art/life/game

A recurring issue of the day is whether video games qualify as art. Proponents point out that video games are clearly able to recreate art in any of its various forms, whether as film, music, painting, comic books, or even theater. Of course, the video game context changes things, which is where the naysayers come in. Games are defined by interactivity. Take away interactivity from a video game and the result is a very different medium, typically something like a computer-animated movie. If the audience has a choice in the outcome of the story, is it still art? Some have argued that the meaning of art disappears in this case. Another complaint is that games often offer not so much a plot as a laundry list of meaningless chores. Sort of like real life.

Let's go back to the beginning. Video games can do everything art can do and more. Even if we were to agree that interactivity destroys artistry(and it doesn't, but let it go) this point remains. Art is something that you get when you remove features from video games, or to put it more simply, video games are bigger than art. Art is a way for an artist to share his ideas about life, but ideas are ethereal. They don't have to prove themselves against the logic of the real world. Games are more real than art, with physical rules and cause and effect. Art is given significance by its distance from life, while games are trivialized by their closeness to it. Which then, are video games closer to, art or life? They are fictional, but they are a kind of existence.

A better phrase to describe video games is "virtual reality," and I think if we remember this label every time we talk about games vs. art, many things become clearer. Everything that goes on in "real" reality can be simulated in virtual reality. Our virtual realities still have practical limitations, such as the lack of full sensory input, but the only absolute distinction between virtual and real is that virtual realities will always be simpler than the reality that contains them.

Video games, then, are a bit like life and a bit like art. There's a recursive pair of aphorisms - Art imitates life, and life imitates art. Is art life? Is life a game? Are games an art? Video games both epitomize and irrelevantize the distinctions between these elements. Video games are art/life/game. There may come a time when humans forget that art/life/game was once three different things.