Will Computer Games Ever Be A Legitimate Art Form?

Ernest W. Adams

2001 Game Developers’ Conference

This is an approximate transcript of my lecture at the Game Developers’ Conference on March 24, 2001 in  San Jose, California.

Introduction

Hello, everyone – my name is Ernest Adams, and this is “Will Computer Games Ever Be A Legitimate Art Form.” This lecture was originally supposed to be a panel, but I decided that I had so much to say on the subject myself that if I tried to moderate it as a panel, I would simply hog the microphone for a whole hour.

For those of you who have been attending my lectures for a long time, you’ll know that this is point at which I usually give a disclaimer that what you are about to hear is not the opinion of my employer. For the first time ever, I don’t have to do that, because I’m now my own employer. Last summer I left Electronic Arts, and now I’m a freelance game design consultant. That means that I am finally able to speak freely about EA and their games, although since this lecture is about games that might be works of art, I don’t have much reason to discuss any EA products. [Laughter and applause.]

When I first started giving lectures at the Game Developers' Conference I did the usual dry, boring, bullet-point slide shows. They usually contained a lot of facts, but not much thought. Then in 1994 I decided to change the way I lectured, and started giving a lot of thoughts, but not many facts. There's a polite name for this: blue sky. Well, I'm here to tell you that this lecture is going to be about as blue sky as you can get. You've got to know that if you attend a lecture that addresses the question "what is art?" already you're in big trouble.

I'm not going to tell you how to do anything in this lecture. If you're looking for advice or guidance, you're in the wrong place.  I'm here not to show you a road to walk on, but to show you that the road we're already on is not necessarily the only road to walk.

Games and Movies

So I divide my lectures into those which came before 1994, boring lectures, and those which started in 1994 and continued, good lectures. And the very first good lecture I gave was called Celluloid to Silicon: A Sermon for the Newcomers from Hollywood. And in that lecture I vehemently attacked what I called the Hollywood metaphor – the notion that computer games are like movies, and more importantly that they can be made in the same way.

You have to understand the historical context. Hollywood was getting back into the industry, for about the third time, and this time it looked like they were serious. The arrival of the CD-ROM suddenly meant that they could put real content into their games. “Interactive movies” were all the rage. I was pretty sure they were going to screw it up, and waste a lot of money, and cost a lot of developers their jobs, because they didn't understand anything about engineering. And I emphasized that engineering is what separates us from Hollywood and the movies: the absolute necessity of doing engineering makes our craft fundamentally different from theirs.

In the course of this lecture today, you're going to hear me talk a lot about the movies and what interactive entertainment and film have in common. For those few of you who were actually around to hear my lecture in 1994, I need to emphasize right now that I haven't backed off one bit from the position I took back then. The difference is that I am now going to talk not about the craft of moviemaking and the craft of game development, but the art of film and the art of games. I still believe the Hollywood metaphor is flawed insofar as it pertains to the actual process of constructing these products; and it's flawed insofar as it fails to address the differences between linear and non-linear, or interactive and passive, entertainment. Those are both lectures for another time. But there are certain parallels between computer games and movies as expressive forms, and it's those parallels that I'm referring to here.

I'm sorry for the long disclaimer; I just don't want anyone who's actually been paying attention to me for the last seven years accusing me of hypocrisy.

What Is Art and What Does It Do?

Types of Arts

If you look up the entry for “Art” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you’ll find that art is divided into a number of types. There are the literary arts, writing and drama, which are characterized by the presence of narrative. Film and television clearly belong to the literary arts. Then there are what are called the fine arts: sculpture and painting, music and dance. Then we have the decorative arts: wallpaper, fabrics, and things like that. Architecture, of course, is regarded by some as a form of art, and industrial design, but at this point we’re moving more and more away from “pure” art and into areas with more utilitarian considerations. Industrial design, for example, isn’t really art so much as it is an aesthetic applied to a utilitarian object. The boundaries between art and non-art are not hard and fast; it’s a very grey area.

