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Earlier this month, the Museum of Modern Art debuted a new exhibition, “Applied Design,” which features the 14 video games recently acquired for a new branch of the museum's permanent collection. That the same hallowed halls reserved for Picasso now also displayed Pac-Man sparked yet another round of a now familiar debate: Are video games art?
Whatever the answer, whatever the position, the debate revolved around the same set of ethereal arguments that are called to earth whenever art is being discussed. Supporters of MoMA’s canonization of digital entertainment pointed out that video games, like all great art, expand our horizons; opponents argued that lacking a single creator, and being primarily playthings, video games fall short of pure art’s Olympian standards.
It's a fascinating debate, but the answer to the above question is, put bluntly, "no." Video games aren’t art because they are, quite thoroughly, something else: code.
To understand the distinction, consider Pac-Man, which was at the heart of one of the most important—and most unheralded—lawsuits in the history of the medium. In 1982, with the Pac-Man craze peaking, an aspiring company named Artic International released its own series of video arcade games featuring more or less the same maze, the same pastel-hued ghosts, and the same ravenous big-mouthed circle. The color pattern was slightly different than the original, and the game’s name was tweaked—it was called Puckman—but it was clearly a knock-off.1 Midway, Pac-Man’s American manufacturer and distributor, sued.
Artic’s defense was artful. According to Title 17 of the United States Code, they argued, copyright protection applied to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” Unlike a page, which is a repository for printed words, or a film strip, which permanently stores images, the computer chips that made Pac-Man run held nothing fixed; like all code, they were merely a set of instructions that, when followed, allowed the machine to conjure the famous character and his world. As such, Artic argued, video games did not meet the requirement for fixation. The company even cited a congressional report from the mid-1970s, arguing that “the definition of ‘fixation’ would exclude from the concept purely evanescent or transient reproductions, such as those … captured momentarily in the ‘memory’ of a computer.” The judge, however, was unconvinced. Video games, he ruled, may be a set of instructions, but they’re a very consistent set of instructions—Pac-Man looked exactly the same every time the machine was turned on. Artic was forced to cease production and pay damages.
Puckman lost the battle, but it ended up winning the war. Immediately after the case was decided, the U.S. Copyright Office announced that it was changing its approach to video games: Rather than allow game producers to register the images and sounds that appear on the screen as “audiovisual work” and the code itself as “literary work,” they would now require applicants to choose between the two.
Most game producers chose to protect the way their games looked and sounded and felt, their iconic characters and memorable landscapes. This is unsurprising—it’s Mario and Link and Master Chief we love, not the algorithms that govern their movements. But there’s more to this strategy: Game producers quickly realized that unlike art, which is distinct and unique and exists for its own aesthetic purposes, code is practical and interchangeable and exists merely as a tool to make something work. Trying to copyright code, then, was a lot like trying to copyright a hammer—even if you succeeded in protecting one particular design, it still wouldn’t stop others from constructing very similar methods of banging nails into walls.
With code largely unprotected, designers are not above the occasional bout of copying and pasting. Take a look, for example, at Crush the Castle, originally released in April 2009. You probably haven’t heard of it, but you’ve almost certainly seen or played a nearly identical game that came out eight months later, used the same general premise—catapulting objects onto stacked structures—but exchanged the warring knights for angry birds.
This isn’t theft. It’s how games work. Even though they were algorithmic twins, the two games couldn’t have felt any more different: One was cool and steely and evoked the raw conflict of medieval times, and the other had those villainous green pigs and enough charm to become instantly iconic.
Which brings us back to the argument about video games as art. You could argue that Angry Birds succeeded where Crush the Castle fizzled because the former was more artfully done. But that would be only half true, as the game itself—specifically the playing experience, of swiping fingers to flick objects across the screen—is, for all intents and purposes, the same game. With art, borrowing and citing and paraphrasing images and themes and ideas is commonplace; it’s how the craft is practiced. But a game incorporating another game’s code isn’t like Duchamp incorporating the Mona Lisa in his work. That’s because a few lines of code aren’t an artistic statement, but rather an action-oriented script that performs a specific set of functions. And there are only so many functions computers know how to do: While art is bound only by its creator’s imagination, code is bound by the limitations, more numerous than you’d imagine, of computer comprehension. Code can’t, like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, abandon logic and decide to imitate the sounds of nature instead. It can never be poetry, just a series of if/then statements. Code has more in common with the hinges that connect the museum’s doors to their frames than it does with Nude Descending a Staircase.
This divide between code and image, between the algorithms responsible for the experience of play and the pixels representing its visual manifestation, is what makes games so complicated and compelling. MoMA, however, has chosen to largely ignore this question: A number of the games displayed in its exhibition are merely loops of video footage, allowing visitors to watch, as the museum put it, “guided tours of these alternate worlds,” but not to play the games themselves.
The question, then, is not whether video games are art, but whether whatever is currently gracing MoMA’s walls could even be called video games. Anyone who has ever been truly transformed by a game—that is, anyone who realizes that games, unlike paintings or movies or books, are made not to be observed but to be actively played, repeatedly and over long stretches of time—knows that the answer is no.
