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!
The specter of that half-truth has been haunting us ever since.
Of course they can. Video games are an art form. Art inflames the passions. 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 raged and quarreled with one another. The Plough and the Stars inspired the Irish to riot, and the aggrieved Yeats to rebuke his people; "You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this going to be a recurring celebration of Irish genius?" But we did not ban plays.
After the release of certain Danish cartoons, the Islamic spat fury in protest, some among enraged enough to damn their own souls with murder to assuage their offense. 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.
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.
Let's start by clearing the field. People who have no answer to this, or who argue that art is indefinable, or is a purely subjective category, 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.
My definition of art is rooted in its use for society, which demands that I exclude the modern icons of "high" art from the category. I don't mind, as I've already learned to dismiss their champions from the discussion. 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.
But saying art is rooted in social utility doesn't tell anyone much. Let me be more specific, which requires the answer to a final question regarding the point of the enterprise in the first place. To whit;
Let's dispense 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, or desperately want to 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. 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. They are passive.
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 other words: Story is Context, Gameplay is Story. But more on that next time.
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.