Video Games Are Art
Elie and I decided that video games are getting so good that we needed to share the podium this time out. First, I give an overview of the emerging form of interactive digital art, and Elie follows with an in-depth look at the Shakespeare of video games: Sid Meier’s Civilization.
To Civ Review | Back to HomeThe Art Form Formerly Known As Video Games
It’s time we stopped calling them video games. With the increasing complexity of the narratives in a lot of so-called games, the only difference between them and movies is that one allows me some degree of influence over the outcome and the other only has space for me to sit there and drool in stupefied obedience. Even if having influence over the “video game” just means I’m pressing the X-button over and over again to cast the same spell at the end of a game like Final Fantasy VII, it is still influence (albeit influence of a slightly stupefied and droolish nature). I could stop pushing the button and watch everyone die if I wanted, and how many horror films have I wished I’d had that kind of control over? The bottom line is that these media objects are becoming far too complex to be reduced with the rather pejorative label ‘video game,’ which basically leaves the form to over-caffeinated sixteen-year-old boys. In The Sims, the point is to run a digital character’s life. Calling it a game is like calling living your life a game. Simulated? Digital? Sure. But a game? What is a game? We consider sports games, but what about managing a sports team, which some “video games” allow you to do? Is managing a team a game? How about running a movie studio, which you can do in The Movies? Is running a studio’s budget, hiring actors, putting alcoholic directors through rehab, and building sets a game? Or take a first person shooter (you know, one of the games where you run around and shoot everything that moves)—would you ever ask a soldier returning from a battle, “How was the game?” Not all forms of human behavior are considered games, and as the world of interactive digital media develops it would be wrong to continue to consider all digital simulated environments games. At some point, we’re going to have to come to terms with the idea that digital art is evolving and dragging humanity with it.
Now you’re thinking, “Okay, great. Another thing to get all PC about. I hate this column.” Except the point here really is not to get people to change how they refer to video games as much as it is to shift the whole paradigm of thought surrounding them. I know you won’t really be able to resist calling them video games, and for the rest of this column I will acquiesce and call them by their common name, too. But call them what you will, the point I am about to make is even bigger than some quibble over semantics.
This point is not really new. For starters, a growing number of people have been pushing for the acceptance of video games as a valid art form for some time. The likeness of popular video game star Lara Croft has been seen in multiple museums, having been used in a mosaic floor mural in Helsinki in 2000 and in a 2004 video installation at the Museum of Modern Art. And video games continue to influence other art, most notably in the case of movie crossovers. Big screen Hollywood adaptations of video games have all but entirely failed, but one has to wonder a bit: why are these games so much more fun than their non-interactive counterparts? The insinuation when a video game film adaptation fails is that games are shoddy art not worthy of the feature film treatment—but could it be that we are just done with Hollywood, and that Hollywood can only fail at the kind of powerful experiences games can provide? Certainly, in the case of a game like Final Fantasy VII (one of the greatest games I’ve ever played), the game is blameless. I have never been so involved in a story. Going in to a final battle with the game’s villain, I felt that my soul was on the line. It was epic in all the right ways, and Hollywood’s ideas on how to translate that great story into the kind of art that Hollywood is good at merely exposes (to my mind) the artistic bankruptcy of the film business.
It is actually very appropriate to compare these two art forms. Video games are now almost exactly where movies were in the late twenties and early thirties. Until cultural giants like Henri Langlois, Henry Langdon, and Iris Barry showed up to effectively reshape critical attitudes toward film such that they were seen as an expressive, culturally significant art form, films were seen as entirely disposable commodities. The materials in the film stock itself were seen as more valuable to the studios than any alleged artistic content. Mary Pickford, that old starlet of the silver screen, did her share of melting down old films to salvage the silver. Until a core group of early film archivists started petitioning for the preservation of films as artifacts of cultural heritage, films were just a commercial commodity.
Since then, the self importance of Hollywood has bloomed (there’s nothing quite so good for the ego as being told that your schlock is of high social significance), but video games have yet to find their champions. Conventional wisdom holds that video games are worthless because they are created to make money. As an art form then, they are limited by the greed of the industry. One of the greatest obstacles to codifying video games as a valid art form is, of course, the video game business itself, which has little interest in changing its ways to become less commercial and more expressive. Except however convincing it is to say that video games are worthless tripe, created to pander to the basest of adolescent desires, I do not believe the game industry will last very long if it stays wedded to this narrow outlook. More to the point, I believe the industry could make even more money were it to address humanity in a more sincere way and escape its crippling sexism. A broader audience is a bigger audience, pure and simple.
Not that I think there is anything wrong with a little pandering to some base, adolescent desires. Such pandering can be art, too, if it is good enough. The Grand Theft Auto series proves this point. Oversold as an anarchic, immoral playpen for depraved souls who just want to beat prostitutes to death, Grand Theft Auto provides the player with such a degree of freedom that it is quickly understandable how addictive such a game could be. The series also has great style, and the writing of the radio announcements is pleasantly witty. If we can call Scarface art, we can call Grand Theft Auto: Vice City art.
