Long ago, to our modern, anemic sense of time, video games faced their first great challenge. Emerging from the death of the consoles and their revival under the auspices of the Nintendo corporation and the growing upswell of PC gamers, greater attention came to be focused on them. And in that attention, opportunity. Thus did politicians and lawyers begin a calumnious attack on the video games industry, centered around that inflammatory claim; Video Games Caused Violence.

And the people believed them, and banned their children from partaking in the hobby. Outraged and fearful, censorious in their fury that they would be preyed upon by vicious game developers. But a few stood against them, fighting against the deceptions of their foes. They were stalwart and steady in their work, turning back the tide of the censors through Herculean effort and unceasing devotion to their craft.

No, they responded, Video Games Do Not Cause Violence!

They told, at best, a half-truth, and the shadow of that truth has been hampering us ever since.

Video Games Can Cause Violence #

Of course they can. Video games are an art form. Art affects people. It causes emotions and ideas to spread, to mutate and take on new form. Every art form has caused violence in the past.

After viewing the play The Rites of Spring, Parisiennes took to the streets, burning, looting, and pillaging their own city in artistic fervor. But we did not ban plays.

After the release of certain Danish cartoons, the Islamic world rose in protest, slaughtering dozens of people in fury. But we did not ban drawn images.

The movie Taxi Driver caused a man to try to assassinate a sitting U.S. president to impress Julia Roberts or Natalie Portman or someone, I forget. The Birth of a Nation led to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Where are the voices demanding we ban all film?

Of course video games can cause violence. The fact that they generally don't is more to do with the fact that most games are not art than any lack of capability on their part.

Oh, there's the fighting words.

What is Art? #

People who have no answer to this, or who argue that art is indefinable, or is in the eye of the beholder, can be safely ignored in the ensuing discussion. Refusal to define the thing under discussion is grounds for dismissal from the conversation, as far as I am concerned. If you cannot define art as useful category - which includes, by necessity, standards that exclude certain things from that category - then you have no actual contribution to the discussion of what is or isn't art.

Notably, I have to exclude the classical categories of "high" art from the category. Those curators and critics that elevate a chimpanzee flinging paint onto a canvas as a pioneer in the field; who want us to believe that a banana taped to a wall is worth more money than the average person in the United States makes in 6 years; who act, in the end, as cover for rich elites engaged in widespread money laundering or tax evasion. This is, granted, entirely an outside-perspective argument, but if art is to have any socially positive function, then it cannot include that kind of obvious madness.

Obviously, I must put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, and offer just such a filter to usefully separate art from other forms of creative endeavor. And the first step in doing so is judging the point of the enterprise in the first place. To whit;

What does art do for society? #

Again, we must grapple with the inane "inspires us, motivates us, fills us with dreams" nonsense. This is a useless definition. A person can be inspired and motivated by cat shit. It relegates art to the mire of subjectivity once more. Art has a purpose in society. It performs a function, one that has actual cultural value.

Art is cultural warfare.

Art is the method by which a culture spreads its ideas and values. It is propaganda for a social framework, the ways in which the members of a society see and interpret everything around them. Art is the medium through which the primary axioms and assumptions of a people are found, repeated, refined, and propagated.

This idea is, of course, offensive to many. There are some who believe that art is a kind of pacifistic endeavor, the collaborative soul-searching of the human race as it tries to understand itself. The melting pot of cultures and civilizations. The idea that it is by its nature combative and imperialistic does not sit well with them.

Except we can see the evidence in how people react to art that violates their own cultural axioms, their fundamental view of what is good and evil. I referred to The Birth of a Nation earlier. Imagine that movie releasing today, unchanged in its racist messaging. Would you be surprised if people protested its viewing?

The only reason to do so would be if they believed that viewing the movie would, in some way, result in people becoming more racist and acting out that racism. If they believed that an art piece would shift the underlying norms of the society that viewed it, and in this case in a way that they found objectionable.¹

Every art piece does this. Ludic media does it better than any other. Or at least, it could, if game developers tried to make art.

Ludic Media's Place #

Games have a unique advantage over other forms of media in advancing an artistic message; interactivity.

It is a cliché now to hear of a AAA game described as cinematic by a gaming press too enamored with obsolete and inferior art forms for its own good. They do not realize - and many developers alongside them, I fear - that "cinematic" is an insulting description for a game.

Video games are not movies. That is self-evident. What is more subtle is that games are more unlike movies than movies are unlike books. That is to say, film and literature have similar artistic lineage and structure. They tell fixed stories under the guidance of the story teller. The audience is the passive recipient of that art. For all that film critics discuss bringing the audience in as an active participant in the art, that is not literally true. The audience cannot affect the piece in any meaningful way.

This is a critical distinction. It is the entire distinction that makes ludic media a unique and higher art form - it does not trace its genealogy from the one-to-many mass-media formats of the storyteller of old, of the playwright and pamphleteer.

The closest analogue to video games is performance art.

Specifically, that niche of performance art that demands audience involvement. The audience of a video game - the player - is an integral part of the artistic experience. They are the cameraman, the main actor, even the writer should the game allow for choice in their character's dialogue. They are the improv artist shown a scenario and asked to perform. They are fundamental to the understanding of this media as art.

This is why so many of the classical views of art don't fit in with video games. They are embedded in a view that relegates the audience of a piece to the passive role, the "recipient" of a visionary's message. Ludic media, on the other hand, is relentlessly and unashamedly democratic and open to the participation of that audience in the creation of the experience.

To call a game cinematic is an insult because it implies that the game fails as an art piece. It means that the game does not invite the player to be a part of the most critical aspects of the game, that the piece values the spectacle of cinema more than the choice and interaction of the player. To play a "cinematic" game is to play a movie with an annoying interface.

Unfortunately, far too many games fall for this trap. Rather than employ their artistry to maximum value, using their mechanics as the carrier of their message, they instead resort to the methods of passive media; non-interactive dialogue and cutscenes or "environmental storytelling." This is what most people refer to as the story of a video game - characters speaking to one another, text dumps or recorded messages left everywhere, or interesting setpieces the player can pause and look at. If we're going to make a comparison to cinema, then all of that isn't the story of the game at all; it's the backstory. It's the context, the backdrop against which the actual story - the actions of the player and their consequences - takes place.

That, too, is the subject of another article. This one has gone long enough as it is. Suffice it to say; video games can be art, but most aren't and strong misunderstanding about what makes them good art cripples our understanding of them as such.