Video games: high art or cheap thrills?

'Do video games have power and integrity? Do they make us think?'

London’s biggest festival of geekiness, Comic Con , opens this weekend, sparking new debate about whether games should now be regarded as an art form as valid as our established media of film, painting, music and the rest. 

Even the Today programme has weighed in, asking art critic Sarah Kent and Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans to debate whether games ‘Have a kind of power and integrity? Do they make us think?

Squaring up for the gamers, we have the Guardian’s games editor Keith Stuart, arguing that ‘There are many hundreds of people, right now, making sensitive, extraordinary and subtle games, who are pouring their frustrations, fears and anxieties into these projects, often working alone, using whatever tools are at hand’  – artists, by any other name. 

Not so convinced is the Spectator’s Fisun Güner , who argues that putting video games into a gallery is a win for no-one, concluding ‘In short, the work gains little by being seen as art and loses quite a lot. So I suggest that people who want to see this, that and the other as art, should really just chill out.’

Confused? There’s really no need. We asked Sean Walsh , Culture Whisper’s in-house doctor of philosophy, to unpick the arguments.  Along the way, he came up with a pretty serviceable definition of art too….

London Comic Conference: what all art will look like in 20 years' time

It’s London Comic Con this weekend. Yes, there are comics there, but really it’s a giant jamboree for the lovers of geek culture, for the fandoms – mini-worlds devoted to comics and anime and science fiction and fantasy and computer games. The event can look a little ridiculous to the sceptical eye, full of grown adults dressed as third-tier Star Wars characters, and anime dolls with distracting décolletage and cerulean hair. However, dismissal is not good enough. Outside a few state-sponsored deer parks, this is what all culture and art will look like in 20 years’ time, so we had better pay attention. 

So, are games art?

Let’s take games as the most interesting case, because they’re the toughest: you can sort of see how comics, even superhero comics, can be serious; television series are endlessly praised; and fantasy, SF and horror novels have bled into the literary mainstream in all sorts of ways. They all look a bit like art as we understand it, but games are different – they’re the volcano from which the lava of new culture is pouring over the old continent.

The romantic-bourgeois conception of high-prestige art

OK so, why are they different? To figure it out, let’s try to sketch the Romantic-Bourgeois conception of high-prestige art that games aren't like. I think it’s something like this:

1. It’s an autonomous production of an unusually gifted human spirit, expressing something that is at once particular and universal, serving no practical purpose. (Corollary: it shouldn't be created for filthy lucre).

2. It reveals permanent truths about the world – that is, it stands the test of time. (Corollary: art does not get better over time, so Homer can go toe-to-toe with James Joyce).

3. We’re impartial when assessing a work of art: we don’t think it evil when it represents something evil, and if it represents nudity, we shouldn’t want to have sex with that representation. (Corollary: the correct response to art is communing with it in silence). 

(Inside the Visual Art World, it's slightly different: they've spent a century charging people to look at urinals, poo-in-a-jar and Marina Abramovic just sitting there, so they mostly accept that art is just what the institutions and people with the power and money say it is:  if it's got a degree from St Martin's or an oligarch is willing to buy it, then it's art.)

It's all the fault of 18th-century Germans... 

This is a strange set of rules, frankly. We’ve cobbled them together from some eighteenth-century Germans, and they’re quite rickety at this point, since people spent much of the 20th century making things that don’t quite fit or dynamiting the logic. However, they remain resilient fall-back positions for broadsheet-ey criticism – art is geniuses telling you eternal truths while not turning you on. 

The thing about games – and in fact the whole world of comic-con pop culture – is that they do not fit this at all. Games are more like alternate rule-bound worlds, made by teams of largely anonymous people, using ever-advancing technology. You're meant to be involved and excited – you're making decisions all the time. Games age notoriously badly and are super-keen to make money. And if teenage boys get crushes on the female protagonists, so much the better.

So if games aren’t art, what are they? Some kind of cultural artefact? More like a fancy scarf or a custom car or an elaborate Victorian paper-doll theatre? This seems to work, since the world of gaming is definitely a culture, and a dense one: multiple overlapping communities, with a communal vocabulary of sorts, and internal rivalries and in-jokes. Gamers are permanently participating – arguing on the internet, making endless hours of videos of themselves playing games, dressing as their favourite characters, writing long critical essays that can be a strange mix of pop reference, childhood memoir and critical theory. Everyone can join in; everyone seems to be joining in. 

The thing is, this evolving, developing culture will soon be enough to turn games into art: they may not be the Romantic autonomous artworks that haunt criticism, but very little is. The idea of art is a flexible working fiction, and not that much fits it, really. 

So, as gaming culture gets more solid and generations grow up with it, games, like art, become an arena for expressing status, confederacy and distinction. They are objects of taste. And this means that the framework for high-prestige art comes back into it, and sophisticated chat about games converges with the old 1, 2, 3 of the aesthetic above. 

First, auteurism: this is coming through now: it's easy to admire the ludic elegance of Michael Brough’s 868-Hack, the shattering twitchiness of Terry Cavanagh's Super Hexagon or the aesthetic-emotional coherence of Jonathan Blow's Braid.

Second, the test of time. A canon is more clearly forming as the past of video-gaming is more and more fetishized – this incredible future-facing form increasingly looks back to primitive game systems, drawing on childhood memories to find pleasure or depth. 

Third, disinterested pleasure. This is the weirdest aspect of the aesthetic but it's visible in games too, in self-conscious art games – melancholic literary rambles such as Dear Esther basically feel like the field announcing its own seriousness, with a little pomposity appearing to be above things like 'winning' and 'points' and 'fun'. 

(Of course there has to be the fodder that's less admired, that good taste has to reject – trashy, churned out sequels and the rat-brain stimulation of Candy Crush. In the same way, you've got to be sniffy about blockbusters for art films to have meaning.) 

How games will reshape our definitions of art

And that’s enough – we might think of games as ‘cultural artefacts’ now; but thanks to the energy, size and enthusiasm of gaming culture, the whole shebang of ‘what is art?’ gets slightly reshaped – that strange idea of the aesthetic aligns with games, and games align with it. 

For a while, mainstream culture will treat the paradigm shift in a basically conservative way: it’ll be about talented people learning lessons from computer games, or using them to create 'proper' art that can be shown in galleries or watched on a screen. 

But, once another generation grows up with games, they will move to the centre of cultural production, and the question of games-as-art will melt away, or seem a little strange. Look at rock. Fifty years ago, before the Boomers fought their culture wars to have Dylan proclaimed the equal of Keats, the question 'is rock music art?' would seem absurd or provocative; now it still has a slightly odd ring, but to my ears the problem isn't about the seriousness of popular music, rather that there's something a bit off with this notion of 'art'. A couple of centuries ago, before George Eliot, before Flaubert, you could play the same game with the novel, which also redefined our notions of the artistic; in fifty years’ time, it’ll be games. 

So if your child (or possibly husband) is going to Comic Con, try not to panic. It may be a DREADFUL WARNING from a future populated by idiot man-children who want to buy games based on Lego based on Star Wars – but at its best there's something wonderful about giving up the sedentary, sit-there-and-take-it nature of art and going out into a world of joining in, dressing up and larking around. 

London Comic Con runs from 23 - 25 May 14 at Excel. Tickets are available on the door. 

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