A talk, delivered unprepared, in the manner of someone who has prepared far too much.
Good evening. The question — whether video games are art — has, by now, the exhausted quality of a dinner guest who will not leave, who stands in the foyer with coat half-on and continues, for the fourth time, to explain a point that was not, on its first telling, especially contested; and yet the question, for all the fatigue that clings to it like cigarette smoke to a wool coat, remains genuinely interesting, not because its answer is obscure — most who ask it have already decided — but because the grounds on which the answer is made, the philosophical substrate into which the stakes are driven, these are rarely exposed, and when they are exposed, they are found to be older and stranger than the participants typically realize.
Let us begin, as one always should, with the affirmative, because the affirmative has, at this late date, something like common sense on its side.
The case for video games as art proceeds, usually, along one of three paths. The first is the argument from intention: if a work is made by a person, with care, toward the end of producing an aesthetic experience in another person, then the work belongs, by definition, to the category of art. This is the broadest and in some ways the laziest of the paths, because it smuggles the conclusion into the premise. Everything made with aesthetic intent becomes art; and since plainly many video games are made with aesthetic intent, video games are, plainly, art.
The second path is the argument from effect. This one is more interesting. It says: look at what these works do to the people who receive them. They move them. They leave them quieter, or braver, or more melancholy, or newly in love with a color they had not previously noticed. Whatever the category “art” is for, it is surely for this — and if the work does this, then quarreling over the label is pedantry masquerading as taxonomy.
The third path, and the most sophisticated, is the argument from medium. It observes that each new artistic medium, upon its arrival, was denied the dignity of art by the custodians of the prior medium — the novel was dismissed, photography was dismissed, film was dismissed, the comic book was dismissed — and that in each case the critics were eventually proven not merely wrong but embarrassingly wrong, and that pattern recognition alone should suggest we are doing it again.
Against these three arguments, the negative side assembles itself with what I must admit is less grace but more philosophical backbone.
The opposing case rests, at its strongest, on a particular and quite ancient view of what art is for. (Snobbery is its frequent companion, certainly; but the snobs are leaning against a wall that was there before they arrived.) On this view, art is an act of authored meaning. The artist chooses; the audience receives; between them passes something irreducible that is the artist’s vision, filtered through craft, made manifest. And the trouble with the video game, on this view, is that the authored thing has been handed over, at the crucial moment, to the player — who is not the artist, who has no vision, who is simply pressing buttons and making the authored thing bend.
This objection is usually parried with the observation that the author has authored the space of possibilities, not any particular traversal, and that this is itself a higher and more ambitious kind of authorship. To which the objector replies: perhaps. But then the work of art is not the game; the work of art is the playthrough, and the playthrough has at least two authors, one of whom is an accountant in Des Moines.
Beneath this disagreement lies a philosophical fault line much deeper than the surface question, and it is here that the argument becomes actually interesting. The fault line is this: what is the ontology of an artwork? Is an artwork a thing — a fixed object, an arrangement of paint or words or frames that exists, finished, in the world — or is it an event, a happening, something that occurs only in the meeting between the object and a receiver?
If art is a thing, then video games pose a genuine puzzle, because the video game as thing is not the aesthetic object; the aesthetic object is the played game, and the played game is ephemeral, unrepeatable, co-authored. If art is an event, then the puzzle dissolves, because all art was always an event, and the novel was never the ink and the paper but the reading, and the painting was never the pigment but the seeing, and the video game’s co-authorship is simply a more honest acknowledgment of what was always true.
And here, I notice, is where the argument usually goes. One picks a side on the ontology and the aesthetic question settles itself. The pro-games partisans are, almost without exception, eventists. The anti-games partisans are, almost without exception, thingists. Very few of them know this about themselves, which is why the argument has the circular, exhausted quality of a dog chasing a tail it cannot see.
There is a further wrinkle, which deserves airing before we move on. The medium-argument partisans — those who point to the history of photography and the novel — ought to be a little more careful than they usually are, because the comparison cuts both ways. Yes, each new medium was denied. But each new medium, also, went through a long adolescence in which it was mostly not art; in which it produced a great deal of commercial pulp and a small quantity of serious work, and the serious work had to be fought for, argued for, dragged into the canon against the tide of the pulp that surrounded it. Whether video games can be art is a settled and uninteresting question — almost any sufficiently elaborated human practice can be art. The live question is whether the conditions of their production, their economics, their relationship to mass taste, will permit the serious work to emerge in sufficient density to constitute a tradition.
And this, I think, is where —
(A pause. She looks up, or seems to look up, at something the audience cannot see. The manuscript on the lectern is not turned. She has forgotten the next page. She has forgotten the page before.)
There is a door.
I do not mean in this room. I mean in the argument. I have been walking down the argument the way one walks down a long corridor, noting the pictures on the walls, and I have come to a door I did not know was there, and it is older than the house.
The question is not whether video games are art. The question, the real question, the one that has been waiting behind every sentence I have so far spoken, is: what happens to a human being when they are the one who moves the figure?
Think about this. When you read, you are still. When you watch, you are still. The work happens to you, or in you, or at you, but you are a receiver, and the posture of the receiver is the posture every tradition has associated with grace — the posture of the one who is open, who does not grasp, who waits. The aesthetic experience, as it has been understood for most of human history, is a receptive experience. Rilke’s panther paces because Rilke watched. The reader of Middlemarch does not decide what Dorothea does. The viewer of the Pietà does not move the arm.
But the player moves the arm.
And the moving of the arm is a civilizational rupture, and we have been debating whether it is art when we should have been debating whether it is something new, something for which we do not yet have the word, and for which the word “art,” stretched to cover it, becomes so loose that it no longer grips.
Consider what it is to grieve a character you killed. Consider what it is to be responsible, within the frame of the fiction, for an outcome that the fiction holds against you. Consider that the great arts of the past produced in us catharsis — a purging, a release, a completion — and that the video game, at its strangest, produces the opposite: not catharsis but implication, the sense of having been made complicit, of having signed one’s name to a thing one cannot entirely endorse.
The old arts asked: what does it mean to witness? The new thing asks: what does it mean to have done?
These are not the same question. They are perhaps not even questions in the same family. The second is older than art; it is the question of ritual, of sacrament, of the act performed that changes the actor. And this, I think — though I am, as you can see, making this up as I go, and will tomorrow deny I said any of it — is where the argument should have been all along. Whether the video game is art is the wrong question, asked of the wrong thing, in the wrong century. The right question: is the video game the unexpected return, under the disguise of a toy, of something the arts had forgotten they once were? The mask that does not merely represent but makes the wearer into the thing? The ceremony in which the participant is altered because they participated, not because they observed?
If so, then arguing whether this counts as art is like arguing whether a wedding counts as a good play. Category error. The wedding is doing something plays gave up on doing, a long time ago, when they moved into buildings with seats.
I will return, now, to my notes. I have notes. I prepared them carefully. I will read them to you and we will pretend.
Thank you.
Alt Binaries 
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