Kellee Santiago makes the point that video games are art in this TED talk:

Roger Ebert makes the counterpoint:

Video games can never be art

She begins by saying video games “already ARE art.” Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.” To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.

Kellee Santiago responds to Ebert here:

My Response To Roger Ebert, Video Game Skeptic

For the most part, his argument seems to wander through some extremely muddy waters of defining art. Although he even states, “But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one,” it doesn’t stop him from dedicating 50% of the entry to going back and forth on the subject. Ebert seems to lump “art,” “artistic,” and “artistically crafted” all into one big ball, which I think confuses any discussion on the subject.

And so on. The problem with art is that it is hard to define. The article How Art Works does take a stab at it.

Let me give you an example of the slipperiness of art. Let’s take a Formula 1 car. If you show a Formula 1 car to any HowStuffWorks-type person (any engineer, tinkerer, DIY sort), the car is a work of art. Everything about it is beautiful, elegant, pure. MOMA can even display a Formula 1 car because of this beauty. But if you show it to people who lack the engineering background and ability to appreciate the beauty, a Formula 1 car is a meaningless lump of metal and plastic. It might have no beauty at all – might even be repulsive.

What Ebert and Santiago seem to be missing is this duality. The fact is, many people can see video games as art, while many never will, and that’s just the way things are when it comes to art.

However, there is something about video games that video game players and promoters (like Santiago) seem to be missing. The fact is that many video games are problematic – in the sense that they are addictive time sinks, and therefore a waste of human potential. One of the best summaries I have seen of the problem embedded within video games can be found in this article:

Cultivated Play: Farmville

While this may sound like a relatively banal game, over seventy-three million people play Farmville.[7] Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day…

Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?

The author answers his question in this way: “The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations.”

This problem with video games may be one source of Ebert’s ire, and may also be the thing Santiago is missing. Video games can be addictive for a huge part of the population (especially children/teens) for some odd reasons, and that addiction is a problem. See also: You only get one life and Why are video games addictive?

One other thing should be mentioned while we are discussing video games (and related things like Omegle). There must be a way to turn the addictive qualities of video games into something good. For example, let’s imagine a different form of Farmville. When people play this new game, their actions are translated to robots that grow real food, and that real food is given for free to starving people. Or let’s imagine a game kids love on the Nintendo DS, and it teaches real history or chemistry facts. Kids addicted to these games radically outperform their peers on history or chemistry tests without even realizing it is happening. Or a game on the XBox 360 that adds value to the economy, so you get paid for playing it (perhaps in a Mechanical Turk sense, or in some other way).

In other words, people who play these games are spending billions of man hours on them. There must be some way to make those billions of hours useful and valuable.

[[[Jump to previous Point and Counterpoint: Has America become a socialist nation?]]]