Are games art? Art games are? Gavin takes some time out in the arthouse to investigate.

What makes a video game what it is? What makes art what it is? Can either of these things be quantified and turned into a digestible, definable explanation? Or are both questions answered only subjectively, purely open to our own interpretation?

The only thing we all know is that Roger Ebert must be an idiot.

When it comes to discussing video games as an art form, things admittedly get kind of murky. Yes, somebody with at least two brain cells and a basic understanding of how culture has evolved wouldn’t be dumb enough to flatly discount video games as an artistic entertainment medium. But what exactly it takes to make games considered art is an entirely different can of Warhol soup. If someone writes a play, it’s considered art. If someone gets a bunch of people together and shoots a movie, it’s art. So shouldn’t any game with a plotline considered as artistic expression? A game contains music, art design, animation, and story. Even the most hardened critic would acknowledge the artistic merit of those elements in their individual forms, but somehow when a controller gets plugged in, the overall product becomes inferior. But that’s generally only to people for who, for whatever reason are so out of touch with gaming that they don’t understand the increasing legitimacy of the medium.

The difficulty lies in the differences between video game art, an artistic video game, and a so-called traditional gaming experience. Video game art can be loosely classified as using an existing video game and its mechanics to create an artistic expression. Machinima would be an example. It also helps to show how broadly video games can be used in other facets of art. Joseph DeLappe’s "dead-in-Iraq" performance piece uses the game American’s Army as a platform for him to juxtapose the United States Army’s contentious use of the video game as a virtual recruitment tool for the harsh realities of the current way. In the piece, Joseph recites all 4300+ American war deaths that have occurred in various servers across the game. Here the video game is being used to demonstrate differences between the virtual world and the real world.

Invaders was understanbly controversial, but isn’t art supposed to be?

It also isn’t uncommon for video games to be used in a highly modified form as a piece of installation art. One of the most recent, and most volatile examples was Invaders! Douglas Stanley referenced the classic game Space Invaders in a critical commentary on America’s global strategy during the Bush administration. His installation featured attempts to save the World Trade Center towers from the familiar space invaders, but these attempts were always futile. Next to the screen was a loop of various American movies with xenophobic slants, interposed with shots of President George W. Bush in publicity shots. The point he was trying to make wasn’t entirely subtle, but it was art.

Both of these examples were accepted by the art world - at the least as art, anyway. But here the video game was simply being used as a tool for already accepted artistic statements. Even music has begun to experiment with the use of synthesized video games sounds, as evidenced in the rise of chiptune, a musical genre based entirely around console sound chips.