11 comments
So, a game's rules can't be art? Forget the digital aspect and forget the copyright laws, which strike me as beside the point. The question is whether it belongs in an art museum, a determination not bound, I would say, by the thing's status as "code" (a digital photograph is just ones and zeroes) nor by its legal status for copyright purposes. A human being created the code. Just think of it as rules -- the way the game functions -- which, under a broad understanding of "art," I think could qualify. In addition to a game's aesthetic manifestation -- an antique chess set could certainly be museum-worthy -- the game itself may strike one as beautiful and elegant or some other descriptor befitting a work of art. Does it make sense to refer to "the art" of game design? Sure it does. Sometimes, I could imagine, the game's functioning and its aesthetic sensibility will merge to generate an appreciation that is deeper than, on the one hand, the game's prettiness, or, on the other, the game's pleasing operation -- similar to one's artistic appreciation of other functional things -- a building, a car, a computer. The art of architecture or industrial design, for example, goes beyond the aesthetic attractiveness of the item to its functional attractiveness. A great building will be great at both, and seem to be expressing both values, both of which may be said to be artistic, at once. What's more, that antique physical game is museum-worthy as a cultural artifact, and video games are modern cultural artifacts. Where do video game reviews go? In the arts section. Are they not to be admitted -- on narrow and pointless categorical grounds -- to art museums? Are they to be confined, instead, to, oh, I don't know, video game museums? Art is all around us. It's not outside MoMA's mission to judiciously pick some of those items for special consideration as art. The real question, to my mind, isn't whether the thing is art. A lot could qualify, and I think we do well to have a wide-open door on that issue. The real question is whether it's *good* art, or, like most movies or cars or really any category of artwork, is it mundane, lame, deflating? Since I know nothing about video games and haven't seen this installation, I don't feel qualified to judge. But I wouldn't say it's automatically out of bounds because it's a game with rules.
- JakeH
March 13, 2013 at 1:39am
Sorry, I don't understand why a video game's programming code makes it ineligible for a classification as "art." Game designers organize all those ones and zeroes and algorithms with the purpose of ultimately crafting a specific experience for a player. It's their paint brush. When you play video games like Pac Man (not to mention the more advanced games of recent years), you're enjoying the colorful shapes on screen, and identifying with the game's "protagonist" in hope that you might "win." How's that different from film, which has long been deemed an art form? It's a metaphor of sorts for life. Games elicit many of the same emotional responses as other works of art--and demand equal craftsmanship from designers, artists, programmers, and even musicians. But most importantly, your argument about copyrights and the plagiarism of programming code is laughable within the context of art history. Do you realize how many artists have stolen from other artists? Look no further than Marcel Duchamp's "L.H.O.O.Q." (1919) which copies and lampoons the Mona Lisa. Andy Warhol became famous for stealing the artwork of brand-name logos. Jean-Michel Basquiat lifted quotes and symbols from all kinds of places. And the number of painters who riffed on other painters' techniques over the years is staggering. By the way, I haven't even mentioned musicians' long and storied history of theft. Countless songwriters have pilfered lyrics from blues songs, and rappers have been swiping "samples" from other songs since the eighties. Guitarists and horn players steal licks from one another. That's the way it is. However, I agree that MOMA should let people play the actual games--as that is how they were intended to be experienced. I can't argue with you there. It's not that different from Marina Abramović sharing intimate stares with museum visitors. But the blanket claim that video games are not art is just wrong.
- maxhencke
March 13, 2013 at 9:38am
3, 13, 13, 3:35 pm, est. // I'm joining this discussion shyly not knowing enough about any of it: what's art, video games, code, algorithms, other things. I ask myself whether L.L.'s argument tends to two inconsistent directions. One line of it is that video games aren't art because, "bluntly," his word, video games aren't art because their foundation is code. The other line, pulling a different way, is his concluding thought: he, I assume L.L. is a he, says the question *isn't if video games are art but whether what's on display is a game and he says it's not because games are to be played not observed and what's on display is to be observed. An implication I take from this line of reasoning is that if it's to be observed it may be art. if that's a justifiable implication then it clearly cuts against the first line of argument. If it's not a justifiable implication, then isn't the concluding paragraph, with its emphasis on what the QUESTION is, otiose?/// All objects, video games too, can be artful. And some objects when abstracted from functionality can be art. So that drives us back to L.L.'s first line of argument: video games aren't art because they're "quite thoroughly, something else: code." Here particularly my insufficient grounding in the constituents of the issue kicks in. if photography, as distinct from Jake's example of digital photography, can collapse the difference between the machinery of its process and the emerging image and count as art, why can't video games collapse the the difference between code, the machinery of its process, and the emerging game? ///But then a question arises in my mind that the piece doesn't make clear. What exactly is on display concerning the video games: is it a singular manifestation of the game, the images and patterns of the game, frozen in instantiation, as if awaiting the players? I'd think it's that. If so, then I'd think that that instant is precisely the abstraction of the functional into (an attempt at) art. And I see no reason, going back to Du Champ at that, why this abstraction of a video game necessarily isn't art. /// There's a difference between the video games so displayed as art and conceptual art, the former not suggesting, I don't think an idea beyond itself, as its reason for being, the latter's art precisely residing in the idea the artist intends his composition of materials gives rise to. So then, questioning the displayed video games as art, we might apply, a little arbitrarily, criteria derived from traditional understandings of art: 1. agency in the sense of the application of creative skill and imagination so to evoke, 2. aesthetic pleasure--i.e. evokes an aesthetic experience, marked by, typically, 3. appreciation of beauty and the stirring of emotion. Applying them it seems indubitable that the first criterion is satisfied, and that code as a ground of the game is impertinent. The second criterion has the potential to be satisfied in any particular instance of any game.///Wouldn’t that drive us to the conclusion Jake reaches, that we’re enriched by a broad understanding of what can comprise art, as opposed something or a process being artful, and the question then becomes, I’d argue too, as Ellington said of music, is it good or bad art.
