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Sci-Fi Writer Considers BioShock's Artistic Merit
The LevelUp blog considers an article on the Washington Post site, where their tech columnist did a little experiment. He set Science Fiction author Michael Dirda down in front of Irrational's BioShock, and asked him to consider the game's artistic merit. N'Gai has himself some interesting commentary about the article, which raises a flurry of question on its own: "Dirda, to use his word, doesn't know the 'rhetoric' of video games. Me: I've spent so much time playing video games over the years that I'd forgotten people aren't born instinctively knowing how to 'circlestrafe' a monster ... 'I could lose myself in this, in some ways, easier than in a book,' he said. Dirda said the game showed him that video games 'obviously have artistic value' and will likely become more of a recognized art form. So: Is BioShock art? 'I would hesitate to go that far,' he said after a short pause."
I want to emphasize that I think the article is good, and that it's the kind of point that needs to be made...
But lets not forget that the "artistic merit" of Bioshock is basicly the watered down artistic merit of System Shock 2, as Bioshock is a copy and paste of the game, sans cyberpunk theme.
No one talked about that game back in the day when it came out, and I think it's important to remember that such artistic merit is not a new thing. Very old games had just as much, or more artistic merit that was never praised or recognized. The market is simply willing to recognize it now.
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I think it really comes down to how you define art. I personally will consider a lot of things as art that most people wouldn't, things like games, graffiti, and even source code. If you look at things like music, movies, and images you'll notice one thing in common. They all show or inspire emotions. I think that is how art should be defined. So why would a game, which quite often inspire emotions like fear and victory, and many games have quite elaborate and emotional stories, not be considered an art form?
Just my opinion though.
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I think the bottom line is that a lot of people who don't play games, but do pay attention to art, don't want to imagine that they're not trained to appreciate a particular art form. Better to deny its potential as being art at all. The real question is -- why should gamers care?
Games are really paralleling film history right now. The answer to anyone invested in it (say, someone who went to film school and now writes about video games and spends spare time on Slashdot) is, "of course they're art, stupid." But the new media ALWAYS meet resistance.
Novelists met resistance. Photography met resistance. Film met resistance. Television still has its residual resistance. And now gaming is next. This is no surprise; it's the way sociaty takes its new media. That's all.
Gamers should care because the future of their art is at stake. Of course, that's a melodramatic way to put it; art will out, and it will mainstream, and it doesn't matter what Critic X says. When a child who was born in a home with an XBox360 in it is going to college and to grad school, the concept that "games cannot be art" will be as foreign to her as the idea that "film can't be art" is to a child born in the era of the VCR.
> The fact is that BioShock, at its best, is capable of evoking some complicated responses
> from players--among them, shame, guilt, remorse, regret, and, yes, sadness--using not
> only its story, but most interestingly, its gameplay.
Isn't it sad that people spend so much time making games to make us scared, shameful, and depressed, instead of using the genre to make us self-confident, satisfied, and happy?
Why is Michael Dirda labelled as being a science fiction writer?
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Quickly moving away from? It's sitting exactly where it always was. Perhaps Doom was a bit more accessible, but most games since have pretty much just been Quake over and over again.
I've long felt that art is "whatever the old boys club says is art", which is what makes art so disenchanting for me. It's like if, in science, you could determine whether observations would fit your theory *only* after making them, instead of having to put the theory to the test by making the prediction first. Supposedly, you have to have a refined taste to appreciate art, but in my experience, this in practice means, "you have to be told it's good before you notice its good". Also known as the Placebo effect.
Recently, people have been putting the objectivity of art judgments to the test, and art's gatekeepers aren't looking so good:
-When Joshua Bell played anonymously in L'Enfant Plaza, with the world's best violin and supposedly most beautiful music, virtually no one stopped to listen.
-When wine critics have to do blind tests, the results look pretty random.
-When an author submitted Jane Austen's work to a publisher, the publisher rejected it as no good. (Of course, it should have been rejected, but on grounds of plagiarism.)
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Some of you think that no one denies that movies are art but you are wrong. Many believe that most movies are not art and that only some movies can be considered art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film
This is important because if you consider that all movies are art, well if you film your vacations you have a storyline (your vacations), you have characters, you have different backgrounds, you have emotions, etc. So why shouldn't your vacations be considered art? If I draw a square with a pen is this art or not? If not then why is this art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mondrian_CompRYB.jpg ? If you look at dadaism (here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg ) can this be considered art or not?
Before arguing about games being art or not, we should start by arguing over what is art.
The question is why, oh why, are artists in other genres so utterly threatened by the concept that it might be.
What makes you think they are threatened?
You have as much as said that a video game is collaborative effort like a movie.
You need people who think in terms of narrative, dramatic structure, pacing. People who can script dialog and action that is persuasive and entertaining.
You need production designers, art designers, animators, composers, musicians, specialists in audio and video effects --- and so on, endlessly.
Haven't played Bioshock yet, but I'm constantly reminded of Deus Ex as I read or take classes. As I read Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy recently, I was reminded of characters, lines, or episodes from that game at least half a dozen times. Several times, my experience with the game has helped me to more quickly grasp an idea, or to make connections between it and others which I might not otherwise have made.
I don't know of any other game like that, not even among the other plot-heavy games I've played (Thief series, System Shock 2, a whole host of RPGs). Mind you, this is a game that I re-play every 1-1.5 years or so, along with a couple of others (Fallout1/2, notably). There are a ton of throwaway lines and little references that relate to all kinds of aspects of philosophy--especially political philosophy--and, to a lesser extent, to a variety of other topics. Once you've played the game a bunch, and assuming you've got some level of familiarity with political philosophy, you start to see Rousseau in Tracer Tong, Nietzsche everywhere (obviously), Aristotle in the AI, etc., and minor aspects of those and other philosophers scattered about and woven into the storyline.
Or, you play the hell out of the game in high school, and later end up seeing Tracer Tong in Rousseau, the AI in Aristotle... heh.
It's not that many games (like Bioshock) aren't art on the level of many quality films and novels, it's just that with things like literature, you can fall back and say "This author was the greatest there ever was!" Since "mainstream" culture is familiar with great books (or at least knows they exist even if they've never read any), no one thinks about all the terrible ones out there when they talk about the medium as a whole. I have no qualms in saying that most video games are better than, say, a Nora Roberts book. I would argue that there are quite a few games on the level of an Orson Scott Card or a Robert Jordan novel. We just haven't seen one on the level of Hemingway yet, and until then, people outside of gaming will never take it seriously.
Conversely, we also need to realize that we don't need them to take it seriously to appreciate the art inherent in some titles. It is they who are missing out.
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Very few people are going to object if you call "Les Mis" art. But is Harry Potter art? Certainly, it has been read by more people then most all other literature. But it is a story written primarily for children (nothing wrong with adults loving it) that is more about entertaining than challenging the reader. Fantasy and sci fi has always struggled to be recognized as art. It takes a move like LOTR to show that fantasy can be as good as movies like the Godfather or The good, the bad, and the ugly.
This is part of the problem with video games. Like Harry Potter, they are in a fantasy world and the art snobs perceive it as being geared towards children. But I have found few other things in art that moved me as much as Aeris's death in FF7. And I think I am not alone in that. Really, the old generation that didn't grow up with video games will have to die off before video games get the respect they deserve.
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