Video Games Are Art

Not a great title, but trust me - it's art.

My tried and true process for deciding what to write about on this blog is to live my life until something pisses me off (which I can always count on happening twice a week, if not twice a second) and then examining the reasons for why it makes me feel that way and how I came to hold that position, and next thing I know I’m waking up in front of my computer with a brand new blog update posted, my breath smelling of whiskey and a pile of human molars at my feet.

While in England, though, I felt obliged to write about England oriented topics, as I didn’t want to be the guy who goes on a once in a lifetime trip overseas and writes about what his preferred brand of Kleenex is or whatever (Everyday Plus™, in case you were wondering). This was troublesome when something particularly stupid and non-England related happened during my absence, but now that I’m back and my travels have temporarily ceased, I feel like it’s time to deal with an issue that’s been nagging at me for some time.

On April 16th, film critic and general pop culture god Roger Ebert posted an update on his blog in which he reaffirmed his position that video games can never be art. Not only is this statement wrong; it’s profoundly ignorant, and made all the more frustrating for me because the person who said it is highly intelligent and talented. I always hate to see smart people acting like idiots – this is why Steve Martin’s film career as of late has been sort of painful for me to follow.

Roger Ebert stated that he doesn’t play any video games, which, as far as I’m concerned, ends the argument right then and there.

“The three games [TED speaker Kellee Santiago] chooses as examples [of art] do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it.”

He’s basically disqualified from any discussion on the matter because he has no frame of reference other than how he sees video games represented in the media, which is either in sophomoric commercials designed to glorify selling points such as violence or immersion, or in news segments designed to deride elements of gaming such as violence or immersion.

To be honest, I can’t blame Roger Ebert for thinking that video games are not and cannot be art. Precious few games are of what is classically considered to be artistic merit, and even then they’re not usually sold on the basis of artistic merit, like independent films, because you can’t carjack artistic merit and use it to run over hookers. On top of that, a fair number of the games that are designed to be of artistic merit tend to fall flat.

Case in point, Grand Theft Auto IV. It was heavily billed as this brooding, creative masterpiece about the American dream, but a lot of that message is undercut when your character eats hot dogs to recover from gunshot wounds and caps off his American sojourn by jumping a motorcycle onto a moving helicopter. The Halo series also tried to bill itself as this mature study of war and peace, particularly through a really beautiful ad campaign that almost makes you forget that you spend most of the game shooting profanity spouting, neon colored aliens with a rocket launcher.

So video games don’t make a great case for themselves. Arthouse gaming receives virtually no exposure, and as a casual gamer myself, I can tell you that I’m fundamentally uninterested in noncompetitive games that a couple of stoned digital arts majors cobbled together in somebody’s basement. Gaming is a big industry that currently sells itself with the same over the top zeal as a film industry made up entirely of Michael Bays.

But what really cheeses me off is that Roger Ebert, this goddamn American treasure, would go out and outright deride video game artistry as “pathetic” when the man hasn’t so much as played any of them. Full disclosure, I always hated soccer, but I withheld comment until I’d actually watched a few games, just so I knew what I was talking about. Likewise, I hate Sex and the City, but I’m not going to get on here and label it as a socially detrimental piece of pseudo-pornographic trash until I’ve actually sat down and watched a few episodes to give myself a frame of reference – until that day, I’ll freely admit that my views on Sex and the City are uninformed opinions and nothing more.*

*I’ve watched some Friends, though. Friends can go straight to hell.

For Roger Ebert to even get up on his high horse about what is or isn’t art is also pretty stupid, seeing as a good amount of the groundbreaking, important artwork of the 20th century was either declared to be ‘not art’ by the critics of the time (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Pop Art), or intentionally designed to challenge or refute notions of what we consider to be art (Dada, punk rock). Those are such murky and subjective waters that I’ve given up on trying to differentiate between art and not art, because as soon as you say that a man rubbing his shit on a wall isn’t art there’ll be some asshole in a beret and a striped shirt telling you that you’ve just written off Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack with that statement.

I don’t have a whole lot to say to defend video games, because the video games I play, as stated, are almost exclusively the ones in which murder and destruction are the primary gameplay mechanic. These are, I imagine, the video games that Ebert has in mind when he says that the medium is not capable of art. Even these particularly plebian games, though, have rare moments that bring out in me an emotional response even greater than that of other mediums (such as, I don’t know, film.)

The best example I can give is from Resident Evil 4, an almost criminally enjoyable game which revolves entirely around you shooting Spanish zombies in the face with a shotgun.

In the game, the player’s character is government agent Leon Kennedy, who is investigating the disappearance of the President’s daughter in a remote Spanish village. Before long, everything goes to hell and the zombified villagers begin to attack en masse, sometimes with chainsaws. Alone and cut off from the outside world, Kennedy has no choice but to work his way through the village and surrounding countryside, fighting off wave after wave of increasingly horrific zombies.

The dialogue is reprehensible, the hero is a square jawed, unflinching American, and all of the Spanish villains are two steps above Speedy Gonzales on the racial sensitivity scale. But in spite of all this, the game has a distinctly existential tone – at virtually all times you are completely alone and cut off from society. Sure, you’re surrounded by people, but the only way you can interact with them is shooting them before they eat you. Eventually you do find and escort the President’s daughter, but in a fight she’s little more than a mewing, crying liability.

Near the end of the game, after countless hours of being all alone in this nightmare without a friend in the world, the player stumbles upon an outdoor complex packed full of vicious, bloodthirsty zombies, some of whom are armed with crossbows and rocket launchers. Low on health and ammo after an earlier boss battle and with no way around the compound, the player has no choice but to walk into what is clearly certain doom. As he does so, however, a lone US Air Force Apache helicopter appears, responding to one of Leon’s earlier distress calls.

“Name’s Mike!” The pilot of the helicopter cheerfully shouts into your earpiece. “If you’re looking for firepower, you’ve come to the right place.”

From this point on, you sneakily make your way through the compound as Mike absolutely massacres this seemingly unstoppable army of zombies, the vile antagonists who’ve been making your life a living hell for the past 15 hours or so of gameplay. He’s pretty much the only ally you’ve got, in addition to being the only evidence that anybody in the outside world is still looking for you, and the fact that he’s flying a helicopter loaded with heavy weapons also helps a lot. For me, at least, this was a moment of fist pumping elation.

Shortly after he’s wiped out the zombie threat, Mike hovers his chopper near a cliff while he and Leon discuss where they can meet for drinks after this all is over. And in that moment of carefree relaxation after so much tension and violence, one remaining rocket launcher armed zombie appears and shoots Mike’s helicopter down, killing him instantly.

When this happened, I yelled, “No! MIIIIIKE!” at literally the exact same time as Leon did. Such was my emotional connection to a minor character in a video game who I had only just met and whose face I’d never even seen.

It mattered so much more than any dead helicopter pilot on film because I’d lived the experience. That, Mr. Ebert, is why video games are art.

Truman Capps hopes he didn’t spoil Resident Evil 4 for anybody – but it’s been six years, after all. There’s a statute of limitations on this stuff.