Whether you are playing a drug lord in Grand Theft Auto or choosing your fate in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic—sort of the Grand Theft Auto of the Star Wars game series, and such a good game that it can satisfy diehard fans yearning for more of the old school kind of Star Wars joy that the film prequels so lacked—in these games, you are actively participating in a drama in which you make the choices. The drama is your drama. The potential to this form is incredible. Not only can video game designers craft excellent graphics, build up unforgettable atmosphere, and push your character through some truly epic stories—but you can leave room for the personal choices of the player. The effect is that the art and the artist become tied together in such an intimate way that art itself is transcended. It is no longer a question of whether art imitates life or life imitates art but rather a question of what is life?
Which brings me to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Notoriously immersive, these games involve many people at work in the same virtual environment, creating characters and digital lives for those characters. I am not about to start criticizing anyone’s infatuation with such a digital dreamland; I completely understand it. In fact, it is why I stay so far away from them. I am terrified by how much I know I would love it. The point I want to make here, however, is that often people will misbehave in such a world and think that it is okay because it is, don’t you know, “just a game.” Well, at what point do we have to pack it up with respect to such a dismissal and say that just because you are acting through a digital representative (your avatar) you are not absolved from all sins? I think morals do play a part—or at least should play a part—in online environments, simply because of how much the state of an avatar matters to the person controlling it. The avatar and the human directing it are linked, and in this way, video “games” are really just expanding the realm of human interaction. Digital or not, what you do to someone else is still governed by the laws of right and wrong.
Video games are becoming increasingly complex. As they do, we have to shed our misguided preconceptions about them and look at how they can enable us to live in ways we have not yet dreamed. We can become anyone or anything, do whatever we please, and live lives that span thousands of years as we guide entire civilizations to their ruin or to their glory. Video games can become more than games, more than art, more than human—and in so doing show us so much more about who we are than we ever seem to want to give them credit for.
Back to Top | Back to HomeCivilization Stands the
Test of Time
Test of Time
I remember the first time I really got the crap beaten out of me by more than one person. I remember every detail of the day I lost my virginity. I can still feel the opposing linebacker’s helmet making direct contact with my left fibula and the helmet winning. I’ll never forget the first time I met my wife. These are the days that will flash before my eyes as my liver finally capitulates to the undefeated Jack Daniels in the battle for life. Alongside such traditional memories, when the end is near I will think back on everything that led up to me playing Sid Meier’s Civilization for the first time.
For the uninitiated, most people would describe Civilization as a turned-based strategy video game, epic in scope and addictive in playability. You start with one unit on a darkened map and from there you must build cities, research technologies, and generally explore and conquer a world populated by other civilizations attempting to do the same thing. The foregoing description however is a poor translation of an indescribable experience. Calling Civilization a particular kind of video game is like calling an Uzi “not unlike a long ranged bow that can harm at a distance and fire rapidly.” Civilization is a test of intelligence and skill and decision making ability that happens to require a personal computer. I would gladly give up my partisan leanings and simply vote for the candidate who won a best of five set of Civilization games regardless of their party platform. If you can beat another worthy human and the Deity level AI consistently in Civ, then you are more than qualified to run this nation.
The engine that drives Civ is decision making. Other games quickly devolve into either pixilated twitching (see monster, shoot monster, get bigger gun, lather, wash, repeat) or can be strategically and statistically exploited for an optimum winning percentage. Take the latest “gaming” craze, poker. After you become skilled enough to understand your statistical chance of winning and pot odds, poker becomes almost entirely dependant on luck. 2003 World Series of poker novice turned champion Chris Moneymaker would have been crushed in a tournament where skill was the guiding factor. Even the ancient game of chess, with its endless stratagems, pales in comparison to the possibilities inherent in a game of Civ. Imagine a chess board with 7 players, where your knights became useless halfway through the game and your pawns revolted against your rule, and you would still have an inferior strategic experience. On top of all of this goodness, Civilization is the first game that can reasonable claim to be infinitely replayable. Every time you load up a new game the very map changes. That means that a strategy that led you to victory on a Pangaea style Earth abundant in coal will be rendered absolutely useless on an archipelago where no land mass can support more than two cities and the only reliable source of horses is next to your rival’s capital city. Nothing works every time against the Civ AI … and I won’t even start on what happens when you go online and compete against several human opponents.
I could write several pages on the game mechanics, but that would rob the experience of its unimaginable scope and depth. When you add all of its component parts together Civilization becomes ... emotional. I can not explain how it does this; I can only attest to the fact that it does. You become emotionally invested in your cities, your people, your jungle rainforest that defines your southern border. When stronger rivals threaten you, you actually become scared. When an ally turns to attack you, you feel betrayed. When one of your precious cities falls into the enemy hands … it’s as close as most people are ever going to get to homicidal rage. The other half of Quadlings and I once played a game where, in a desperate attempt to get back into a game I was losing, I used nuclear weapons against his capital. We didn’t talk for a week and I feared non-virtual retribution. Civilization is a well written movie where you are the main character. Sometimes it’s a comedy, sometimes it’s a tragedy--at all times it is an experience that is personally happening to you.