Another characteristic of the literary arts is that the object you see is not the work of art itself; i.e. the paper and ink that make up the book are merely the delivery medium, not the work itself. Similarly with film, the strip of plastic is not the movie; rather, the images and sounds recorded on the strip of plastic are the movie. With games, the CD-ROM is not the game; it is the software and artwork recorded there which are the game. This is as opposed to, say, sculpture, in which the sculpted object itself is the artwork.

I believe that most of our more complicated products, if they’re art at all, belong in the category of literary arts with movies and television because they do contain elements of narrative.  There are some exceptions, however, which I’ll mention later.

The Philosophy of Art

At this point I’ll give a very brief look at the history of the philosophy of art, because it’s worth knowing about if we’re going to talk about games as an art form. For several hundred years it was thought that art was representational; that art existed to portray a person or scene or object. Obviously this notion applied only to visual arts such as painting and sculpture, and not to such things as music and dance. They were considered separate forms not covered by the philosophy. And to some extent it was thought that the more accurate the representation, the better the art. In other words, a sculpture or painting which looked exactly like its subject was better than one which did not.

In the twentieth century, however, this notion was entirely replaced by the idea of art as expression. People began to feel that art was not meant to depict existing objects accurately, but to serve as an expression of the artist’s thought. This had a number of benefits. For one thing, it enabled music and dance to be included with the other forms of art, since they are of course highly expressive. And it allowed painters and sculptors to start creating works which were not visual reproductions of real things, but images as they saw them, and as they wished their viewers to see them. The notion of art as expression caused an explosion of new kinds of art and new ways of looking at things.

There are other theories in the philosophy of art as well. Some people believe that the function of art is to pass on cultural values from one generation to the next, to serve a sort of moral purpose. Others believe that art is essentially hedonism, that it exists to create aesthetic pleasure. But by far the dominant theory of art today is art-as-expression.

Art Lasts

Another characteristic that we can note about art, good art anyway, is that it lasts. There are Greek statues 2300 years old that we are still admiring today. There are Egyptian statues 5000 years old that we’re still admiring. Now it’s true that these things were created in stone, a highly durable medium, and so they naturally tend to last; but still, we wouldn’t bother putting them in museums and looking at them if we didn’t think they were worth looking at. There are plenty of other mundane objects that old that we don’t bother to look at so closely. These ancient sculptures appeal to us not merely because they are old, but because we find them aesthetically interesting.

There are also some very old games. If you go to Egypt, you can see people playing games in the sand that have been played exactly the same way for thousands of years. That doesn’t actually make them art, it just makes them very long-lived games. Still, it’s interesting that games can last as long as great works of art, and I presume it’s because they contain some appeal that lasts across the centuries, despite changes in culture, language, religion, and so on.

I think it highly unlikely that people will be playing Escape from Monkey Island a thousand years from now. However, I do think it’s conceivable that people will be playing Tetris a thousand years from now. Tetris is so beautiful, so elegantly simple, that I believe it has an appeal that could last for centuries. Tetris doesn’t belong to the literary arts, since it has no narrative, but to the visual arts. I think Tetris is a work of kinetic sculpture, and I could easily see it sitting in an art museum -- especially if you took away the scoring mechanism, for reasons that I’ll get to later.

Can Games Be Art?

Art Versus Popular Culture

I have long argued that what we do – what most of us do, anyway – is not art. It's popular culture. Art is purchased in art galleries by art connoisseurs, it is  criticized by art critics, it is conserved in art museums. It is not cranked out by the millions and sold for $59.95 at Toys ‘R’ Us. But the fact that most of what we do is merely popular culture does not preclude the interactive medium from being an art form. It just means that we have an uphill battle to be recognized as one – just as the movies did, moving from the nickelodeon to the screen. Film is an art form, but that doesn’t mean that every movie is a work of art. Some are and some aren’t, just like games. Most movies are not art, but popular culture. And there's no question that the vast majority of games are not art either. Monopoly is not art; poker is not art; baseball is not art.

Art and Interactivity

So why aren’t most games art? One possibility that springs to mind is that interactivity precludes art; that art is a form of communication between the artist and the viewer, and if the viewer starts to interfere, the message is lost. It’s certainly true that interactivity interferes with narrative: narrative is about the control of the author, while interactivity is about the freedom of the player.

