Videogames as Art
It’s always bugged me that most people refuse to acknowledge videogames as anything more than simple entertainment. I’m not talking about just the people who dismiss videogames as children’s toys, and freak out at the concept that adults enjoy playing them too – although, those people piss me off as well.
No, I’m talking specifically about the people who continue to deny that the medium has any artistic merit. There have been some bold, edgy attempts to use videogames as a medium to make a statement, but these statements are always misinterpretted. It’s as if people go out of their way to misunderstand videogames.
For example, a few years ago, there was Super Columbine RPG!, which, although I have not played, sounded like it was an attempt at interactive satire. Unfortunately, most people just heard: “Videogame about Columbine” and assumed that, since it’s a videogame, it must be completely devoid of taste.
Similarly, an independent game developer in Britain is working on a game called Imagination is the Only Escape, which he hopes will help educate young children of today about what young children went through during the Holocaust. The game is already “under attack by a holocaust survivor”, who said: “People can read and watch things about the Holocaust, they do not need these kinds of games.”
What it boils down to is: If a particular incident in our world moves you, and you want to make a deep statement about it, society welcomes you to do so, but only if you use a medium that has been around longer than 40 years. So, if you can’t talk about real life in a videogame, what can you do?
You can do what Jason Roher did: Talk about yourself.
I recently played Gravitation, a game Roher says is meant to express how he feels about the process of being creative. As a traditional game, it’s not very fun, but that’s the demon of working in a medium usually used for entertainment to create art. Art films are often less entertaining (and in some ways, “entertainment” is a euphemism that applies in the same way to both film and videogames) than Hollywood blockbusters. Looking for the game to be “fun” would be missing the point. Just because it’s interactive, does not necessarily mean it’s supposed to be fun. Instead, it’s making a statement in an interactive medium.
What the game did impress me with was the many different statements it made about life, about how one sees the world around them, how mood affects what they see, and what they’re capable of, all in ways that I personally identify with. As a piece of art, it was, in fact, deeply moving to me. I won’t tell you what the game is actually like, because like any piece of art, it must be experienced to be appreciated. You can’t appreciate a book without reading it, or a painting without seeing it. This is interactive art – you can’t appreciate it without interacting with it.
I want to see games like this will get more exposure, and lend more credibility to people out there who do want to work with videogames as a medium for interactive art. I think it’s wrong that we’ve told thousands creative people that their creativity is unwelcome, and their voices should be silenced. Creativity is born to be expressed, just as we are born to live.