Hopper with Headshots

Interesting response from Grant Tavinor to Roger Ebert's claim that video games can never be art.

I have a couple of responses myself to Tavinor's piece. One is that I really need to finish Bioshock. I keep skimming past portions of these essays so as to remain unspoiled. (Of course, if Bioshock really is art, then it should stand up without a surprise twist. I can't imagine putting aside Madame Bovary once I knew (spoiler alert!) that Emma dies. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that Bioshock is the game around which the videogame/art discussion will take place. Essays like "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock" (among others) suggest that Bioshock will be the game around which much discussion of the medium will take place. That's OK, as I can't think of a better one, except possibly Braid, which I also didn't quite finish. But Braid is a short independent game, and so Bioshock is probably a more representative example of what a commercial studio could accomplish if it decided producing a serious game was worth the effort.

I've finally looked at Ebert's essay, and it's shockingly shallow. Of course, he doesn't have to rise much to meet Santiago's challenge; any essay that uses Wikipedia for its definition of art might as well just give up at the outset. What's really troubling about Ebert's response, though, is his steadfast refusal to play a game. Whatever one thinks of games, it should be clear that playing is the mode of experiencing the medium. No serious person would review a piece of music without listening or a film without viewing it. It's easy enough to imagine Ebert's response if someone were to say The Godfather was an inferior piece of work because it was about gangsters and thus was clearly "one more brainless shooting gallery." Why even bother sullying yourself by watching it?

Ebert's failure to even understand how games are experienced appears most clearly in his dismissal of Braid: "You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game."

Now I couldn't actually finish Braid. I don't enjoy platform gaming, probably because I've never really had the reflexes for it. Still, Ebert appears to have missed the entire conceit of Braid, which is that some of its puzzles can only be solved by reversing time and taking back previous actions. A complex series of maneuvers have to be completed to finish the level. In chess, this is known as playing the game.

Because Ebert doesn't understand the mechanics of the game, he can't really grasp Santiago's point about how the game explores permutations of memory and regret. Had he played the game, moreover, Ebert might have considered Braid's use of music, for example, or its painterly design, which alternates Edwardian interiors with pastoral dreamscapes. These surely deserve consideration in an essay that purports to consider the aesthetics of the game.

While I like Tavinor's discussion of overlapping cultural activities, I actually think he concedes too much in responding to Ebert's argument about rules and competition. The fact of the matter is that in many many games produced these days, one does not win, though it's again unsurprising that Ebert doesn't realize this fact. You don't win Bioshock and you don't win Braid. You finish them, as you might finish a novel. Except in PvP areas of MMOs, there's very little competition in the sense that Ebert suggests.

Neither Braid nor Bioshock is without its flaws. I found both the whimsy and the melancholy in Braid wearying after a few hours of play. And both Clint Nothing and D. Riley in the links above explore how Bioshock fails to make good on its promise of ethically significant play. But Bioshock urges players to consider the ethics of their in-game action, the ethics of ludonarrative, and in this it distinguishes itself from any other game I'm aware of.

But is it art? At this point, I finally think Ebert makes a valid point, just not perhaps the one he intends. He's right to suggest that gamers shouldn't worry about whether games are art. Games, like film, painting and theater, are cultural productions, more or less engaging, more or less complex. Critics like Tavinor can probably more fruitfully spend their time analyzing games themselves than they can trying to persuade anyone that games measure up to the the arbitrary aesthetic standards of Roger Ebert.