bigideas

Columnist Charlie Brooker recently stirred up this familiar hornets’ nest by writing a piece about censorship of computer games, inspiring a slew of comments comparing the medium to films and novels. Are modern computer games a valid art form, and should Grand Theft Auto IV be treated just like a painting or a symphony?

It’s an oft-aired question on the internet, where game afficionados are perhaps a little over-represented, and a positive answer usually emerges. But the question of whether something is an art form or not is incredibly hard to frame sensibly.

From the outset I should point out that I’m not a gamer, but I certainly don’t have an axe to grind either way, as I hope will become obvious.

The most vexing question in all this is what we mean by art, or by an “art form”. Certainly this term is commonly applied as a positive value judgement: if something is particularly good, we like to call it a “work of art” even if it’s just some nicely-grouted bathroom tiles. I don’t think this is what people are getting at when the claim the status of “art form” for computer games. Certainly it’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing, otherwise we’re just arguing about whether computer games are “good” or not, and that’s clearly daft. There’s something else about art forms over and above any judgement of value.

Wittgenstein on Family Resemblances

Unfortunately, we search in vain for a mathematical if-and-only-if definition of an art form. There just isn’t a list of criteria out there that we can check computer games against to see if they’re really an art form or not. If there were, we wouldn’t be having this argument, would we?

In these situations — which are very common — philosophers naturally think of Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances” between things that fall under a particular concept. He even used games as a key example.

For Wittgenstein, we learn a concept like “art form” by looking at cases. Painting a picture on canvas is usually art, but painting the gutters of your house generally isn’t. Playing a piano is art but selling it, or disposing of it in a skip, isn’t. A novel is art, but a photocopier’s instruction manual isn’t.

By hearing these usages in real-life situations, we absorb a fuzzy picture of how we should use it for ourselves. Then we start trying it out, and we note when people approve or disapprove of the way we use it. So the idea we have firms up, although it never quite becomes concrete and it’s not likely to have exactly the same meaning for you as it does for me.

How does this help us? Well, it hopefully deflates any idea that we can dogmatically assert one position or the other. It also reminds us that the idea of an “art form” is something culturally-determined, and something that changes with time. Soup cans and urinals didn’t used to be art either; now they are, for us, but they weren’t for people in the nineteenth century, say, and that’s fine.

So who decides what counts as art and what doesn’t? Well, in a sense, it’s simple: we do. Arthur Danto proposed the idea that an “artworld” of powerful people and institutions is largely responsible, which seems plausible, but there’s no well-defined edge to it. A society determines for itself what it wants to count as its art-objects and, I think, also its art-forms.

For computer games to be an art-form, on this view, requires an artworld, a loose coterie of curators, writers, intellectuals and so on who, in a speech-act sort of way, proclaim them so. We don’t have that, at least not yet. So on Danto’s definition computer games aren’t artworks.

You don’t have to buy Danto’s idea, but the nice thing about it is that it turns the question into a fairly straightforward matter of fact. In particular, it’s not a judgement of value. Cures for diseases aren’t artworks either, but they’re valuable. In fact, an artworld definition slightly deflates any intrinsic value you might think art has in virtue of its being art, since really it’s just something we decided to treat as art for a while.

Computer Games as a Medium

Computer games are, however, products of craft, and often involve a very high degree of skill. That skill is brought to bear in giving a raw material — CPU cycles — meaningful form. As such, computer games can certainly be thought of as a communicative medium and, like all media, they can be used for many purposes.

Think of the medium of film. You can use it to make a training video for your company’s HR department, or a trashy action movie, or an art-house experimental film. In the first case, few people would consider the product to be an artwork. In the second, we might be unsure about whether it’s an artwork, but we might all agree it’s no good. In the third, we might all agree it’s an artwork but we might argue about whether it’s any good or not.

I think this is how we should think of computer games: not as an artform (or not) but as a medium that’s capable of having many applications beyond the usual shooting-driving-jumping kinds of things we usually think of. FoldIt, for instance, is a game designed to encourage humans to use their intuition to help computers solve protein-folding problems that could one day lead to medical breakthroughs.

I suspect that computer games are still in their infancy as a medium, and that in the future they’ll find many more now-unforeseen applications. One of those may be the creation of artworks, and it surprises me that more artists haven’t experimented with the form (if you know of any, put links in the comments please). But I’m sure they will, and I’m sure computer games will develop their own artworld and will become an art form (as well as having other uses). But I don’t think we’re there yet, not because the games aren’t good enough measured against some unspecified standard of quality, but because they don’t yet have an artworld to create the right kinds of meanings around them.