That juncture of a personal experience whose uncertain outcome is wholly determined by your own choices is where Civilization transcends “computer gaming” and elevates itself into a fully functional alternate reality. In the real world something like fascism is a despicable form of totalitarian and oppressive government. In the world created by Sid Meier, fascism is a viable choice when your people fear that the rest of the world is passing them by, chafe under the increasing encroachment of their neighbors, yet are incapable of protecting their traditional borders with a scientifically elite defense force and expert diplomacy. In the newest version of the franchise (Civ IV) slavery is such an effective strategy for building up your infrastructure and wealth that I routinely fight against my emancipated neighbors just to keep their silly ideas of liberty from infecting my people. No history book (and I say this an a person who all but minored in history in college) can teach you what must have been going through the minds of Stalin or Jefferson Davis like a Civilization game where you find yourself struggling for power and the respect of your neighbors. I never try to act like Napoleon would act; I always try to act like I would act, and sometimes I find myself in Napoleon’s situation. Often I am shocked at how similar my resolution is to the historical counterpart. As many great men have learned: “Never start a land war in Asia.” Never.
I once played a game where I re-took a former city of mine that had fallen into enemy hands during a long war. By the time I re-captured the city, the war was all but over and I was going to win, yet reflexively I burnt the city to the ground and danced a tarantella over the smoldering ashes, as I was both angered that it had cost so many lives to take back and “wanted to send a message” to other would-be rebels. Not that the game engine recognizes the kind of “message” I was trying to send, but I did it anyway because--well, it was mine, and I could do what I wanted. That was the day I learned that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Two years later I still consider that to be the most purely vindictive thing I have ever done in my life.
An experience that is all about decisions and consequences and alternate realities is bound to extract some price. The game is described by every player who has ever played it as “addictive.” That word does not nearly encapsulate the coup d’etat that this game pulls on your higher mental functions. When I first starting playing Civilization II back in 1997 I would purposefully load up the game when I was hungry, because I knew that within a few minutes I would forget that I needed food and thereby save my meager supplies of it. I’ve never stop playing because I am sleepy; I only look at the rising sun and rationalize that I can better serve my people if I got some rest before plunging them into a foreign war. An addiction is something that chemically alters your physiology so that you physically need the chosen drug. Civilization is more like a “possession”--an outside force that overpowers your sense of self awareness and enslaves your mind to the game’s dictation.
The game is so overpowering that I have a plurality of friends who are quite literally afraid of it, as a monk both loves and fears God. Tetris was addictive. Civilization is life-altering. I’ve listened to people explain without exaggeration how cocaine is more safe for the mind the Civilization. I scoff at these side effects, but I am not currently employed so, well, there’s that.
Even if you are the kind of person who thinks “games” are inherently foolish and/or cultish, there is an important social reason that a thing like Civilization should be praised. In a world that is rapidly being reduced down towards the least common denominator; where mediocrities rule and thinking is viewed as an elitist trait, Civilization refuses to cower to majoritarian tyranny. The beauty of Civilization is its complication, and at every opportunity the developers make the game more complicated rather than less so. It is a game about decisions and consequences in a world where people increasingly allow others to make decisions for them and then try to avoid the fallout. Any Civ player knows that just because you are technologically superior to your opponent, you don’t just send the bare minimum of troops into their territory with no clear goals or an exit strategy. A leader who would do such a thing is severely punished in the Civ world. We can only hope that in this case, life really does imitate art.
Every person who is over the age of 25 who played a video game has dealt with parental and societal forces that view the “hobby” as something fit for silly children. I recently told my mother that I was eagerly awaiting the PlayStation 3 this November and she said, in complete seriousness, “I can’t believe you still haven’t grown out of it.” I won’t even begin to describe the various lengths I at one point went through to hide video gaming from members of the opposite sex. Out of this general disrespect, Civilization stands as the clarion banner for all that is good and right with the video game world. It is both the manifestation of the kind of intellectual challenges that few other experiences can provide. It, not the Internet, is the realization of just what a computer can do for your mind. It is the justification for every child who ever sat down to play and Atari 2600 instead of going outside to play with “action dolls.” Civilization is my line in the sand; you can make fun of my Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, you can shake your head at my Madden 2006 football team playing out its 2027 season, but you can not, you will not tell me that Civilization is a waste of my time. When I am 40 I might have a job, I might have a kid, and when I try to explain to my little black child how a people could ever enslave another people, I will load up a Civilization XI scenario, and I will show him that given the right balance of time and pressure, he too would gladly destroy an entire race if it kept him alive for one … more … turn.
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