Is it Art? - John Lanchester on Videogames from LRB

From LRB:

"From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist. The newspapers cover the movies extensively, and while it isn’t necessary to feel that they do all that great a job of it, there’s no denying that they have a try. Video games by contrast are consigned to the nerdy margins of the papers, and are pretty much invisible in broadcast media. Video-game fans return the favour: they constitute the demographic group least likely to pay attention to newspapers and are increasingly uninterested in the ‘MSM’, or mainstream media.
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist. (The exceptions come in the form of occasional tabloid horror stories, always about a disturbed youth who was ‘inspired’ to do something terrible by a video game.) Their invisibility is interesting in itself, and also allows interesting things to happen in games under the cultural radar. ...

Shouldn’t we just leave gamers to their annoying games, until they become less annoying? Is there anything that might be done about it, to make video games less offputtingly difficult/ arbitrary/self-segregating/stupid? One of the people who has most engaged with the question is also one of the few unquestioned geniuses in the video-game world, Shigeru Miyamoto.

...Miyamoto has, throughout his career, engaged with the question of arbitrariness by making his games more arbitrary, more silly – by making that silliness part of the fun. He is the inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong and Zelda and Nintendogs: in other words, he’s Walt Disney. At his best, as in the recent Super Mario Galaxy, made for the Nintendo Wii, his games are visually beautiful, witty (a quality expressed mainly through the design of the many small planet-worlds in the game, heaving with imaginatively designed traps and enemies), and have a sublime, enchanting silliness. He dislikes narrative in game design, so his games don’t have a story (except for the Zelda series), but they do offer wholly satisfying worlds – this being one of the things video games do best.

...It is no accident that Miyamoto has dedicated his career to the Japanese console-maker Nintendo, for whom all of his games have been designed. Nintendo began life in the late 19th century as a maker of card games, and that emphasis on gaming survived their transition to newer technologies. That might sound like a truism – video-game maker has background in games – but as it happens the company’s two great rivals have different histories. Sony is a consumer technology company, Microsoft is a software company, and both have been more reluctant than Nintendo to understand that what people mainly want to do with games is play;
their interest has recently focused more on their desire to ‘win the battle of the living-room’. Translated, that means to sell consumers a super-powerful omnicompetent console which sits in the corner of the room and gives the parent company a share of all sorts of potential future revenue streams. Sony’s PS3 is a wonder of the world, with two astounding new technologies inside, the multi-threading Cell computer chip and the new generation Blu-Ray Disc; the Xbox 360 is a powerful computer in its own right; but the much lower-tech Nintendo Wii is a lot more fun than either of them.
If one were trying to find a point where video games are turning into a form of artistic expression, however, it might be towards the more powerful consoles that one would look.
The Wii is great entertainment but in spirit it is closer to a toy than a game; I don’t mean that as a criticism, it’s a virtue. In the form of games such as those of Miyamoto, it is close to a spirit of pure play. This is often elusive in the darker types of video game. A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work. The Grand Theft Auto games, for example, are notorious (especially among people who’ve never played them) for their apparent celebration of random violence. The most recent iteration of the game, however, Grand Theft Auto IV, involves the main character having to spend a large amount of time building up his relationships, so that he can have people to help him do his criminal thing; and building up these relationships involves driving to see these people, taking them out to nightclubs, and sitting there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life.

Peter Molyneux, a brilliant British game designer with a particular interest in ‘God games’ – games in which the player creates a world – had a great notion in a game called The Movies, which came out in 2005. In it the player designs and then runs a movie studio, starting at the birth of the medium and running all the way into the near future: he builds the studio, sets budgets, hires directors, manages the careers of stars, co-ordinates the production of the film, and then, within the game, actually gets to make animated films in the relevant style of the period, from silent to early colour to the present day. The player can then upload these films to the internet where anyone can watch them.[2] The Movies is an example of just how sophisticated video games can be; but it also has a not so subtle flaw, in that the business of running the studio, in the game, is all too realistic: it’s almost as much of a budget-juggling, ego-massaging, logistics-forecasting pain in the bum as it would be in real life.
That’s not atypical.

