Technology in Art

Video Games are Art

Roger Ebert once wrote, “Video games can never be art.” Whatever he meant by this it must mean that he either had a very different experience with video games or a very different understanding of art. I am going to guess his video game playing was limited.

According to Merriam-Webster art is the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects. Over the course of time, lots of things have been deemed art. Pigments used to make marks on cave walls. Marble carved into the image of the goddess Diana. A play about a Danish prince who seeks to avenge the death of his father. A novel about a middle aged man who chases heroism by taking up a lance against windmills. A movie which brothers battle in a deadly chariot race.

Paintings and Sculptures, Drawings and Architecture are all art because they are beautiful creative objects. Stories, whether in plays or novels or movies, too are art because they are beautiful, they evoke feelings. A good story in some ways is the highest form of art, pure experience and expression. I suspect Ebert would have agreed with that, but somehow he had a blind spot when it came to games.

This is not a blind spot I share. I distinctly remember the first time I was headed back to Imperial City and I crossed over the crest of the nearby mountain just as the sun was rising. I actually watched so I could watch the virtual beams of light, the hues of pink and purple illuminate the tower and the various districts of the city.

I remember being an operative for the Sigmund Corporation hired to give a wish fulfillment memory for a dying man. I remember learning of the melancholy love of Johnny and River, a troubled girl who communicates with folded paper bunnies. I remember finding the sheet music “For River”, a composition of love, which just the thought of moved me. Then there was learning why Johnny’s wish was to go to the moon. A beautiful love story.

If a painting of a landscape it are, then using a computer to virtually walk through one, has to be art too. If novels and plays that make you fall for and feel for the characters are art, then it is art when I get to live in that story. Technology has always allowed the evolution of art, multiplied the art, not kill it.

I say, let’s have a little art appreciation, Skyrim anyone?