Video Games as Art

Video games are art, but a strange art: their essence is transformation of the player, not description to the player. This makes meaningful criticism nearly impossible—you can point at the moon, but it’s not the moon, and once someone sees it, they no longer need the pointing.

Roger Ebert once claimed that video games cannot be art. At this point, most people, including myself, disagree: it is simply obvious that they can be.

But what kind of art are they? At the risk of seeming to say something hopelessly obvious, the distinctive feature of video game art is that it is interactive rather than passive.

For all the 10-hour-long YouTube explainers or blog posts or endless Let’s-play or the rise of the streaming industry (based largely on video game as filler) or meritorious attempts at creating an academic literature around games (eg. Well Played) or celebrity critics like Yahtzee Croshaw, I find no form of criticism as unsatisfactory as video game criticism. To read a review or an attempted critique of a video game is scarcely more satisfying than someone telling you about a dream they had once; presenting a video of cutscene compilations or a few minutes of gameplay doesn’t add much. Even a psychedelic trip report or a music album review is more interesting and gives one more insight.

At this point, we can’t blame the immaturity of the form. Video games have been one of the largest media in the world for decades, and we are at least 3 generations into the art form, and practically every child in First World countries like the USA has played games. (M.U.L.E for example was 42 years ago, in 1983_43ya, and Tempest 44 years ago.) Billions of man-years have been spent creating, playing, and discussing games.

So, if they are art, and we are all extremely familiar with them and have great sophistication, and some of our most gifted young people have gone into games, why is it so hard to say what art they are or discuss things like what makes some great works of art but others just well-produced entertainment?

My answer, after all these years, is that a critique of a video game is indeed like someone telling you about a dream they had: “you had to be there—and doing it, like I was.”¹

The critical difference between a movie, novel, album, painting, sculpture etc., and a video game (and perhaps other critically neglected art-forms, like perfume, where reviews are so mutually contradictory and our vocabulary impoverished) is that the former is something you feel or experience, while the latter is something you do or are.

An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation. (Notably, the closest ‘passive’ art-forms I can think of in this respect are also some of the most demanding of their viewers, like The Ring opera cycles, in both intensity and time. Is it an accident that reviews of escape rooms or immersive theater never seem to successfully convey why you would want to bother?)

And so, good art game criticism can only be understood by those who have no need of it; a hand may point at the moon, but once you see the moon, you no longer need to look at the hand. Can anything convey the psychedelic trance horror of a Tempest player locked into an alternate state of consciousness after hours of pulsating vector-art warfare? Descriptions of such games, as below, can only point at the moon. (As such, video games are less extreme examples of “transformative experiences”.)

Oft-cited game art Journey embodies Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars/The Little Prince, in putting the player in a vast desert, seeking a transient connection with other humans while conducting an increasingly familiar ritual.

Rogue-likes or permadeath games like Apocalypse tailor their mechanics to teach their own lessons, about the nature of impermanence, the irrevocable passage of time, the virtues of caution and the value-of-information.

“Walking simulators” may seem passive, but are still far from a novel or a movie, where the creator controls your attention at every instant; the player must be trusted to choose to see things, and put the pieces together.

A Tetris player cannot describe the experience of dreaming about playing Tetris, or about starting to see everything as blocks which can be fitted together without gaps. (They can describe having had a Tetris dream, but not the experience of dreaming in this new way; the twist ending of Blow’s The Witness comes to mind as attempting to capture the effect of such puzzle games.) Once one has started dreaming in Tetris, and started hearing the bleeping muzak and seeing the endless onslaught of pieces dropping next to the pixel art onion domes, one might say that Tetris is done as an artwork.

Patrick McKenzie has given a good description of Factorio, which is about creating a vast factory and optimizing all its conveyor belts & pipes, furnaces, stockpiles etc. to “make number go up”. He praises it as some of the best training for an engineer or systems analyst. What makes Factorio so good at this? Is there some compelling actor or soundtrack? Does it have a brilliantly compelling SF plot written by a famous author about colonizing a new planet? Is it a best-selling book like The Goal, to be found in an airport bookstall near you?