However, I don’t believe that interactivity does necessarily preclude art. Chris Crawford, in his book The Art of Computer Game Design, wrote, “Real art through computer games is achievable, but it will never be achieved so long as we have no path to understanding. We need to establish our principles of aesthetics, a framework for criticism, and a model for development.” I disagree with him about a model for development – I think how you create a work of art is irrelevant – but he’s right on the money about the other things.

Up in San Francisco there’s a curious science museum called the Exploratorium. This museum takes the notion seriously that its exhibits, while illustrating scientific principles, should also be aesthetically pleasing. They consider them to be works of art, and some of the people who build them are referred to as “artists-in-residence.” The exhibits are beautiful as well as educational; and aesthetics plays a role in their design. These exhibits are necessarily interactive, and their interactivity does not detract from their status as works of art.

We’re used to thinking of art as illustrating the human condition, or talking about large issues related to ourselves, but why shouldn’t it illustrate scientific principles? Diane Ackerman is a poet who wrote a series of poems collected into a book called The Planets. These poems weren’t just moony emotional stuff; they accurately described the appearance of the planets, their behavior, their position in the solar system. The poems are no less beautiful for being scientifically accurate; in fact, to me as a fan of science, they’re even more beautiful for being scientifically accurate.

The Messages of Art

This raises an interesting question about the limits on what art can say. Art is not pedagogy, obviously; its purpose is not to teach. But still it is capable of making quite complex statements. We know that literature, for example, has themes. The theme of a novel is a declarative sentence which sums up the message of the work. Themes can be trivial, like “Death causes grief,” or they can be non-trivial, like “Death causes emotions other than grief.”

Can games have themes? I believe that they can. Simulations certainly say things. Sim City, for example, says that a good transportation system is essential for economic prosperity. This is never stated explicitly; it’s something that you find out in the course of playing the game. In fact, it is discovered through interactivity – if you didn’t interact with the game, you would never find it out. Now of course, this is a simple economic statement. It’s not very deep, and a work of art whose message was no more than “a good transportation system is essential for economic prosperity” would be considered pretty mundane. But it illustrates the point that games are capable of saying things.

There are also non-linguistic modes of expression. Sculpture, for example, does not necessarily have themes. You can’t always distill the content of sculpture into a declarative sentence. But you might be able to distill it into an emotion: a non-linguistic expression of a feeling. And I don’t see why games can’t do the same thing.

The Effect of a Victory Condition

One of the key characteristics of many games is that they have victory conditions. I’m not entirely sure that this is compatible with art, although I haven’t made up my mind on the subject yet. As soon as you establish a victory condition, give the player a goal, the player starts to work towards something. They concentrate their attention on achieving the goal. I’m not convinced that you can be having an art-appreciation experience if you’re working towards a goal at the same time.

Interestingly enough, Tetris is a game with no victory condition. You cannot win at Tetris. And so even though you are working like crazy, your mind is not concentrating on the goal.

Some Other Characteristics of Art

Art Has Content

One of the things about art is that is must have content. This is why baseball and poker are not art: they have no content. Nothing is being expressed. Monopoly has almost no content: it has little houses and pieces that move around, but it’s certainly not enough to be “art.” When we say “There’s an art to playing poker,” what we really mean is that there is a craft to playing poker – that there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and that playing poker well requires a high degree of skill. But the act of playing poker is not an aesthetic act. It has no content. It’s not expressive.

Art Has An Aesthetic

Another thing about art is that it is aesthetic, it has rules for determining beauty and ugliness. Now in the 20th century the idea that art was simply supposed to be beautiful was thrown out. But nevertheless, art is supposed to appeal to us in some way.

Art Contains Ideas

Art must have the capacity to express ideas. Film is an art form because it has an aesthetic, and it also has the capacity to make statements. Most games do not make statements, but then, neither do James Bond films. Most computer games are the interactive entertainment equivalent of James Bond novels and movies. The novel is an art form, but James Bond novels are not art. For a novel to be art it must be more than merely entertaining. For a painting to be art is must be more than merely decorative.

