This is modified from something I wrote to some good friends of mine. Thoughts on what I want out of the work that I do.
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Museums are interesting things, though. There are good ones, and bad ones. The National Gallery in London? Excellent. Gives you a sense of history, and most importantly, context. Explanations describe this particularly work’s place in history, you get to appreciate its immediate aesthetic value, and the pieces it’s placed next to are often also works by the artist, or works that had some influence on that particular piece, or the movement it belonged to. The Louvre? Excellent. The Tate Modern? Not so much. Not because it was a “modern art” museum, but rather, because the way the exhibits were set up was extremely poor – each piece had no context, and in modern art, fundamentally, context is such a huge portion of *why* something works, or doesn’t work, that without the context, a Pollock is reduced simply to squiggles of paint on a canvas.
The interesting thing about being immersed in thousands of years of art, and finally *getting it* – seeing the progression over time, seeing the phases of certain styles, schools of thought, or even perceptions of what art *was* opened my eyes. I’ve been so concentrated on modern media, such as film and comics, that it’s like comparing the history of say, Boston, as a city, to Rome. Seeing the development of painting over six hundred years, or seeing how the Egyptians and Romans told stories through sculpture, or saw what’s lasted through the ages, and what still provokes an emotional or aesthetic response, even thousands of years later… it changed how I think about art – about expression, and what I *want* out of my career – hell, out of my *life*.
A friend of mine died last year – had an Esctasy-induced heart attack. Stupid waste of a life. But though Kevin (Frostybyte) had been a “hacker” when I knew him, in the years after college, he’d grown into an artist. He created these astonishing LED sculptures that were just … amazing – an amazing combination of engineering and artistic expression. After he died, some of his more current friends had posted various video clips of him, or photos of the things he had made.
I don’t remember the exact phrase that he used in one of the interviews someone had recorded with him, but when asked why he did what he did, he said something to the effect that people don’t look around enough, and appreciate the world around him. The things he made were bright. Blindingly so. His goal was essentially to create things where the light was so bright as to be disorienting – to force the viewer to reassess where they were – to look around, and notice the world around them.
I thought to myself, “I knew Kevin – I knew he was smart. When did he get wise?”
It’s that sort of wisdom – that sort of drive, or vision, or passion that changes the world. Changes how people perceive things, how they understand the world around them. Will Wright does that through games. Kevin did that through his art. Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, David, Da Vinci – they all did this in their time.
I work in games at a fortuitous time. The medium is in great flux, and fundamentally, there have been very few pieces of videogames as “art.” Rez qualifies, I would say. It’s an interactive experience that evokes such a sense of … immersive reaction. It’s not about a story, characters, or anything that one would associate with traditional narrative – instead, it creates a feeling, through the interactivity, that I find almost completely unique to games. Ico, though more character oriented, is like staring at an older painting, and seeing the interplay and symbolism in how the characters are portrayed – the interactivity in Ico is like learning to understand the characters in a great painting through observation.
So, there are a few examples where games manage to evoke something totally unique – but for the most part, people haven’t really figured out that games are really *art*. Like, ART. Not just that they are artistic, or contain artistic qualities. The medium is like a canvas – like a camera, or a paintbrush – the medium is a tool that can convey something to the viewer – but we have a tool that has more potential than any medium has come before, because the potential is there to engage the user in a way that no previous medium ever has.
Do I think I’m the person who’s going to upend the genre? Who will really be a Picasso of our time?
It would be extraordinarily arrogant of me to say so.
But at the same time, I’m not willing to close that door. I’m not willing to settle for less.
I think this is fantastic.
I really don’t know what else to say, but since I was an English major, let me express myself by plagiarizing someone else’s work:
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
As You Like It, by William “Tex” Shakespeare
And like staring at older paintings, that took a good deal of time to understand, but I think I get what you’re saying. And so yeah, I’m glad what I got out of the toad was the jewel, and not a wart.
Sheesh. Dude works on Seaman and thinks ALL games are going to be world-changing.
I’ve never been inside the Tate Modern, but if I understand your complaint correctly — the pieces were organized by theme instead of chronologically — then doesn’t that kind of go against the notion of “games as art?”
One of the problems I’ve got with self-consciously “modern” art is that it’s TOO dependent on context. A lot of pieces that are universally considered “significant” are that way not because of their inherent value, but because the artist was the first person to think of doing it. That kind of novelty wears off quickly, though.
I like the idea better of just presenting a bunch of pieces that are different interpretations of the same theme. It separates the pieces that really communicate from the ones that are only in a museum because people say it should be in a museum.
And it encourages the thinking that something isn’t good just because it’s good “for a game” or funny “for a game” or “better than most comic books” or televison “as good as a movie.” It’s just effective or ineffective, and the medium is irrelevant.
So what is that — post-modernism? Post-post-modernism? I know there’s some fancy-pants term for it, but I dropped out of art school.
I agree about the issue that modern art is all about context, and as such, most displays of modern art are quite inaccessible, because it is difficult to distinguish what makes a piece interesting, versus what makes it look like a three-year old could have made it.
One of the things that the recent “total immersion in art” helped me understand was that in the vastly larger scale, I found that context quite interesting. In part, because it fits in historically. Basically, you’d walk through the Louvre, and see someone who completely upended the structure and methods of their time. Then a hundred years later, you’d see it happen again.
Then, in more modern times, once photorealism was pretty much “maxed out,” all these other questions started being asked, and these sorts of changes just started multiplying and multiplying, faster and faster. I’m not even sure to what end, really – it’s almost as if modern art has exploded “art” into “everything.”
But the point being, I think that the modern art mentality can apply to games, now, where we can start asking questions about what it means to be a game, or really radically push the boundaries of what game is. It’s as though we now have enough work to start plying the medium in different ways.
And I don’t mean different ways, like, Rez is different than Mario. I mean different ways in the sense that I want a game whose purpose is to challenge how I feel about shooting one person, much less a thousand.
I totally agree that the context is interesting. I guess I just think that photo-realism isn’t the only thing that’s “maxed-out.” The idea of a piece of art having value solely (or even mostly) because it challenges what art is “supposed” to be like — that should’ve gotten exhausted by the end of the 1930s.
I guess it bugs me because it promotes lazy thinking but disguises it as being iconoclastic or novel. I think of it as the “Fritz the Cat” (the movie) mentality — it’s a terrible movie, ineptly done on every level, but still it makes all the “important movie” lists. Not on its own merits, but because it was unlike the Disney norm.
I’m not saying that art should stagnate, and people should throw out the idea of challenging the status quo; I just think (maybe naively) that the ideas of dada and surrealism and counter-culture are so ingrained by this point that most people already accept the idea that “different is good” on a subconscious level. So It’s difficult to get noticed at all unless you do something subversive or novel, and people can go back to concentrating on the basics of making something “good” instead of just making “different” their first goal.
And for your last point, I agree 100%. The best recent example I can think of for that is Shadow of the Colossus. The real art in that game wasn’t the way it looked, it was the way it put you in a morally ambiguous situation and forced you to play through it. You had this vague sense of uneasiness throughout, that you knew you were doing something “bad,” but you didn’t know exactly what and kept pushing through because of the game mechanic.