Video games as an art form
The concept of video games as a form of art is a commonly debated topic within the entertainment industry. Though video games have been afforded legal protection as creative works by the Supreme Court of the United States, the philosophical proposition that video games are works of art remains in question, even when considering the contribution of expressive elements such as acting, visuals, design, stories, interaction, and music. Even art games, games purposely designed to be a work of creative expression, have been challenged as works of art by some critics.
History
In 1983, the video game magazine Video Games Player stated that video games "are as much an art form as any other field of entertainment".The earliest institutional consideration of the video game as an art form came in the late 1980s when art museums began retrospective displays of then outdated first and second generation games. In exhibitions such as the Museum of the Moving Image's 1989 "Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade", video games were showcased as preformed works whose quality as art came from the intent of the curator to display them as art. Further explorations of this theme were set up in the late 1990s and early 2000s with exhibitions like the Walker Art Center's "Beyond Interface", the online "Cracking the Maze - Game Plug-Ins as Hacker Art", the UCI Beall Centre's "Shift-Ctrl", and a number of shows in 2001.
The concept of the video game as a Duchamp-style readymade or as found object resonated with early developers of the art game. In her 2003 Digital Arts and Culture paper, "Arcade Classics Span Art? Current Trends in the Art Game Genre", professor Tiffany Holmes noted that a significant emerging trend within the digital art community was the development of playable video game pieces referencing or paying homage to earlier classic works like Breakout, Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Burgertime. In modifying the code of simplistic early games or by creating art mods for more complex games like Quake, the art game genre emerged from the intersection of commercial games and contemporary digital art.
At the 2010 Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, Georgia, professor Celia Pearce further noted that alongside Duchamp's art productions, the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, and most immediately the New Games Movement had paved the way for more modern "art games". Works such as Lantz' Pac Manhattan, according to Pearce, have become something like performance art pieces. Most recently, a strong overlap has developed between art games and indie games. This meeting of the art game movement and the indie game movement is important according to Professor Pearce, insofar as it brings art games to more eyes and allows for greater potential to explore in indie games.
In March 2006, the French Minister of Culture first characterized video games as cultural goods and as "a form of artistic expression", granting the industry a tax subsidy and inducting two French game designers and one Japanese game designer into the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In May 2011, the United States National Endowment for the Arts, in accepting grants for art projects for 2012, expanded the allowable projects to include "interactive games", furthering the recognition of video games as an art form. Similarly, the United States Supreme Court ruled that video games were protected speech like other forms of art in the June 2011 decision for Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. In Germany, prior to August 2018, the Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle software ratings body enforced Strafgesetzbuch section 86a as outlined by the German government, which banned the sale of games that contained imagery of extremist groups such as Nazis; while Section 86a allowed for use of these images in artistic and scientific works, video games were not seen to fall within an artistic use. On August 9, 2018, the German government agreed to recognize some of the artistic nature of video games and softened the restriction on Section 86a, allowing the USK to consider games with such imagery as long as they fell within the social adequacy clause of Section 86a.
The lines between video games and art become blurred when exhibitions fit the labels of both game and interactive art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum held an exhibit in 2012, entitled "The Art of Video Games", which was designed to demonstrate the artistic nature of video games, including the impact of older works and the subsequent influence of video games on creative culture. The Smithsonian later added Flower and Halo 2600, games from this collection, as permanent exhibits within the museum. Similarly, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City aims to collect forty historically important video games in their original format to exhibit, showcasing video game interaction design as part of a broader effort to "celebrate gaming as an artistic medium". The annual "Into the Pixel" art exhibit held at the time of the Electronic Entertainment Expo highlights video game art selected by a panel of both video game and art industry professionals.
The Tribeca Film Festival, while having featured video games in the past, had its first Tribeca Games Award at the 2021 event.
Philosophical arguments
Video games have been of interest in philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of the arts since at least the mid-2000s where a growing body of literature typically examines video games in the context of traditional philosophical questions concerning the arts. One such question is whether video games are a form of art. In a 2005 essay in the journal Contemporary Aesthetics, "Are Video Games Art?", the philosopher Aaron Smuts argued that "by any major definition of art many modern video games should be considered art" The New Zealand philosopher Grant Tavinor's 2009 book The Art of Videogames argues that when considered under disjunctive definitions or cluster accounts that have been employed to address the question of the definition of art itself, that "though they have their own non-artistic historical and conceptual precedents, videogames sit in an appropriate conceptual relationship to uncontested artworks and count as art". In a later paper Tavinor also argues that despite ontological differences to other examples in the category, video games count as examples of what the philosopher Noël Carroll has referred to as "mass art". Dominic McIver Lopes, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia, writing in a book on computer art, gives similar reasons to consider video games as a form of art, though also noting that their characteristic interactivity may mean that in comparison with established forms of art such as architecture and music, each "realizes positive aesthetic properties in its own way".Following on from these initial philosophical accounts of video games as art, video games have become an established topic in the philosophy of the arts, appearing as a frequent topic in aesthetics journals such as The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; receiving their own entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics; and appearing in multiple readers and collections of works in philosophical aesthetics.