I want to mention two games that I think contained a lot of ideas. One was Planescape: Torment, from Interplay. This was a game about an immortal man who had lost his name and his memory. The game was about his quest to find out his name and to learn the reason for his immortality, possibly so that he could die permanently. Along the way he meets a strange collection of people all of whom seem to know him, but whom he does not know, and each one of them possesses part of the key to his past. Now this isn’t great literature, it’s not Anna Karenina or anything; in fact it’s not substantially better than your average paperback fantasy novel. But it contained far more interesting ideas that most hack-and-slash RPG’s, and I enjoyed Planescape: Torment a great deal. I found it aesthetically intriguing.

The other game was Balance of Power, by Chris Crawford. It came out around 1986, and I think it is one of the best computer games ever made. Balance of Power was a simulation of global politics. The Soviet Union and the USA are each struggling to maximize their geopolitical prestige at each other’s expense, by supporting friendly governments and overthrowing or destabilizing unfriendly ones around the world. This game taught me all kinds of things about global politics that I didn’t know, and in fact it was so good at it that the State Department began to use it to train diplomats. Now, like Sim City, this was a simulation, so the ideas it contained were not aesthetic ideas, but nevertheless they were interesting and new, and it’s clear proof that games can contain ideas.

I actually had a rather odd emotional experience playing Balance of Power, because I once tried playing it from the Russian side. Of course we’re used to playing games from the enemy side in wargames – you fly a World War II flight simulator and you can fly either the German or the Allied planes, but all it really means is that the performance characteristics of the planes are different. But playing Balance of Power from the Russian side, I got an immediate and visceral experience of what the Soviets were actually up against. The way the game is designed, the Americans have a lot of money but very few men under arms, while the Russians have very little money but tons of men under arms. What this means is that their mechanisms for influencing world opinion are really quite limited and crude. It’s easy for them to send in troops, but they can’t afford to buy friends around the world by sending powdered milk to starving children and things like that. And the other thing I noticed is that all America’s friends are extremely rich and powerful – Britain and France and Germany and so on – while all Russia’s friends were extremely poor. And the experience of playing this game was quite strange. Here they were, surrounded by enemies and treaty organizations designed to hem them in. It really turned my world-view upside down, because I had never put myself in their shoes before, and I felt quite weird for a couple of hours afterwards.

Art Makes You Feel Things

And art should make you feel something. That’s part of what art is about. And games unquestionably can make you feel things, but for them to be accepted as an art form, they have to make the effort. If movies had never moved beyond the nickelodeon, they would never have been accepted as an art form. But movies, even silent movies, were clearly an outgrowth of drama, of the stage, and the stage is a very ancient and well-understood art form. Computer games roots are not in movies or the stage; they’re in gameplay, in board games and so on. And those are clearly not art forms, because they have so much less emphasis on the aesthetic, and because they don’t usually make you feel things.

Art is Not Formulaic

Another important characteristic of good art is that it is not formulaic. The artist Salvador Dali began to be considered a bit of a fraud in his later years, because his work became formulaic; he ceased to innovate. I think that the Star Wars saga is beginning to lose whatever claim it may once have had to be a work of art, because it is increasingly formulaic, and it is increasingly driven by merchandising considerations.

Utility and Salability

All these characteristics of art – expressing ideas, making you feel things, not being formulaic and so on – outweigh considerations of utility. Art is not about being useful. And to some extent, they outweigh considerations of salability as well. Art does not involve merchandising. No one creates a work of art with a presumption that it’s going to be turned into T-shirts and lunch boxes. A key point about art is this: It’s not about what the customer wants to buy. It’s about what you have to say. A work does not have to do all the things I mentioned above, but if it does none of them, the chances are it’s not a work of art.

The Role of Fun

Now I said at the beginning of this lecture that it was going to be a sermon; I neglected to mention that it was a heretical sermon.

Back in February, I wrote a column for the Gamasutra webzine called “Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers.” And this column was a deliberate take-off of the famous Dogme 95 movement in film. In my column, I proposed a set of outrageous rules for the game industry whose purpose was to divorce game design from technology, to encourage thinking about game design without reference to any particular technology. They were rules like, “The design documents must not contain any reference to any hardware installed inside the target machine.” And I had other rules intended to discourage derivative game designs. For example, I said, “There shall be no knights, elves, dwarves or dragons in your game, full stop.” You may not do a first-person shooter, under Dogma 2001; it is a forbidden form. And finally I ended by saying that innovative gameplay was a moral imperative, and all other considerations were secondary.

