Now That Video Games Are Art…Let the Hating Begin!

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States (or SCOTUS, as you can call it if you want to sound “in the know” and make people think you have some awful STD) rejected California’s ban on the sale of video games to minors on First Amendment grounds 7-2 with only Justices Clarence Thomas (who uses his time on the bench to get in a good nap) and Stephen Breyer (the male member of the Court’s Jewish Liberal Third) dissenting. Because the majority invoked the First Amendment when striking down the California law, taking aim specifically at the law’s justification under the claim that games were without “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” this has meant one thing: Video games are now art.

Except…not really.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge lover of video games, which I’ve been playing since I was but a wee child. If I had to choose between television, film, and video games, it would be a no-contest fight from which video games would emerge triumphant. But that doesn’t make it art.

Why these nine elderly people have been chosen to decide what is art is beyond me.

Yet.

You see, it’s not that video games can’t be art, it’s that they’re just not at a point that they can be considered art. And this is endemic to all mediums, really. It’s a classic A=B but B=/=A situation. All art is entertainment, but not all entertainment is art.

To make this easy to understand, I’m going to jump away from video games and make a comparison to the art form that strikes me as most hipster-friendly: photography. It’s a perfect one because it requires a pretty high price point for entry, no one but other photographers can tell that you’re doing it wrong, and you can use antiquated technology just to make it hard on yourself and get back to the “roots” of the form. For hipsters, photography is to art as bicycling is to travel.

Now, imagine that photography was nothing but stock photographs.

Like this stock photo, for the stock market (I shit you not)

Now, as in all art, there’s a basic narrative there–someone has been gasp! reading the stock market, and they have glasses that they have taken off. But at the end of the day, it’s a photo of glasses on a newspaper. If that seems rather reductionist, it’s not. That’s as much thought as the photographer put into it or the company that hired said photographer wanted. “Stock Market” they said. And boom! glasses on the business section of the newspaper.

Okay, now forget the concept of stock photo only photography. It’s not true. There’s lots of good photography. Here, I’ll make it better with one of my favorite photographs.

The Marlboro Marine was so done with this war…seven years ago.

But there is an artistic medium entirely dominated by what is generally termed “commercial” art (by which we mean, anything that doesn’t actually qualify as art to art critics). And that medium is video games.

See, art is about the communication of an idea and what I would claim “true” art is about is communicating an idea with an emotional reaction queued into it. Take the stock photo versus the Marlboro Marine, James Blake Miller. Both of these are still lives, both of these were taken with intent to sell the photo (and both were). But because the stock photo needs mass consumer appeal, it lacks any emotional depth. It will only gain that depth through context. For instance, with the global market crisis, we might relate to that pair of glasses. But fifteen years ago, we might have been glad that pair of glasses was not us, what with all our money safely and heavily invested in Pets.com. But Miller, with his deadened two-thousand yard stare, the cigarette he so desperately needs while still covered in the grime of combat, it speaks to us of how weary the whole situation is. We feel something in response.

Video games have nothing like it.

The most dramatic emotional experience I ever had in a video game was 2007′s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The moment is easy to pinpoint: it is when the game blows you up in a nuclear explosion. But the act of being blown up isn’t the dramatic part. It’s the aftermath: the part where you wander around the now destroyed landscape as the last moments of your life drift away.

This image conveys the idea that your character is fucked.

And if the game ended there, that would be something. A real “war is horrible, nuclear war is the end” situation. But that’s not what happens. That moment comes sandwiched between two giant firefights. Also, you will never feel sorry for your character, because he hasn’t been given a voice or a personality.

And that’s the case with all games. There may be the occasional instance of emotional reaction, but it’s often squashed in between the pure entertainment “go here, kill that” parts. Even the games where you don’t kill things, like Wii Sports, couldn’t be said to evoke any honest emotions on their own, except, of course, the will to utterly destroy your opponent.

So, I’m glad the SCOTUS has struck down game censorship. But I’m not willing to call games art, yet. I’m willing to call it the promise of art. No one ever cried over the end of Guitar Hero 3. Mortal Kombat never inspired a person to get into politics. But they could–if they were better.