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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."
The question is not whether video games are or aren't art.
The question is why, oh why, are artists in other genres so utterly threatened by the concept that it might be.
I mean, just look at the constituent properties of games.
Games have music of all genres, and nobody denies that can be art.
Screen shots from many games could probably be snuck into your local modern art gallery. Nobody denies imagery can be art.
They went to a sci-fi author! Certainly a science fiction tale can be art.
If you combine all three of the above -- well, you end up with a movie, and nobody denies that cinema is an art form.
Even if you take away the controlled progression of experiences -- well, welcome to architecture. Was Frank Lloyd Wright not an artist?
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?
Gameplay and artistic depth are two very orthogonal goals. It's hard to engineer a game which is fun to play and tells a truly original story -- generally, the high ratio of (time spent killing people) to (time spent talking to people) precludes a lot of useful dialogue.
Probably the last game which spoke to me in any meaningful literary way was Deus Ex -- and even that had long stretches of plot-thin killing.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
The real question: is it *good* art? Nobody will deny that a painting or a novel is art, but 99% of all of them are crap. Good art provokes a response- you think about it and remember it later, and not just because you managed to frag some noob thirteen times in a row. Video games for the most part have not reached this state. I can only think of a few that merit the title "Good art" that tell stories that are interesting enough to reach that goal.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I think that the final assessment, that they picked the wrong person to do this because of a lack of familiarity with games, is dead on.
Why can't someone get a better reviewer to do this? Cory Doctorow? Orson Scott Card? Bruce Sterling? Dan Simmons?
I'm a bit confused as to why, if Dirda's 16 year old son finished it, why didn't he ask for help? Seems to me this implies he really wasn't that into the experiment himself. Surely there's directions someplace on the basics? RTFM?
I think the real challenge is to get some serious "artists", be they of books, music, movies, or whatever, to play the games and give their impressions.
A better analogy for the person they picked would be to take my grandparents (who can barely use the MS Works that came pre-installed on a computer) and ask them to do a review of OpenOffice vs. MS Office 2007. Without the basic minimum skill threshold, the whole thing is tainted anyway.
Bill
So: Is BioShock art? "I would hesitate to go that far," he said after a short pause.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
Yes, of course, Any game that has solid enough writing that you care about characters or the world has that ability. For me, Planescape: Torment, Sanitarium, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 (death of vampire villain Bohdi "No! It's mine! This life is mine!"), and FF7 are just a few examples that come to mind.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Actually, Bioshock is a damned piss poor rebuttal of Objectivism. Mind you, it tries so very hard, but it happens in a closed system with a hard limit on resources that has already been reached. Any remotely intelligent economist could tell you that it was already fucked, no matter the economic system. Add in the fact that extremely life-altering changes were introduced in an astonishingly rapid fashion, and any two-bit hack could tell you bad things would go down. Not to mention that from a scientific standpoint the discovery of the uses of ADAM happened entirely too rapidly. Genetics takes time to make understandable changes as there are so very many options. And without modern computers I fail to understand how they were even supposed to understand how to make those changes. Gaping plot holes abound. A much better rebuttal of Objectivism is simply this: Given that Objectivism expects around 95% of citizens to be almost completely rational in deed if not thought, it is doomed to failure in a world populated by humans.
Amen to that. Check out Zero Punctuation's review of Bioshock. He does make some damn spot on right remarks about the game.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1394-Zero-Punctuation-BioShock