Games are not art

There is an ongoing debate, contributed to by far greater luminaries than myself, about whether games are art. I would like to voice the following opinion: games can be art by accident, but games are a lot more than art can ever possibly be. Games can deliver an aesthetic experience, but this is not their strength, and to undervalue games by saying that they can merely be art is to miss what games are good at.

Any discussion of games and art inevitably has to walk around the quagmire of defining what art is. I call it a quagmire, not because of the current state of art and the art world that Jim Preston suggests is contradictory and perhaps even fraudulent in his Gamasutra article the Arty Party, but because any attempt to define art leads to types of circular logic and reasoning that concludes 'art is what you see as art'. In fact, there is considerable disagreement within the art world as to whether any agreement can be made as to what art is, and attempting to define it appears to be a futile exercise. I'll merely point you in the direction of an essay 'What is Art?' by Bart Rosier so that you can at least appreciate some of the complexities involved in thinking about art.

But thinking about art, for my purposes, is not so important as what art is, but as what art does. Art transmits ideas, art engages the viewer, art conveys an aesthetic experience, art is a realised meme. But art is passive, in the sense that art conveys a limited domain of viewer interaction. At best you may be able to view art from a number of different angles, and modern exhibits are likely to have an exhibit which allows the audience to participate or manipulate elements of the exhibit.

Defining games on the other hand appears initially less complex. Games are played, which is their defining characteristic. They involve an interaction between the player and either the game itself, or other players through the game. One of Roger Ebert's chief criticisms on why games cannot be art is the extent of the interaction that games allow: 'I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.' (Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker).

But even in this simple definition, there are complexities. Should we distinguish between single player and multi-player games? How is the role of the game designer, at one position removed from the act of play, important to the game? Similarly, Ebert's criticism feels wrong some how. Is the role of being a game player the same as being an artist, or is it something else? If it is something else, what can it be?

Games have a couple of distinguishing features from art: they have rules, and they have feedback. The rules distinguish game players from artists to an extent, although not completely, because art seems to thrive under restrictions and adversity, and rules are one such type of restriction. But the feedback mechanism - reward and punishment - is unique to games, not art. You can get addicted to games - and the problems of gambling addiction show how strong such an addictive process can be. You cannot get addicted to a piece of art - despite literature's best attempts to suggest otherwise. (You can get addicted to creating a piece of art, which implies game playing and being an artist are closer related than we think. You can also get addicted to buying or collecting art, but the art is not the behavior itself).

Addiction is gaming's dark side. Many games can be accused of being virtual skinner boxes, and slot machines are the closest physical realisation of this idea (and consequently the most addictive). But the concept of operant conditioning behind skinner boxes relies on the basic human function of associating changes in the environment with actions (responses) made by organism being conditioned. And this is the positive function of gaming. Games allow you to condition your behaviour correctly in a simulated (safe) environment. Examples include improving hand eye coordination in key hole surgery by game playing (Medical News Today). But they include more improving more general problem solving skills which are equally transferable. Not one has accused art of making such improvements - at least, not since 1945.

(You may wish to read my follow-up piece on how to define 'What is Art')