Counterpoint: Games Are About Winning, Art is About Experience

I apologize for the lateness; this is what I get for trying to mess with Blogger's HTML to get pullquotes when I've only a basic familiarity with coding.  I know what I'm doing now, so hopefully in the future I can insert pullquotes without severely delaying the articles.

Back in 2006, deservedly revered film critic Roger Ebert spoke out saying that video games were not, and indeed never could be, art (it's a few questions down).  This claim was followed up twice in the following years, once further stating his argument in 2007 then again in 2010, followed soon after by an interesting assertion that he was still right, but never should have brought it up.  If you were a gamer during these times, you no doubt remember the uproar.

Unfortunately, all the responses to this focused on Ebert himself rather than his arguments.  It seemed there were only two responses: seething hatred for the man who dared to make such ignorant statements about something so clearly out of his experience and understanding, and completely writing him off as an old man ranting against a new art form that isn't his.  While the basis for both of these reactions is valid (his statements obviously came from a perspective with very little actual knowledge of video games, and they did seem an awful lot like what theater critics said about film back in the day), the mistake was to focus so much on Ebert himself.  His arguments, though still incorrect, are have some interesting concepts that can help us further understand not only those who object to this medium's artistic legitimacy, but the present and historical development of interactive art.
Ebert's arguments can help us further understand not only those who object to this medium's artistic legitimacy, but the present and historical development of interactive art.
There were two main arguments that Ebert put forth in his arguments.  Both fall into another broader argument; that is, games cannot be art because the nature of a "game" inherently involves certain elements that art must inherently be without.  The two arguments he specifically focuses on within this are 1) video games cannot be art because the game-like nature involves completely different objectives from art, and 2) video games cannot be art because the player has control of the outcome rather than the author. This Counterpoint article will deal with the first argument, and the second will come later. But I would like to strongly specify, this article is not about Roger Ebert.  He is simply a framing device as the man who popularized two of the very few arguments against games as art that actually have legitimate and worthwhile artistic thought behind them. Let's focus on the arguments and the theory behind them, not the man and his motivations and qualifications.

Let's try to grasp this particular argument first.  The best way to do this would be to take a quote from the article itself, in which Ebert is specifically supplying counter-arguments to various quotes given by Kellee Santiago in a TED talk given at USC.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This is a decent summation of Ebert's argument on the matter (if you want more detail, read the full article).  Essentially, games are about using skill and coordination to prevail over the competition, whereas stories are not about "winning" or getting to the end, they are about the experience and the effect it has on you as the reader, viewer, or indeed, player.

Not much winning going on here, but if you didn't cry in
The Land Before Time as a child, you had no soul.  

Admittedly, this is a compelling argument.  After all, I've discussed the difficulties of combining gameplay and narrative in a previous article.  It is not easy; the two do in fact, to some extent, contradict each other in their basic nature.  Games are about performance and competition, not an emotional and intellectual experience designed by an artist.  So when one attempts to combine a game with a narrative, does it legitimately create a work of narrative art, or just a game with a story attached?

In general, the argument fails when it considers video games to be a game with a story tacked on.  Though this does often happen with unfortunate results, it is far from an inherent trait of the medium.  This argument seems to be viewing video games as a checkers board with the cover of Casablanca unceremoniously taped onto the back, when in reality the effect we're going for is more like chemical bonding, where the two elements fuse to become a new thing entirely.

This is a hamster with a knife taped to its back. Not how
videogames combine their elements, though it would
make for an awesome game.

Taking specifically from the quoted paragraph, there are two issues here on which the argument fails.  The first is the term "win."  Ebert is referring to the traditional idea that a game is something where the end goal, the entire purpose of the game, is to overcome the challenges it presents.  The completion of this goal is the entire reason the game was played, and the actions along the way have little value to the game outside of the progress they made toward that goal. And of course, if that goal is not accomplished, the actual events of the game are meaningless, as their value exists only in the context of victory.  Art, on the other hand, is about everything, each and every moment of the experience and everything about it that made it what it is. Stories have an ending, sure, but without experiencing the rest of the story in the way it was specifically designed to be experienced, said ending has absolutely no satisfaction, meaning, or impact.

However, video games are not all like this anymore; some exist, of course, and hopefully always will, but it simply cannot be denied that the medium has largely moved past the idea of "beating the game" to an emphasis on the experience of the game.  The player must prevail over challenges, yes, but this is not toward the purpose of getting to the end as much as it is to progress through the story.  Beyond that, the fact that many games allow the player to make choices affecting nothing but the story seems to imply goals outside of the completion of the game's challenges.  The game may be about overcoming its challenges, but the motivation for prevailing is not the completion of the game, but to see what happens next in the story and bring said story, not just the challenge, to its eventual conclusion.  So really, to claim that the goal of a video game is to get to the end and win is a severe misunderstanding of what the medium is actually about.

The second way in which the argument fails is in the word "representation."  If you remember, he said that a game without rules would cease to be a game and instead be "a representation of a story," implying that the goal that games must attain but can inherently never reach is to be a representation of a story.  Which is something with which I imagine most artists and scholars would agree is the goal of art, in the field of narrative art at least.

Victory is not the entire end goal of a video game, but more of a prerequisite to experience more of the story.
But then the question arises; why can't a game represent a story?  Even in basic game theory there are ideas about sports such as football and games such as chess having a narrative; the only thing keeping them from being "art" is the fact that the end result is created by competition rather than specific artistic intent.  But unlike those games, video games allow the player to try again until victory is accomplished.  This means that victory is not the entire end goal of a video game, but more of a prerequisite to experience more of the story, or even if story is not a focus, more of the game.  Victory is not an end in and of itself, but rather a goal that must be completed for both game and story to move forward.

On a simpler note, can it really be argued that a video game is not a "representation" of a story if it has a story in it?  Regardless of the game-like aspects of a video game, if it has a story that progresses as the player does, is the game not representing a story?  One could say this is just arguing semantics, but it does get to the core of this argument; if a game and story exist within a single work, designed and created by an artist or team of artists, how can it be said the final product is not a representation of a story and, as a result, a work of narrative art?

In the end, this argument is based on a lack of understanding about how games work, and seems to have been made under the impression that modern video games are just more realistic-looking versions of Galaga.  It simply doesn't hold up to informed scrutiny.  However, that is not to say it has no value.  Even to a small degree in this article, it has driven us to consider the nature of a game and the nature of a narrative, how the two naturally both compliment and contradict each other, and what it really means for a game and a story to be combined into a single work.  Many of the present and future articles on this blog explore just such topics.  This is why it is so important to not shrug off these arguments because of their fallacious nature, but instead to consider them and explore why they are wrong and what they can teach us.

See you next week!  Don't forget to "Like" Binary Narrative on Facebook!