The Case for Video Games

I am not a gamer if anything I tend to be overwhelmed by and fearful of the addictive immersiveness of videogames but the first time I saw this game Monument Valley I was completely and utterly mesmerised by its spare beauty its MCS sure like sequence of pathways and structures

and ladders that this quiet little person deftly navigates and unlocks I was not just entertained I was moved it was poetic challenging metaphorically resonant how was my experience of this game in any way lesser than my encounters with other forms of art and what else out there was

I missing this is the case for video games video games have a rich history beginning before you think they did with proto computer games like tennis for two in 1958 but they really kicked off in the early 1970s with the explosion of arcade games and the dawn of

home consoles with minimalist wonders like pong and an impressive variety of plastic boxes with faux wood details and there have been a huge range of kinds of video games scents of varying quality and popularity video games are not a passing fad there are a multibillion-dollar industry I mean

seriously as big if not bigger than the film industry and it sees growth every year evolving as the world and Technology evolve and as developers and corporations and gamers respond to those changes it's hard to talk about video games as being one thing because they perform varying functions

and address differing needs I mean some games are primarily about pattern recognition and spatial reasoning like positioning Mario above a pipe or dodging bullets or fitting blocks into an allotted space other games are educational either vaguely or strategically imparting history or math or engineering sometimes you can choose

whether or not you want the game to be educational but video games can teach and test your coordination and rhythm alone and of course with friends competition is at the core of many games but so is collaboration allowing you to work together with others toward a goal whether

your teammates are in the same room or on a different continent now it may be obvious but worth noting that video games are almost always about strategy and problem-solving you can learn the rules of sports and play them with less risk of injury you can simulate potentially real-world

situations and also not real-world situations video games allow you to build world's evolved worlds and explore the amazingly intricate worlds that others have created who doesn't want to turn into a cat and jump through a tree or discover a new planet a planet that admittedly no one else

will ever see in this vast and lonely universe the quality of CGI in games has improved significantly over the years offering up immersive cinematic worlds and almost but not quite naturalistic reproductions of human beings we're still in the uncanny valley folks and we likely will be for some

time developers have brought in actors you know and love to voice characters in a number of games and some games feature footage of real-life actors like her story in which you explore a video database of fictional interviews of a woman to try to uncover the truth of what

happened video games are really good at telling stories letting a narrative unravel over time like a good novel or movie they're paced alternating periods of fast paced action with slower moments allowing for exposition and character development movies are actually a really good point of comparison here as they're

also a more populist accessible art form some are considered high art or film and others are well super babies baby geniuses – and like our taste for movies sometimes we want something fun and easy and other times we feel like something super challenging and intense likewise for the

kind of art you see in a gallery or museum one day you might want to gaze at a captivating landscape whose equivalent in gaming might be something like fire watch another day you want to stand before Picasso's Guernica and feel the pain and misery of the Spanish Civil

War an experienced closer to something like playing this war of mine about a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city now there's been plenty of work assigned to the realm of visual or fine art that has involved video game technology like Cory archangels 2002 works

Super Mario clouds for which he modified the code of the original 1985 Super Mario Brothers erasing all sound and all visual elements except the sky and the clouds that scroll across it video games have also been collected by art museums like Jenova Chen and Nick Clark's Flo and

Jason roars passage a five minute game where a character moves through this stages of life and dies only once at the end both of which were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art but for what it's worth they also have the Sims there are a number of creators

making games who work between disciplines not confining themselves to one field or another actually opera might be a more fitting point of comparison for video games in particular the idea of the total work of art orgasmed Koons Freck propounded by German composer Ricard vogner rather than all the

arts existing separately in their own silos vogner wanted his own works to synthesize music drama dance costumes set design and everything else into one harmonious whole similarly video games are consolidations of the creative output of many writers designers programmers composers concept artists modelers directors sound engineers and many

other roles all brought together into one package the creation of video games is largely a collective enterprise but there are plenty of individual artists and authors who are credited as the visionaries behind given games like Shigeru Miyamoto creator of classics like Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda

and Hideo Kojima the lead behind the Metal Gear series but while the most popular games are truly team efforts there are still lone wolves out there like eric barone the single developer behind stardew valley one of the top-selling titles of 2016 on Steam who created the game by

working on his own 10 hours a day seven days a week for four years like any artist a game developer begins with a relative blank slate they have a particular set of skills and technologies at their disposal and a knowledge either thin or deep of what's been done

before whether working alone or with gobs of money and a team of folks behind them developers build complex many-layered macrocosm for others to investigate and decipher and explore and that's really what sets video games apart they need you to complete them all art is interactive to some degree