Well, in the debate that followed, on the game developers’ message boards, I certainly saw that I had stimulated a lot of discussion, which was my main point. And I noticed, interestingly enough, that I was being just about 50% passionate vilified, by people who thought that I didn’t know anything about the game industry; and 50% passionately defended, mostly by naive newcomers who thought that this really presented an interesting challenge, and a call to change the kinds of games that were out there. And that told me that I had done the right thing. If I were being 100% vilified or 100% praised, then I would have failed, because my point was to get people talking about these issues.

But something I noticed in the discussions was that some people pointed out that there was no discussion of fun in Dogma 2001. And they asked, “Why isn’t fun mentioned? Why isn’t it the case that fun is the moral imperative, and everything else is secondary to that?”

Well – here comes the heresy – fun is not all that we’re about. I dispute that fun should be our highest goal. Now nobody wants to play a board game that isn’t fun. But we are not just computerized board games. Are books and movies only about light entertainment? Are they just “fun”? No, they are not.

If all we're doing is making Schwartzenegger movies and teen sex comedies, then we're not exploiting the full power of the medium! Picasso's Guernica is not “fun.” Nobody goes to look at that painting for fun.

Britain, where I live, is a land filled with war memorials to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the First and Second World Wars. And when I see one, I usually like to go up and look at it. I like to read the names on it, and think about what those people did. But I don’t do that for fun. I actually do it specifically to feel sorrow and regret. I do it to mourn those dead people. I do it to remind myself of the sacrifice that they made.

I once read a rather facile book which suggested that people’s reasons for choosing things to do could always be attributed to fun or learning or both. Ridiculous. I don’t look at war memorials to have fun, and I don’t look at them to learn something; I look at them to feel something.

We work so hard in this industry, we concentrate so exclusively, on capturing fun, that we've lost touch – or never even had touch – with any other emotions. It’s no wonder that so many works in our medium are as shallow and vapid as they are! Our games are the video equivalent of a theme park. A theme park is a place designed to maximize fun. But you know what? I’m an adult. I don't spend a whole lot of time in theme parks any more. Sometimes I go look at war memorials instead. There are times when what I would really rather do is to mourn the dead of a global conflagration, people who died so that I may live in freedom,  than ride around and around in a make-believe airplane.

Now at this point some of you may be saying, “God almighty, what a depressing game designer. If that’s the way you feel, get the hell out of the industry, there’s no place for you here.” Well, I've got news for you. If that’s the way you feel, then you are condemned only to be a designer of theme parks. I’ve got a broader vision than that. I believe this medium is capable of more. You’ve learned how to inspire one single emotion and that’s all you care about! If you were a writer, you could only ever write humor columns. If you were a film director, you could only ever make comedies.

Years ago my wife went with some friends to see the movie Soldier of Orange. I’ve never seen it, but she said that it was a very intense, very gripping movie. And after it was over, they all came out of the cinema rather shaken, and walked along in silence for a while. And finally my wife said, “That was an incredibly good movie. I am very glad I came. I don’t ever want to see it again.”

It's not really true that fun is all we do. We also do suspense, and sometimes horror, and – far more often than we should – frustration. But fun is an overrated value. And if we want to be considered an art form, looking beyond it is one of the first things we need to do.

What Does It Take For Us To Be An Art Form?

So what does it take for us to be an art form? Well, I think the answer is pretty simple. We have to act like other art forms. For games to be recognized as an art form they must do some of the things that other art forms do – that people expect of art forms. More importantly, we must begin to act as if we believe that we are an art form. We must treat our work as an art form and act as if we expect the public to do the same.

We Need An Aesthetic

We need an aesthetic, or a variety of them. If you look at the movies, they’re not judged by a single aesthetic, but by several. They’re judged by the cinematography, and the editing, and the quality of the acting, and the quality of the story, and so on. And like the movies, we need a way to judge the artistic merit of the elements that make up games. We have to judge the story, if there is one; we have to judge the acting, if there is any; we have to judge the seamlessness of the experience, which is equivalent to the editing in movies. We have to judge the degree to which all elements of the game work together in harmony, without any false notes. A lot of games used to have jarring transitions between the interactive and non-interactive segments of the game, but we’ve been getting better about that lately.

