Dark Souls from 2011 is special for a lot of reasons,
but one the most impressive things it does is how it constructs the past.
The way in which the player discovers the past of its world, Lordran,
is a striking metaphor for how historians work, our relationship to the past,
and what we have to do in order to keep it.
Today I'd like to put this into the context of a discussion I've seen blooming up again
around the tubes in the past weeks:
the question of whether games are art or not.
But instead of just further bloating the argument for games as art, I want to try adding something
new to the discussion.
You see, I could wax philosophical about Duchamp's urinal, Wittgenstein's or Immanuel Kant's
ideas on art and aesthetics, or try to define concepts—
but would that really have any potential impact?
Would that help?
I also wouldn't want to write a polemic against other voices around the internet arguing
for the inclusion of games, for reasons which will hopefully become clear.
Roger Ebert, on the other hand...well, on a map representing the art establishment he's here.
If anything, with the only caveat being that he is sadly no longer with us, he could be
brought down a peg or two.
It's certainly true that the argument against games as art is a semantic one, and consequently
its goal is exclusion.
So I'd like to start off with a thought from Ebert himself:
"Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?
… Do they require validation?"
Welcome to Ludocriticism.
This is Mini-Read, a series where we step back from the big picture,
and look at single elements from a game.
In Dark Souls, the past is not laid out before you as it is in so many other games with rich back stories.
Instead, you need to search for tiny scraps of the past—
scraps found in item descriptions, architecture, and environmental designs—
in order to create a full picture of just what has happened in its dystopian world.
It's a process of breaking up elements of myth, legend, and history and putting them
back together that took a communal effort from players to reach something close to a conclusion.
The process can be seen as a metaphor, or even analogy, to how the historian works.
The historian, too, needs to sift through fragments of the past together with a global
community to make some sense of those parts of our existence that aren't with us anymore.
Dark Souls requires a 50 hour long flourish of creative expression to represent so well
the tragedy of how much of the past always continues to be lost to posterity.
It's an astounding expression of the conditions of the human experience, and I can't imagine
any of our other mediums being able to represent it so competently.
But here's the thing: studying, or even appreciating, art is inherently demanding.
It requires interpretation, which is a skill you need to cultivate.
Jonathan Blow has spoken at length about his desire for games to speak to the human condition.
But I think they already do.
There are other examples that, albeit doing things differently from Dark Souls' construction of the past,
also speak to a condition of human existence.
Shadow of the Colossus can pretty easily be read as a parable of the environmental damage
humans cause: the world is cold and uncaring, populated only by these mysterious colossi
we're unable to communicate with.
And we—the players, humans—react by decimating the only other possible life-forms,
as if the cold and uncaring world is some great unfairness thrust upon us that entitles us
to not only not take care of that only world we have, but also destroy those we share it with.
That's definitely there if you want to see it, and know how to find it.
Then there's Journey, which can easily be read as a representation of the generality
of all human life-times.
You're a nondescript character in a culturally nondescript world.
You run into other non-descript characters controlled by other players—
sometimes you share only a moment of your respective journeys,
and sometimes you spend a good chunk of it traveling together.
You encounter mystery, hardship even, but also triumph, joy, and beauty,
before you make a final climb into oblivion.
That's there too, if you look for it.
Even a game like QWOP, which is absolutely absurd, can be viewed as a meditation on our
relationship to our own bodies:
are your limbs you, or are they separate?
Are they something in between, acting on your behalf but only insofar as some vague and
undefined feeling of distance allows them to.
All these things are there in all of these games, but only if you look for them and have
the ability to see them.
Only once gamers as community members grow old enough, and take themselves seriously enough
to actually have some interpretive skills and qualifications to know what to
look for and how to share their ideas with other members of the same community,
do these things travel outside of the games.
I think we're in that transition now.
Ebert's words from the start of this video become relevant in light of this,
and they betray both a privilege and a lack of compassion on the part of Ebert.
Why wouldn't we require validation?
Ebert seems to take for granted whatever grace made him—
—the son of an electrician from Illinois—
the first film critic to receive the first Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Isn't it true that the prize he received validated film lovers from around the world?
Isn't it true that it validated the medium as such?
In 2010, Ebert wrote a rebuttal to the criticism levied at his views on video games through
a critique of a Ted Talk arguing for games as art.
He concludes like this:
"I allow Santiago the last word...
[Oh, Roger, you're too generous!]
Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent,
I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art.
The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management.
I rest my case."
His wildly condescending tone aside, that's a damn good point.
But he fails to realize that capital is, and always has been, incredibly slow to include
marginal markets.
Making something with a marginal market in mind is risky, so most market actors require
a trailblazer to prove the profitability of said marginal market.
That just makes sense.
The industry is not what's going to validate games as art.
So what is?
It ultimately falls to the gaming community, because Ebert, and people like him,
have nothing to gain by actively including gamers in his world of art...except, you know, being a better
person than he is mandated to be.
My point is he's being rude by omission, and if he's so appreciative of art he could
maybe aspire to be a better fellow human, as art so often inspires us to be.
A more compassionate reaction would be to say "Wow, you find some existential meaning
in this seemingly meaningless thing?
That's wonderful, what are you seeing?"
Gamers are in a special place when it comes to the two strategies of exclusion and inclusion.
We still remember, as a culture, a time when our medium was connected to a
sense of stigma and shame.
So I present you now:
the Ludocriticism Guide to Validation From the Art Establishment™:
Step 1: Hang out in basements and hide your enjoyment of games from society...like a troll.
Step 2: Start demanding things from games.
Step 3: Allow games to demand something from you—interpretation—
and rise up to the occassion.
Step 4:
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit.
I think we're in between step two and step three at this point in time.
But I'd ask this: do you see Roger Ebert in this step-by-step guide?
Do you see the gaming industry?
I don't.
I see us.
And if I'd venture a guess as to what step four would consist of, it would be this:
help legitimizing the meaning others find in games.
Be it Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, QWOP, or any other game,
appreciate the meaning you and other people find in them.
Share it with others.
Shove it down their throats.
You'll probably find that you won't have to push very hard at all,
because below a certain age everybody plays games—
—whether you know about it or not, and whether they admit it or not.
Whatever grace has allowed us to be here in this historical moment that contains video games,
this is going to be our lives.
Sooner or later, they too will be lost to posterity.
Thanks so much for watching!
And thanks for the responses to the first episode of Mini-Read—
that obviously means a lot to me.
How do you feel about the artsy aspect of video games?
Can you just not shut up about your intense interest, or do you think Janet in accounting's
Candy Crush obsession doesn't qualify as a mutual interest?
Please remember to subscribe—but only if you picked the first option.
Also, remember to keep taking games way too seriously.
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