if a painting hangs in a forest and no one sees it is it really artwork sculpture and installation require you to walk around them to take them in in full more and more works of art assume and necessitate viewer involvement but very few as inherently as any video

game they not only respond to you but adapt and offer diverse experiences depending on the choices you make this extreme interactivity makes it so that you at least to some extent become the co-author you are the artist – you can try to understand what the developer might be

trying to say or accomplish and you can also Bend the experience to embody or project how you see the world there are Zara's of video games just as with other forms of art you've got your first-person shooters and role-playing games and platformers but also like other forms of

art the expectations and rules for every kind of game have been stretched and broken and intentionally subverted zelda breath of the wild allows for open-ended gameplay enabling you to navigate the world in an unstructured and nonlinear way some titles completely discard the idea that a game needs a

clearly defined objective like what am I supposed to be doing on this island exactly or maybe the developers completely throw away the idea of a cutscene pioneered way back in pac-man and make the entire game feel like a single unbroken tracking shot or maybe the game's objective is

to take care of this fish man thing not every new idea is a winner people but video games require much more than coordination whether Solo enterprises are social undertakings they challenge players to think critically about not only the world of the game but also the real world around

them the game The Last of Us in which a smuggler has the job of escorting a teenage girl across a post-apocalyptic zombified United States sparked discussions about what it means to be a father and the dynamics of father/daughter relationships games like life is strange tackled difficult problems head-on

like online harassment and Russian life is strange too follows teenager brothers of Mexican descent who are dealing with the traumatic death of a parent and citizenship and racism and religious extremism one first-person exploration game gone home follows a young woman as she returns to her Oregon home in

1995 finds it empty and pieces together that her family fell apart after her parents found out about her younger sisters lesbian relationship video games can provide a platform for many underrepresented voices and stories like never alone which was developed in collaboration between game makers and Alaska native storytellers

and is based on a traditional and noopy actel US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in 2011 that video games deserve First Amendment protection just like books plays and movies writing video games communicate ideas even social messages through many familiar literary devices such as characters dialog plot and

music and through features distinctive to the medium such as the players interaction with the virtual world of course you don't have to look far to find a game that will offend you no matter who you are but that's true with any art form there are big issues with

gaming but I'd argue they're not baked into the media as Seth she still argued in 2018 it's not the content it's the culture the online gaming culture that is where bigotry bullying sexism and all sorts of toxic behavior have run amok and ruined the enjoyment for many it

can be hard if not impossible to separate these issues from the games themselves however they certainly aren't exclusive to the gaming community video games have always been a reflection of their times and these are indeed the challenges of now whether you play them or not gaming culture extends

far beyond screens and headsets and is no longer confined to virtual space but it never was really arcades were physical places where human bodies shared proximity land parties in the early aughts were actually real parties playing weed together and guitar hero and dance dance revelution aren't merely virtual

experiences and neither is getting into a car accident trying to catch pokemon video gaming like much of modern life blends online and offline experience and it's firmly part of culture and cultural memory whether you consider it high art or low in his 2005 book everything bad is good

for you Steven Johnson reminds us that there is nothing trivial about game play when negotiating various worlds young and old alike practice patience delay gratification and negotiate complex social relationships gaming according to Johnson is about finding order and meaning in the world and making decisions that help create

that order the more I learn about videogames the more my respect grows for those who routinely fling themselves into the unknown of a new game armed with knowledge of past games sure but up for the challenge of finding order and meaning in a new world ready to confront

unforeseeable futures failure death it reminds me of the bravery required to walk into an art gallery where you're unsure of what you'll find or what will be required of you but are nonetheless open to whatever the artists have in store when it comes to video games there is

still so much left to be done so much territory to conjure and explore so many more perspectives to offer on the part of developers as well as players it's an outstandingly elastic medium receptive and also susceptible to all the best and worst week humans have to offer it

video games shape our understanding of humanity just as they are shaped by it oh and there are also really fun [Music] special thanks to our director editor and lifelong gamer Brandon bran guard for his help advising on this episode and bringing it to life also before you go

did you know that this channel is called the art assignment because along with exploring ideas about art in art history we also give out assignments not the kind where you have to buy paint or stress about your inability to draw but the kind that asks you to use

your phone or bits of material you have lying around to make your life more fulfilling my book you are an artist gathers together some of the assignments presented on this show plus a bunch of really good new ones it'll be out on April 14th and is available for

pre-order right now thanks to all of our patrons for supporting the art assignment especially our grand masters of the Arts Tyler Calvert Thompson / zero collection David golden and Ernest Wolfe [Music]