Long ago, video games faced a great challenge. Emerging from the death of the consoles and their revival under the innovations of the Nintendo corporation and the growing upswell of PC gamers, greater attention came to be focused on them. And in that attention, opportunity. Like vultures circling around a wounded animal, politicians and lawyers delighted in their calumnious attacks on the video games industry, centered around that inflammatory claim; Video Games Caused Violence.
And many 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 these clearly amoral, vicious, bloodthirsty 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. The industry is greatly indebted to them.
No, they responded, Video Games Do Not Cause Violence!
They told, at best, a half-truth, and the silent shadow of that truth has been hampering us ever since.
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 Birth of a Nation led to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. But we did not ban films.
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.
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 comprehend art as a 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 clear 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;
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 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 axiology and morality of a people are found, repeated, refined, and propagated.
It is the way a superorganism - a human society - ensures its continuity across time, even as the individuals within it age and die.
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. In other words, they believe that an art piece can shift the underlying norms of the society that views 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.
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 and gamers 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 a designer has carefully crafted to be experienced in a predetermined way - a script for the player to blindly follow. 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.
In a film, the protagonist kills another character. It is a gruesome death, lowering the victim into the spinning blades of a propeller. But the brute fact of the scene tells us nothing of the intended impact. Is the character justified in his actions, or maniacal? Is this the action of a hero, a villain, a monster, a fool?
What tells us this is the context of the scene. This includes the preceding and succeeding events. Unique to film, this also includes be the cinematography, the music, and the body language of the actors. These all give context to the events. In a book, this would be language used and internal dialogue.
All of this can change the impact of the actual events of the narrative; "what actually happened."
In games, "what actually happened" is what the player chooses to do. When the impactful moments of the game are relegated only to the developers chosen story beats, their dialogue and cutscenes and carefully crafted setpiece moments, then whatever art they have sold to their audience is not a game because the game parts of it do not matter.
If the gameplay is irrelevant to the art, then the game is not art.2
What is traditionally considered the "story" of a game - what I have labelled context - serves to provide a framework for the gameplay, to contextualize the actions of the player and hint at or directly communicate the meaning of the mechanics. Without it, certainly, an artistic game is lessened. There is little meaning that can be gleaned from the brute manipulation of numbers or the mere act of sorting pegs into boxes. With it, [everything changes]((https://venturebeat.com/games/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/).
But unless the player's actions have an impact on that context - unless their engagement with the mechanics actually matters in some way - they do not truly have reason to care about the events any more than the viewer of a film does. This is more subtle than merely forcing the player to make certain choices in gameplay. That artifice does not hold up emotionally. The player did not murder those townspeople; Arthas did. The player did not drop white phosphorous on those refugees; Captain Walker did. The designer forced them. The player had no actual choice (besides the eternal cop-out of "turn the game off").
Contrast that to Papers Please. The player controls an immigration officer. Their choices directly impact who gets through and who doesn't. And they are allowed to make the choices that they do. There is no hand forcing the player reject innocents or deprive others of basic human dignity. The relatively simple mechanics (timed investigations and correlation of an increasingly complex number of rules) are elevated infinitely by the contextualization the game provides.
Imagine the same message being conveyed in passive media. The audience is shown this situation, given the necessary backstory, and watch this immigration officer try to do his job. It is not hard to imagine this character being reviled for his actions. But the film maker can address that. Maybe there is time set aside to establish him as sympathetic - a sick family, mounting bills. Maybe he is shown to be trying his best, skirting the rules as best he can to serve the moral good. Yet always - always! - there is a disconnect between the audience and the actor. The film must work hard to make the character seem anything more than a heartless bureaucrat. In doing so, it changes its focus; it becomes about this character and his response to the situation, rather than about the unfairness of the system and how the audience would respond when put into those circumstances.
Aside; for art to be effective at this, it needs to be legible to the audience. They need to understand the message of the piece. Without that legibility, the art piece fails. I have more thoughts on this to be shared in a future article; for now, I will just say that a civilization's ability to comprehend and preference for more elaborate and complex art serves also as a defense against the art of other groups. In other words, a rarefied artistic sensibility serves to inoculate an individual from foreign artistic messaging. "Good taste" is the primary defense against the cultural weapons of others.
Not to deride artless games. Sometimes, people want to just play something fun, without having it matter to them on a cultural or emotional level. Sometimes people just want to eat popcorn and watch big robots punch each other; why should they be expected to absorb art instead?