We might even find a way of judging gameplay itself according to an aesthetic: is it smooth, easy, natural? Again, the gameplay in Tetris is aesthetically pleasing. When you play a really good game you no longer even see the menu items on the screen, the buttons. They become second nature.

We Must Experiment

We must experiment, we must try new things, we must take risks.

Consider Impressionism in painting. It is now recognized as one of the greatest of movements in painting. It was famously excluded from the French Academy, and the first show of Impressionist paintings had to be set up in someone’s house because nobody else would host it. But Impressionism was not a technology of painting. The paint and canvas were still the same as they always had been. Nor was Impressionism primarily about looking at new things. It did bring in some new subject matter, but mainly, Impressionism was a new way of seeing. It was about the fact that the eye is not a camera. That painting does not have to be representative.

What is our equivalent of Impressionism? Who among us is breaking new ground in gameplay, the way Impressionism broke new ground in painting?

We Must Challenge the Player

The greatest works of art, the ones that get displayed in museums and talked about forever, are those which took risks, which broke new ground. Art must break new ground or it is merely craft, decoration. Great art challenges the viewer. It demands that the viewer grow, expand his or her mind, see things that have not been seen before, think things that have not been thought before. Impressionism challenged the our understanding of what painting was for. The Romantic movement in music challenged the listener; it said that music can be about emotion, not merely melodic “prettiness.”

That’s not always easy in other media. But who knows more about posing challenges than we do? Challenging the player is exactly what we are about! People come to our works because they want to be challenged.

You may say that we pose a different kind of challenge, that our challenges are to achieve something, a victory condition, whereas great art challenges the viewer to see and hear things in a different way, not to achieve something but to obtain a new kind of understanding. Yet why can we not challenge the players to achieve not merely a victory condition, but a kind of understanding?

Sim City challenges the player to understand the relationship between efficient transportation and economic prosperity. Now, as I said, that’s not an aesthetic understanding, but it isn’t specifically a victory condition, either. I believe that we are capable of challenging players aesthetically as well as logically. We just have to put our minds to it. The trick for us is to devise new challenges, not variants on the same old ones. New genres of interactive entertainment.

Our Awards Must Change

The next thing that I believe must happen is that our awards must change. Nobody ever gets an art prize on the basis of the technical merit or the craftsmanship inherent in the artwork. If a sculptor gets an award for a sculpture, it’s not for the quality of the welding. Now if the welding is bad, they might not get the award, but good welding alone is not enough.

People do give Oscars for the technical merits of movies, but you'll notice that it’s always a much smaller ceremony, held in a hotel ballroom, not in a big, beautiful theater. It’s not broadcast on TV. The only people who attend the technical Oscars are movie technicians, not glittering stars. The big public Oscars are about Art, not Craft.

But look at our game awards. They're all about craft. Best programming. Best sound. We don't give awards for best story or best acting. And sure enough those elements have traditionally been the weakest parts of games. “Best Graphics” as an award category is especially ambiguous. Some people think that best graphics are those which are rendered at the highest speed, or that use NURBS, or that most closely mimic visual reality. That's not good graphics, that's good graphic technology!

We need awards that honor aesthetic content, not merely technological prowess.

We Need Not Reviewers, But Critics

Awards are not enough. We also need critics to recognize artistic merit. We don't even have any critics. What we have are reviewers. And look at them! The majority of them are game-developer wannabes, gamers with a rudimentary knowledge of English barely sufficient to say something more useful than “sucks” or “rocks.” Real critics bring to their profession not just a knowledge of the medium they are discussing, but wide reading and an understanding of aesthetics and the human condition.

Now, I know some of you at this point are saying, “That's ridiculous. Game reviewers don’t need to be well-educated, they don’t need to be deep thinkers, they just need to know what's fun.” And you’re right. That’s all that game reviewers need. But interactive entertainment critics need to bring more: wisdom, maturity, judgment, understanding.