It has none of that. But it works as video game art because in playing it, in order to play it well rather than continue losing like “a scrub”, one is continually forced to scrutinize one’s factory for bottlenecks, observe tradeoffs in systems like opportunity cost, spot unforeseen consequences of earlier shortcuts… And what has been seen cannot be unseen. Someone who plays Factorio long enough and well enough for Factorio to start playing them will start to see the world differently, as a system to optimize: as a series of pipes shunting material from place to place, with unexpected bottlenecks, and filled with serious design mistakes… and where the urge to optimize can become pathological.

One recent Sunday, I had just installed a pump on a lake shore to feed water to my concrete plant, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t drunk any real-world water in several hours. My head was aching, but I didn’t want to get up from my computer. I wanted to solve the problem with a click of a mouse, the way I would in the game, running a few meters of pipe from the kitchen tap to my hunched form (and perhaps another few meters of pipe from my hunched form to the toilet).

I’ve been sucked into plenty of games before, but few have so completely disabled my conscious will, my sense of time, indeed any region of my brain that isn’t devoted to growing the factory.

When one learns to optimize, one must also learn to not optimize. And this may be the most valuable lesson that getting addicted to Factorio can teach: what does it feel like to be a paperclipper? To be optimizing for something that has long since ceased to matter? To be so caught up in playing the game as to forget to ask if this game is worth playing in the first place?

This is a lesson taught even more directly by Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclips: many players get similarly caught up in the clicker game, despite “Clippy” being explicitly a cautionary thought experiment about mindless optimization run amok. And I remember my own experience playing Neopets—getting caught up in the grind and pursuing rare items and trying to make money on the Neopia stock market, until one day I was banned for manipulation; I asked myself, before trying to set up a new account, “why am I doing this?” and, unable to come up with a good answer, stopped playing forever.

Once one has learned ‘to see like a factory’, and the risks and benefits of this vision, Factorio is done as an artwork. The artwork has achieved its goal. You can keep playing, but now it is just entertainment, and a toolkit. (One is, however, now equipped to create one’s own artworks in the form of Factorio levels or challenges—like ‘avant-garde factories’ which deconstruct or subvert the ‘optimization esthetic’, which make no sense to outsiders who cannot even understand what makes a factory optimized.)

Similarly, Shadow of the Colossus is a work of art because—as one of the few good writings I have seen on it explains, “Losing Your Grip: Futility and Dramatic Necessity in Shadow of the Colossus”, Fortugno 2009_17ya—it expresses an esthetic of sorrow and loss, and the selfish, self-degrading nature of the protagonist’s quest to undo the death of his beloved. The necessity of accepting death and the need to let go is a familiar theme (eg. Orpheus), but most mediums can only show it; a video game like Shadow can embody it by making the player do the degrading to himself. (See also Papers, Please.)

In Shadow, the ‘monster slaying’ is only a small part of the world. Most of the world is unlocked: the player could just explore for hours and admire the scenery and the creatures. The player can watch the creatures he will slay, because they usually won’t attack him—he must choose to attack them. This is conveyed by the player’s own growing grief and sorrow over the beautiful landscapes he travels. (But just in case the point was lost on the player, the character art also grows paler and more demonic.) He seeks out and destroys each wonder of nature, becoming an ever paler shadow of himself…

Until in the end, he is sucked into an endless vortex. Elegantly, the player can avoid being sucked in by clinging as long as they can, using the skills they have mastered… but it changes nothing, beyond exhausting the player. Sooner or later, the player must—let go. And they do. The keenest sorrow is to recognize oneself as the cause of one’s misfortunes; but in this anagnorisis, there is hope of grace, if not redemption. It is too late for the character, but it is not too late for the player. Once the player has learned to let go, and sorrow over the character’s wasted life and devastation of Nature, they have learned to ‘see like Shadow’ and now understand the tragic but compassionate vision of Shadow of the Colossus.

Those who cannot or will not let themselves be changed by game art, cannot understand them as art. The concept of ‘scrub’ is an interesting example here: we might say that a scrub player is the philistine of games. They are too caught up in playing the game as they think it ‘should be’, to surrender themselves to the game as it is, no matter how often they lose. (Losing is the most powerful mechanism a game has for teaching the player, and if ignored, can silence the teacher’s voice—in some games, particularly Dark Souls-style games, the only voice the game has, because to speak too clearly would undo the player’s achievements.) They have many criticisms, and few observations: they can tell you what is bad and missing from a novel like Finnegans Wake, like proper spelling, but not what is good and present. And so they can never be transformed by a game.

