new ways to
understand violence—and talk about how to strike a balance between this
form of expression and social responsibility. Moreover, game criticism may
provide a means of holding the game industry more accountable for its
choices. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, game designers are
struggling with their ethical responsibilities as never before, searching
for ways of appealing to empowerment fantasies that don’t require exploding
heads and gushing organs. A serious public discussion of this medium might
constructively influence these debates, helping identify and evaluate
alternatives as they emerge.
As the art of games matures, progress will be driven by the most creative
and forward-thinking minds in the industry, those who know that games can
be more than they have been, those who recognize the potential of reaching
a broader public, of having a greater cultural impact, of generating more
diverse and ethically responsible content and of creating richer and more
emotionally engaging stories. But without the support of an informed public
and the perspective of thoughtful critics, game developers may never
realize that potential."
Henry Jenkins is director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:53 MST