- basman
March 13, 2013 at 3:33pm
I'm not sure the author grasps how modern games and user interfaces are designed. There are roomfuls of artists. They are creating in 2D and 3D programs pieces art that are called, coldly, assets. The assets are then used by coders to create the motion and transitions that you see. It wouldn't surprise anyone to see a canvas painted a single color in an art gallery. Or perhaps a single color with some contrasting colors flicked across it. How does that different from the gradient wash a modern UI developer would create to highlight the edges of a photo you just flicked? It doesn't. The problem with art museums to date is they've let some really questionable stuff in. Stuff that didn't require much skill, but instead might stand on the merits of "well, nobody thought of this before". And since that is currently what defines modern art, then you pretty much gotta let the game artists in too. Used to be art was defined as something that took incredible skill. Even if I wanted to replicate and it were sitting next to me, it I couldn't because I was lacking skill. But at some point, every unemployed 20 something declared themselves an artist in spite of their work requiring no skill. The "art" was the fact that perhaps I'd not seen a particular set of colors arranged in a particular way. No more, no less.
- seattleeng
March 13, 2013 at 3:41pm
There's a lot in this essay that seems questionable, if not almost moronic.
- mcmahon.an
March 13, 2013 at 5:20pm
"That’s because a few lines of code aren’t an artistic statement, but rather an action-oriented script that performs a specific set of functions. " Yes, and a painting is really just a collection of oil or polymer on canvas -- that's not an artistic statement. And a novel is just some ink on paper (or -- egads! -- code in a computer). And music is just vibration. And none of these (supposed!) artforms will ever "transcend" those basic limitations, and thus they are not art. This is some pretty shallow analysis.
- zuludown
March 13, 2013 at 8:42pm
So games are not art because they are a representation of something else? That seems to be a misreading of video games and of art. All art is, by its nature, representational. A Monet is not actually a field of haystacks. In fact, it looks very little like a field of haystacks. To diminish games to merely their constituent elements is to completely ignore what games in the same way that to diminish sculpture to smoothed stone would be. Video games use code to represent something other than what it is on a surface level. An excellent point is made about what counts as a video game. Yes, what is on display at MoMA is a representation of a video game. What they have done is enshrine a representation to a representation. But that is a problem of curatorial practice, not of video games.
- DHShimomura
March 14, 2013 at 4:13pm
Well, it seems unanimous. We ain't buying it! Not to be a spoilsport, but sometimes the dictionary is poetic and philosophically apt. American Heritage (4th ed.) offers the following graceful entry on "art" (in the sense we're talking about): "1. The human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. 2a. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beauty in a graphic or plastic medium. b. The study of these activities. c. The product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group. 3. High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value. 4. A field or category of art, such as music, ballet, or literature. 5. A nonscientific branch of learning; one of the liberal arts." The rest goes on to talk about pure craft, e.g., the art of building or baking. The overarching concept, captured in definition 1, is that of uniquely human effort and production in the observance, celebration, taming, or inspired fantasy of the natural world. (An animal isn't art. A cave painting of an animal is. A cave painting of an animal with two heads is even better.) In opening with this somewhat obscure sense of "art," the dictionary reminds us what this whole "art" stuff is all about -- it's about people. Art is what makes human human, neither god (supposed creator and ruler of nature) nor mere animal (constitutionally indifferent to it). No wonder another name for the arts is "the humanities." The rest of the quoted definition gets into the specifics when it comes to the museum debate. One word comes up repeatedly in those definitions: "beauty." In fact, I'd say that "human works of beauty" pretty well sums it up, and I'm loath to say that a video game can't qualify as one.
- JakeH
March 15, 2013 at 2:26am
Small correction to the above. Definition 2a should refer to the "production of the beautiful" rather than the "production of the beauty."
- JakeH
March 15, 2013 at 2:42am
After enjoying that definition of "art," I was almost afraid to look up "beauty," thinking it bound to disappoint. But no! "The quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality." I'm prepared to say at this point that American Heritage (4th ed.) is a true work of art.
- JakeH
March 15, 2013 at 2:49am
3,15,13, 5:54, est//// Not to cavil but I'd argue on first principles that the American Heritage (4th ed.) isn't a work of art, albeit, it seems from your sampling, a hell of a dictionary
- basman
March 15, 2013 at 5:57pm
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