Kotaku
By: Bob Denerstein
To call it art or not to call it art?
That's the question that seems to stir passions and make lips quiver with rage when talk turns to video games.
Begin furrowing your brow now. The whole art vs. non-art discussion is complex, difficult and possibly beyond resolution, but those who exalt the virtues of movies over video games often fail to take into account some of the strange variations in the way movies are made, relevant factors when it comes to deciding whether films deserve to be placed on an art pedestal.
With much trepidation, I'm dipping a toe into these treacherous waters because a) I'm too foolish to refrain and b) because there are elements within the film community - and I'm a 27-year veteran of film criticism - that insist that video games can't be art.
Roger Ebert, perhaps the world's most famous film critic and also one of its best, recently recanted his original position. Video games could be art, Ebert wrote, although not "high art." I know lots of critics who wouldn't hesitate to turn a big thumbs down on the notion that video games can be art, and many of their arguments revolve around intention and singularity of vision.
But when we're talking movies, intentions remain elusive. A very capable screenwriter once told me that he hated the vaunted auteur theory - the one that identifies directors as the guiding force behind movies. Writers generally feel slighted by directors, but this writer's animosity derived from first-hand observation. No theory applies to every film, or even to a majority of them, he said.
He further explained that every movie has its own peculiar origins. A movie might begin with a screenwriter and his script. It might begin with a producer who's trying to read commercial tealeaves. It just as easily could originate with a big-name actor who has enough clout to get a project green lit. Maybe it's the work of some aspiring indie whiz kid with a trust fund and too many credit cards.
In the history of movies, few directors have been able totally to call their own shots and even those have often faced limits. The most sympathetic producer can't always raise sufficient money to bring a project to perfection. The ideal actor isn't always available to play a part.
But wait, goes yet another anti-game argument: Games have winners and losers. Scores are kept. Outcomes vary. Such factors rule out the possibility of art.
Really? I'm not a gamer, but I certainly can imagine games that speak to the mind and heart just as easily as I can imagine movies that don't. On second thought, I don't have to imagine such movies. I've seen thousands of them. And I know that some video games trump some movies in both the skill and imagination departments.
I also can see how a game, if created by a master, might begin to reveal the subtleties of its structure, a certain elegance that not only creates the fun of the game, but also begins to disclose the intricacies of the mind that created it.
And if art needs to be rooted in creative decision, what should we make of movies that are test screened so that studio executives can decide which of several possible endings should be used? Does this bizarre multiple-choice game preclude art? Under such circumstances, who's the artist? The director, the audience or the studio?
Here's a story to keep in mind. The great Chinese director Zhang Yimou ("Raise the Red Lantern") directed a movie called "The House of Flying Daggers." A couple of years ago, I interviewed one of the movie's stars, the lovely Zhang Ziyi. I rattled on enthusiastically about a final battle scene staged in a snowstorm. Zhang told me that the director hadn't planned to shoot in the snow, but the weather changed suddenly, and he decided not to wait for a "better" day.
I felt a little silly, but maybe I was right in the first place. Perhaps Zhang - the highly skilled creator of several masterworks - instinctively knew that nature had provided him with a happy accident. The point is that after all the decisions by committee, the second-guessing and the necessary compromises, art still can emerge, beauty wrenched from apparent chaos.
So in the end, how much does this debate matter?
Not much, I'd say. Movies and games should be appraised on two levels: to determine whether they work well, of course, but also to see what they reveal about the society they depict and the fantasies they promulgate. We should ask if games, like movies, speak to something vital in the human condition, a shorthand term that covers our common triumphs and woes.
Perhaps the effort to separate art from non-art does little more than send us on a wild goose chase.
So if there's a battle raging, count me out. I'm not about to climb any barricades to defend the sanctity of art. If I visit a museum that's displaying video games, as some evidently already have, I'm not about to turn up my nose. I'm going to marvel at the elasticity of a changing culture, and I'm going to remember that even a mild wind sometimes blows away lines drawn firmly in the sand.
Bob Denerstein spent 27 years reviewing movies for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver. He recently took a buyout from the paper and has moved on to other writing challenges. You can follow his musings at Denerstein Unleashed.