Much of the literature has now turned from the question of whether video games are art, to the question of what kind of art form they are. University of St Andrews philosopher Berys Gaut considers video games to be a case of "interactive cinema". In The Aesthetics of Videogames, a 2018 collection of philosophical essays on games edited by Tavinor and Jon Robson, several philosophers consider the kind of art form games are, and whether they include characteristic or unique artistic interpretative practices. In his chapter, "Appreciating videogames", Zach Jurgensen, while accepting that previous philosophical arguments that videogames are art are "convincing", finds that they typically neglect gameplay in their accounts, and "what makes studying videogames as works of art worthwhile is grounded partly in our understanding of them as games" In 2020, University of Utah philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen published Games: Agency as Art to examine the concept of video games as art in the context of the wider consideration of non-electronic games.
Empathy games
While many video games are recognized as art for their visual imagery and storytelling, another class of games has gained attention for creating an emotional experience for the player, generally by having the user role-play as a character under a stress-inducing situation, covering topics associated with poverty, sexuality, and physical and mental illnesses. Such games are considered to be examples of an empathy game, loosely described by Patrick Begley of the Sydney Morning Herald as a game that "asks players to inhabit their character's emotional worlds". For example, Papers, Please is a game ostensibly about being a border agent checking passports and other travel documents in a fictional Eastern Bloc country, with the player-character's pay reflecting how few mistakes they made and going to feed and house their family. The game requires the player to make decisions about letting in certain people who may not have all their proper papers but have dire reason to be allowed through such as to be reunited with their own loved ones, at the cost of their own pay and well-being of their family.Controversy
The characterization of games as works of art has been controversial. While recognizing that games may contain artistic elements in their traditional forms such as graphic art, music, and story, several notable figures have advanced the position that games are not artworks, and, according to them, may never be capable of being called art.Legal status
American courts first began examining the question of whether video games were entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech as under the First Amendment in strings of cases starting around 1982 related to ordinances that limited minors from buying video games or from video game arcades, such as America's Best Family Showplace Corp. v. City of New York, Dept. of Bldgs. These ordinances and regulations had come from a moral panic around the potential for violence and addictive behavior of video games and arcades in the wake of the golden age of the arcade, with games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man drawing in millions in revenue from minors. Precedent began to be established for finding that video games were no more expressive than pinball, chess, board- or card-games, or organized sports, and thus could not be considered protected speech. The bulk of these cases declined to grant video games protection under the First Amendment and ruled in favor of the municipalities that their concern about limiting behavior was a more compelling concern at the time. However, these early cases brought into question the potential that video games may be more advanced than just pinball machines due to the virtual worlds they could represent, and as technology advanced, could change the precedence.The release of Mortal Kombat intensified debate around violence in video games, and the U.S. Congress held hearings in 1993 and 1994 criticizing the industry for lack of a ratings system. The hearings prompted the formation of the Interactive Digital Software Association in 1994 – later renamed as the Entertainment Software Association – and the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board to stave off proposed legislation to regulate the industry. While the ESRB system was voluntary, retailers agreed to not sell unrated games or those rated "Adults Only" while restricting sales of "Mature" games to minors.
Despite the ESRB system, several states attempted to create laws that enforced the ESRB ratings on the basis that violent video games were harmful to minors. A series of cases at federal district and circuit courts starting in 2000 which challenged these ordinances and restrictions began an alteration of precedent of the nature of expression of video games. In these cases, the courts identified two elements of video games; that they were expressive works that had the potential to be protected by the First Amendment, and that under review using the Miller test, video games were not seen as obscene, and thus were not restricted from being protected works. The Seventh Circuit case American Amusement Machine Ass'n v. Kendrick in 2001 is considered to be the most definitive basis of the new precedent set by these cases, in which Judge Richard Posner recognized that obscenity, related to sexualized content, was separate from violent content. Posner reasoned that, unlike cases involving obscene content, there was no similar prurient interest to support excluding violent content from First Amendment protection. Applying this reasoning, video games were treated by reviewing courts as protected works under the First Amendment, with decisions generally ruling that ordinances blocking minors from playing or purchasing them were unconstitutional. However, in the absence of Supreme Court precedent, these decisions did not set nationwide standards.
Violence in video games remained a concern for parents, advocates, and lawmakers. Following the "Hot Coffee" discovery in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2005, and the ESRB's re-rating of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in 2006, both which revealed sexually explicit content within the game's assets that were only viewable with mods, new federal and state laws were proposed to further enforce the ESRB's system as well as to mandate processes for the ESRB. Other states passed laws to enforce sales of games based on the ESRB ratings, most designed to prevent sales of games rated "Mature" to minors by fining retailer. Video game industry trade groups sued to block these laws, generally succeeding based on similar precedence from the early 2000 cases that video games, even violent ones, were protected speech.
In 2011's Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which was based on a similar law in California to block the sales of mature video games to minors, the United States Supreme Court ruled that games are entitled to First Amendment protection, with the majority opinion reading, "Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices and through features distinctive to the medium. That suffices to confer First Amendment protection."