They can appreciate isolated parts of the game, but this is a low level of ‘art as buffet’ appreciation. The virtue of those parts is that they will combine to more than the sum of their parts. If you admire the orchestral OST, or the art style, or memorable quotes, or a plot summary, this is all well and good, but it is like going to a cathedral and looking at it piece by piece, and admiring each one, but failing to recall that a cathedral is a place to do rituals, and is not a museum for passively admiring the art and craft.

This is the same failure mode as video game art criticism, in a way, in treating it as entertainment and just the sum of its parts. To tell me that the graphics are so many gigabytes of files, or the world has 30,000 rooms, or there is 300 hours of recorded NPC lines, or that it’s an arena shooter with microtransactions, is to tell me something as ultimately useless as “this movie cost $300 million to make”. Saying that this fantasy character killed this other character in a cutscene, in one alternate ending, is little better. Even talking about ‘fun’ is still missing the mark.

Game art criticism only works when it conveys the transformativeness on the player (ie. reviewer/critic). For example, this review of Grid Wars 2 manages to convey how it becomes a completely different space shooter game when one starts thinking of the random black holes as not merely environmental hazards, but as one’s real enemies, who feed on the ‘enemies’, and so it is not about shooting enemy spaceships but “black hole farming”:

Sometimes it’s as simple as putting a hole between you and a pack of enemies (such as the dumb blue diamonds, which just head straight for you regardless of what might be in the way). Sometimes (eg. with the green squares which run away from your shots) it’s the slightly more sophisticated method of putting the enemies between the hole and your fire, driving them into the hole as they flee from the bullet stream. Sometimes it’s desperately hovering at the edge of the black hole and shooting the enemies before they fall into it, because otherwise it’ll be overwhelmed and explode before you have the chance to blow it up and get the points. And sometimes, most terrifyingly, it’s sitting in the midst of a huge wave of deadly enemies on the edge of a whirling star of death and not shooting at all.

Even accidental unintended games demonstrate this: the participants in what you might call the ‘accidental ARG’ of the Paul McCartney coverup conspiracy theory found their consciousnesses transformed into the paranoid schizophrenic mindset, in which they interrogate every scrap of the Beatles as not just evidence that Paul McCartney had died & been secretly replaced, but as deliberate communications from the Beatles about the coverup. After playing the ‘Paul is Dead’ ARG long enough, they literally saw different things on album covers and heard different things when playing records the wrong way. This is something that cannot be communicated except by experiencing yourself, and a good writeup like “Who Buried Paul?” succeeds by teaching us “Paul-is-Dead 101” thinking so we can feel what it is like to see messages about this tragedy & coverup hidden in plain sight. (See also Foucault’s Pendulum and Unsong.)

Perhaps it’s no surprise that such criticism is so unsatisfactory. Epiphanies do not come like clockwork to all. Personal transformation cannot be scheduled reliably for a tight magazine deadline, nor can it easily be conveyed in words. They are premised on a false model of how such art works, and how it should be critiqued. And even when they hit the mark, they are still derivative secondary works—at best pale echoes of an actual transformation some player once had.

Given the commercial realities, perhaps this cannot be fixed, and we must accept that timely reviews are ultimately the “Cliff Notes” of games.

But with this in mind, we can focus on reviews for older games, which have had enough time for transformation to happen, by players who have just recently been transformed—they are still capable of explaining it to the un-transformed.

that’s a possible justification. I think one can probably come up with a relatively short list of major functions video game art criticism could usefully serve: (1) professional analysis on the technical level of ‘how did they do X? why does Y work? how did they avoid Z?’ (2) serve as a meditation master to help players be enlightened, for ones who are just not quite Getting It and need a good ‘Kwatz!’ or koan; (3) do their best to take the reader through the transformation, knowing that they can’t really, but if they point at the moon, perhaps the right reader will be intrigued enough by the snack-sized sampler platter to go and do the real thing.