The Thinker, The Creation of Adam, and Sonic the Hedgehog
Are video games art? by RS Davis
(libertarian)
Monday, October 6, 2008
At this year's Leipzig Games Convention in eastern Germany, some in attendance were in for a real shock when they encountered a game by Douglas Eric Stanley, called invaders! (at right), which is a modified version of Space Invaders that has the player fighting to stop the destruction of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
It featured politically-charged movie clips and shots of President George W Bush, which had the effect of adding what Leigh Alexander called "additional peripheral elements that let us know we had a nebulous political message' on our hands."
What's more, it was programmed to be unwinnable, which the Game Convention Web Site claimed created "an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy."
The story got back to New York very quickly, and The Daily News was prompt in getting reactions from families of 9-11 victims. Comments ranged from "It's very, very distasteful," to one woman calling Stanley a "sleazy entrepreneur."
It is doubtful that Stanley intended to profit from this venture, as the rights to Space Invaders is still held by the Taito Corporation, and they have vowed to use "all available options" to shut down the game.
They need not worry, though, because shortly after the controversy struck, Stanley shut down the game, apologizing for any "uncomfortable ambiguity."
Less willing to bend to public outcry was Danny LeDonne, who created in 2005 the game Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, which has players reenacting the Columbine Massacre as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, waking in the morning, getting together, planning and implementing their assault on the school.
The more students you kill, the better you do.
Critics called it a "sad and sick thing," but LeDonne defended himself, saying that "behind all the pixels is the fact that people really died, including two angry boys who were, at times, very thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent young men."
He asserted that it wasn’t meant to glorify school shootings, saying, "If you make it far enough into the game, you see very graphic photos of Eric and Dylan lying dead. I can't think of a more effective way to confront their actions and the consequences those actions had."
He even found support from an unlikely source – a victim of the Columbine shooting – who said that "it gets people talking about Columbine in a unique perspective…It shows a stark-contrast between fantasy and real life in an interesting way."
At the core of all this controversy is the fundamental question: Are video games art?
There’s certainly a positive case to be made. This ain’t your father’s Atari 2600.
Games like the Final Fantasy series have full-motion video (FMV) sequences that are stunning to behold in their beauty and cinematic in their framing and scope. The plots of these games have come a long way, as well, from the straightforward ladder climbing and barrel jumping of Mario to the complex twists and turns of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. The aggregation of all these elements, according to Nic Kelman, author of Video Game Art, is "producing something that has some kind of deeper experience. It transcends the form."
The lines between games and more traditional art forms have been blurred for some time now. The video game based on the cult film The Warriors, for example, spends more time on the events that lead up to the big enclave than it spends on the events that unfolded in the movie. The important arc that bridged the gap between the first and second Matrix films could only be experienced in the video game Enter the Matrix.
But if video games can transcend their form and be elevated to art, could they then also transcend art and simply fall into obscenity? Art isn’t necessarily meant to be pretty or reassuring. The first time people heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, they rioted in the street. Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi only lasted two riot-inducing performances before it was shut down.
Stanley said of his game that "it was never created to merely provoke controversy for controversy's sake." But what if it was? Doesn’t some great art provoke just to provoke? The punks of the 1970s often wore swastikas not to promote NAZIsm, but simply to offend, to take people out of their comfort zones. Georges Braque famously said, "Art is made to disturb. Science reassures."
There’s no doubt that invaders! and Super Columbine Massacre RPG! disturb, and it’s easy to give the benefit of the doubt because of their ambiguity. It’s a little harder when faced with a game like White Power Doom, which was a patch created by neo-NAZIs that changed the normal monsters in Doom into racist stereotypes to hunt and kill.
Is that art? For political purposes, it must be protected as such. Art is subjective, and the viewer of that art is the final arbiter of its merit. To centralize that power into one person’s point of view is quite obviously going to limit people’s access to different types of art and controversial ideas, not to mention run roughshod over the First Amendment in the process.
But to each individual? It would seem that’s a value judgment each person must make for themselves. Thus is the nature of art, and the reason the question "What is art?" can never be fully answered.
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The views expressed
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You do realize that there was no mention of The Thinker, the creation of Adam, or Sonic the Hedgehog in your whole, pathetic article, don't you? Aren't our headlines supposed to indicate something about the content of our articles?
Misleading, and veeeeery disappointing. Guess you just got lost in all the other important stuff you were trying to say, huh?
I think I'm making a point that you need to be aware of. The only reason I decided to read your article was because you mentioned Sonic the Hedgehog, an old fav' of mine. Was that ever misleading advertising. I'll be cautious next time. You'll probably write something about Barenaked Ladies, and it won't be about either.
So you are teasing? Is there some backstory I should know about? Were you slammed over a misleading title? Cause an article about Barenaked Ladies that didn't mention ladies or nudity wouldn't be misleading, either, as there is a band.
Just in case you aren't teasing, the point of the title was to juxtapose two well-known pieces of art with a video game title.
No, I don't think he's teasing. He thought he was going to read an article about Sonic the Hedgehog, one of his favorite games. Your article didn't have anything to do with that specific game, so he was disappointed. He feels that he was misled. I suppose it would have been better had the title included "Final Fantasy" rather than "Sonic the Hedgehog", since you do include that game as an example.
Then again, I suppose he'd still be complaining about "The Thinker" and "The Creation of Adam". Eh. Can't please everybody.
If the worst thing people can say about your article is that they don't like your title, you're probably in good shape anyway.
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