Now another objection I’ve heard to this argument is that there simply aren’t any games out there that deserve this depth of thought.  That if you took the intellect of the great art critics of the world and applied it to games, it would be totally wasted. But I think that’s our own fault. I don’t believe that that’s a fundamental weakness in the medium. The fact that there aren’t any games out there that deserve in-depth analysis is because we haven’t made any, not because we cannot make any.

Now, I’ve read some academic movie criticism, and it was mostly boring and unreadable. And God knows I don’t want our industry to get bogged down in the “movements” and “schisms” and petty infighting, not to mention sheer wankery, that is the bane of the art world. Pity the poor bastard who decides, at this point, that he wants to put paint on canvas. He’s got 1000 years of history to live up to, and 10,000 critics, each with their own axe to grind, all looking over his shoulder. It’s a wonder they try to paint at all; I know it would certainly scare me off.

But I don’t think we have to worry about that yet. Right now we’re so far from being art that it’s not a problem for us. What I’m saying is that an art form requires not just reviewers, comparing one game to another, but critics who can discuss the meaning of a game in a larger context.

If you look at a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it had all the reviewers flummoxed, because none of their traditional metrics applied. No romance, no action, no suspense, no drama in the traditional sense of the word. Almost no acting at all. But the critics had a field day! Because 2001 was rich with ideas, it was crammed with them from one end to the other!

2001: A Space Odyssey is a great work of art. It meets all the necessary criteria. It has content, all right: over 3 hours of it. It says something – a great many things, in fact. It makes us feel something. 2001 was boring at points. It was deliberately boring. Stanley Kubrick said, “Space travel isn’t whizzing around the universe; space travel is long and slow and boring, and I’m going to make you feel that.” And that, my friends, is the definition of artistic courage.

2001 isn’t formulaic; it did break new ground in all sorts of ways, some of them technological, although they weren’t necessarily critical to its success as a work of art. It did challenge the viewer, very greatly. It brought us new ways of seeing any number of things: space travel itself, and computers, right up to man’s place in the universe. It asked a lot of very interesting questions.

Where is our 2001: A Space Odyssey? When is one of us going to make a game that was as brilliant and innovative as 2001 was a movie?

Conclusion

Ultimately, whether or not interactive entertainment can be a legitimate art form is up to us. We’ll have to put out a lot of PR material, to let the public and the press know that we ourselves believe that what we do is an art form

We need to change our awards to recognize artistic merit and not merely technological prowess or craft.

We need to change the way we look at our games, so that they are criticized, and not merely reviewed.

We may even, God help us, have to go as far as the movies did and create a cult of personality around the game designer in the way that they have a cult of personality around the film director. This was tried once. Electronic Arts was founded with the notion that game developers should be promoted like, and treated like, rock musicians. They eventually abandoned that idea when the games got big enough that they were no longer being made by a group the size of a rock band, and when the fame they were getting started to cause designers to ask for more money.

I don’t know that it’s good idea, but it would probably make a difference. Art requires an artist. One of the absolute requirements of any work of art is that it be manmade. And I believe that for us to be taken seriously as an art form we have to move the people who make it back into the foreground again.

Dogme 95 declared that movies have gone too far in that direction, that they have overemphasized the idea of the film director as visionary, to the detriment of drama. But I don’t think we’ve gone far enough. Every work of interactive entertainment that wants to be considered worthy of being an art form must have its prime visionary’s name on the front. Everybody in the industry knows who Sid Meier, and Brian Moriarty, and Peter Molyneux, and Will Wright are, but it’s not enough for everyone in the industry to know these names; we need these names to become household words. We need for Sid Meier to become as well-known as Francis Ford Coppola or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But most of all, and before we do any of those other things, we have to start making interactive entertainment that is worthy of the kind of attention that art forms get. Somebody is going to have to stand up and say, “I’m going to create a computerized, interactive work of art. And it’s not going to be an electronic theme park, and it’s not going to be an interactive James Bond movie.”

We have to take those risks. We have to break new ground. We have to devise an aesthetic. We have to challenge the player to arrive new forms of understanding.

The answer to the question that is the title of this lecture is emphatically YES – but only if we, ourselves, the creators, have the courage and the vision to do so.

Here endeth the lesson.