Most games, as Poole argues, are work-like. They have a tightly designed structure in which the player has to earn points to win specific rewards, on the way to completing levels which earn him the right to play on other levels, earn more points to win other rewards, and so on, all of it repetitive, quantified and structured. The trouble with these games – the majority of them – isn’t that they are maladapted to the real world, it’s that they’re all too well adapted. The people who play them move from an education, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, to a work life, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, and for recreation sit in front of a computer screen and play games full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others. Most video games aren’t nearly irresponsible enough.

So, on the one hand, we have those games which manage to achieve a pure state of play – too few, but they do exist. In addition to Miyamoto’s masterpieces, I should mention the magnificently goofy series of games jointly produced by Lego: Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. They are perfect games for an adult and a child to play together.

... The medium doesn’t have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can’t match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film. But it does have two great strengths.
The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema.
The second is to do with a sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose. It is this which gives the best games their immense involvingness. You are in the game in a way that is curiously similar to the way you are in a novel you are reading – a way that is subtly unlike the sense of absorption in a spectacle which overtakes the viewer in cinema. The interiority of the novel isn’t there, but the sense of having passed into an imagined world is.

...Gaming is profitable and has grown fast, and this audience has allowed it to do so, so the industry is to a large extent focused on giving the boys what they want.
And what do they want? The same thing the audience for any new medium always wants: they want pornography, broadly defined. They want to see things they aren’t supposed to see. This is why video games, in general (and away from the world of Miyamoto-san) are so preoccupied with violence – it’s what young men want to see. (Pornography in the sexual sense is less of an issue: they can get that from the internet, any time they want.) Their rule-bound, target-bound educations and work lives leave them with a deep craving to go and commit imaginary crimes – as well they might. Not all games are cynically, affectlessly violent, but a lot of them are, and this trend is holding video games back. It’s keeping them at the level of Hollywood blockbusters, when they could go on to be something else and something more.

It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear. One of the problems is that the new consoles are difficult and expensive to create games for: no one can create a game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 without access to significant amounts of capital. The next generation of consoles is a long way away, and this will likely be even more the case by the time they’ve grown up. As the tools of filmmaking have got cheaper, those for game making have got more expensive; this might mean that the game industry never gets to move on from the need to create blockbuster equivalents. Already the industry suffers from an excessive proliferation of sequels – always a sign that the moneymen are in charge. Games do a good job of competing with blockbusters, but it would be a pity if that was the summit of their artistic development.
There are, however, glimpses of what games might one day be.

... From the aesthetic point of view, a lot turns on whether games offer their users actual creativity, or whether it is just some horrible corporate simulacrum. The PS3 has a wonderful new game called LittleBigPlanet, in which you play a sock-like creature who travels through game levels full of puzzles and obstacles, and governed by fascinatingly realistic physics – and then offers you a full set of tools to design game levels of your own, and upload them for others to play. All the specifics of the levels are up to you; you can fill them with photos and music of your own choice, you can do whatever you like. That’s fun. Is it creative? I’m not sure: part of me wants to say that it isn’t, that nothing within a world so fully made by a corporation can be truly creative. But it isn’t so far off creativity, and it is possible to imagine a day in which games like this cross over to offer real freedoms, and therefore the real possibility to make something new, something of your own.
The other way in which games might converge on art is through the beauty and detail of their imagined worlds, combined with the freedom they give the player to wander around in them. Already quite a few games offer what’s known as ‘sandbox’ potential, to allow the player to ignore specific missions and tasks and just to roam around. (Many people’s favourite aspect of the Grand Theft Auto games involves their sandboxiness. A favourite sandbox activity in the California-set Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was simply driving to the coast and watching the sun go down over the ocean.) I think more and more games will make this central to the user’s experience of the game, and one straw in the wind here is Fallout 3, a new game from the producer Bethesda. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic 2277, and your character begins the game living in Vault 101, a bomb shelter set near the ruins of Washington. The game has the usual props and targets, but one of the most striking things about it is the opportunity it offers to explore the bombed-out, desolate, intensely evocative city. This is something which, once you’ve done it, I suspect will be difficult to get out of your head – and it is a glimpse of what games can do at their best. The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists; if the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form. At a moment when there’s less good cheer than there should be, it’s something to look forward to.

John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the LRB, was given the 2008 E.M. Forster Prize.