Why did Rome fall?
What do women want?
What really happened to Amelia Earhart?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Are games art?

These are questions that will be asked and answered til the end of time. Every answer will have some merit. I have been asked to provide my own thoughts on the last question. Here goes…

Let us first begin by admitting to ourselves that the question is unanswerable. There is no absolute definition of art. Any definition that you propose will be shot to shreds by some contrarian. Moreover, there really isn’t much point in arguing over a definition of art: de gustibus non est disputandem (”There’s no arguing about taste.”) So let’s start off with the humble admission that there is simply no definite answer to the question of whether games are art.

But we can still learn a lot by playing with the question. For example, why even bother with the question? Who cares? Why do gamers even bother worrying about whether games are art?

I can offer an answer to this question, but you may not like it. I think that gamers are overly defensive about their work. We all know that games don’t have the most sterling reputation with the general public: there are plenty of people who consider them tawdry if not downright corrupting to our youth. It seems that hardly a year goes by with some sort of direct or indirect legislative attempt to take a shot at gaming. This makes gamers feel besieged, which in turn leads to the defensive attitude that ultimately seizes upon the ‘games as art’ meme as a form of self-defense. By wrapping himself in the robes of ‘Le Artiste’, the gamer asserts the worthiness of his efforts.

So while I cannot offer any direct confirmation or denial of the hypothesis that games are an art form, I do believe that the assertion of the hypothesis seems to be made for ignoble reasons. The people who argue that games are an art form are (in most cases, not all!) doing so for reasons of personal vanity, not objective intellectual analysis. The argument over ‘games as art’ has everything to do with games and little to do with art.

Here’s a second observation: if games are indeed art, they have certainly fallen far short of the levels of achievement that other media have achieved. Surely there is nothing in the games oeuvre to compare with the great works of music, painting, sculpture, cinema, dance, or literature. Of course, this is an unfair criticism: these other media have had centuries to develop and refine their techniques and to find their geniuses; games have had but 30 years, and during much of that time designers were struggling with atrociously weak hardware. Nevertheless, I can offer a strong argument against the likelihood of such masterpieces emerging. My argument hinges on two factors: the importance of the individual in creative excellence, and the economics of the medium.

First, the individual: there is no question that individuals are better generators of artistic creativity than groups. Throughout history, the most revered artists worked as individuals (although some did work with groups). The individual is the focal point of creativity. Yet the games industry has settled on a system using large teams of workers, with creative control diffused among a number of people. This short-circuits the lightning bolt of creativity.

The second factor is economic. If art can be produced cheaply, then lots of people will create art. Most of that art will be junk, because most people have no talent. But the number of attempts will be so great that there’s a real chance that one of those attempts will be brilliant. Conversely, if art is expensive to produce, then the range of possibilities is narrowed. Fewer attempts will be made and the chances for a bolt from the blue are reduced.

But large budgets are inimical to creativity in a more fundamental way. A large budget inhibits risk-taking because accountability is spread more widely. Working alone, an artist can try any weirdo idea that crosses their mind, and if it fails, then the artist need not explain the failure to anybody. But as the budget of a project increases, the number of people to whom the artist must answer also increases. In the case of a multi-million dollar project, a failure must be explained all the way up to the CEO, and then the board of directors, and possibly even the stockholders. These people don’t understand the intricacies of design, and so any risk, however reasonable the expert may know it to be, is inexcusable at the level of the CEO, the board of directors, or the stockholders. The anticipation of this problem banishes all thought of true risk-taking from the mind of the designer, leaving only the safe — and banal — possibilities.

But what about Hollywood?
It’s likely that you have already realized that Hollywood appears to refute my arguments. Hollywood relies on big teams, not individuals; Hollywood has huge budgets. Yet Hollywood does succeed in maintaining its creative edge. How do I deal with this counterargument?

My answer is to point out that Hollywood has developed an intricate system for coping with these impediments to creativity. The first component of this system can be visualized as a huge pyramid. The bottom layer of the pyramid consists of the millions of Americans who harbor a desire to write a novel. Just above this layer are about a million people who actually do write a novel. The third level consists of maybe 300,000 people who actually submit their work to publishers. Out of those 300,000 submissions, perhaps a 10,000 are actually published. Out of those 10,000, perhaps 500 make a decent amount of money. Hollywood cherry-picks the best of those to make into movies. Thus, Hollywood actually does have a huge creative base upon which to draw. Thousands of creative individuals provide the raw material for Hollywood, and the book publishing industry provides a pre-filtering mechanism.

Hollywood harnesses the creative power of the individual in another way: by precisely differentiating the creating roles in moviemaking, and allocating large amounts of creative responsibility to artists who specialize in that task: writers, actors, directors, cinematographers, editors, and so on. Thus, although many people work on a movie, the creative decisions are still made by individuals, not committees.

Moreover, Hollywood goes to great lengths to nurture its creative talent. Gamers love to boast that the games industry has outgrown Hollywood, but when it comes to growing talent, Hollywood far outstrips the games biz. The mechanisms Hollywood employs to nurture talent are manifold: contributions to film schools to provide basic training to young talent; film festivals for young filmmakers to show off their talents (and where they might obtain further funding); and a plethora of small individual efforts. By contrast, the games industry doesn’t bother to foster its talent because it enjoys a huge crush of eager applicants desperate to get their chance to break into the games industry. Sure, it’s cheaper that way — but it does nothing to foster and develop the talents of these young enthusiasts. They are, for the most part, code fodder. In other computing industries, the size of a program is measured by the number of lines of code; in the games industry, it is measured by the number of newbies you burn out during the project.

The third mechanism that Hollywood uses to foster creativity is its support for films that have no mass market potential. I’m not talking only about art films; there are plenty of films made every year that appeal to only a small segment of the overall market. Hollywood has developed distribution systems to insure that these movies can still make money. By contrast, the games industry is entirely devoted to the Holy Grail of the smash hit. If it’s not an A-level game, it’s not worth bothering with. True there are some B-level projects done every year — but these are not carried out by the major publishers. They’re done by second-string companies trying to break into the bigtime.

It is possible that the games industry will eventually learn from Hollywood and start to utilize some of the schemes that Hollywood uses to enhance its creative output. But I rather doubt it. One of the fundamental rules of corporate and individual behavior is that nobody changes unless they are in pain. Comfortable people don’t change. And the games industry is simply too comfortable to contemplate serious change. It’s not facing the kind of challenges that traumatize and energize other industries. Fuel price increases have no effect; globalization is beneficial, not injurious; the mothers of the world continue to churn out new customers every year. We don’t read news stories of major games companies facing bankruptcy as we read about in other industries. So why should the games industry bother with change? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

A Personal View
Lastly, I offer a way of thinking about the question from the point of view of the individual. It is illuminating, I think, to ask the question, “To what extent is your labor directed towards the goal of meeting the demands of others, and to what extent is it directed towards expressing your own internal expressive impulses?” Here are some variations on that question:

To what extent do you have something burning inside of you that you need to express?
To what extent are you in it for the money?
If you built something that you knew was absolutely brilliant, but everybody else hated it, would you still be satisfied with your effort?

I will not claim that these questions jointly constitute a definition of art. But I do think that any game designer who seeks to be an artist should mull them over.

Tags: Art

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 10:45 am and is filed under Art, Design, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.