Ars Gratia Artis

Or art for art’s Sake. To answer the question that plagues video games namely whether or not they are an art on a par with plays or paintings you first need to answer the questions ‘What is art?’

You often hear people say, ‘you have to suffer for your art’ but why? Surely suffering for the purposes of entertainment is just suffering for the sake of suffering. It’s not like someone’s life depends on whether an opera is any good, just someone’s evening, so why all that effort? Does anybody like opera, does it make any sense? Who does ballet appeal to? What do they represent? Does anybody real act the way they do in plays or in movies? Do games represent real life or parody it, make a mockery of it? Does any of it matter?

 Actors and dancers are treated like performing chimps, for what? What is the meaning of art and why is it so important? The truth is there is no meaning of art, no definition that isn’t so convoluted and vague that not even the people describing it fully understand it. Is the importance of art dreamed up or is it real? Its possible art is like currency, or love purely important because of the importance placed upon, it has no real value on its own, just as money is just paper without people to spend it.

 The point I’m trying to make is that so much importance is put on what is and isn’t art, that the meaning of art is completely lost and instead it just becomes an impossible standard attainable only by those art forms that defame and kill off all the others.

 “like theologians of various trends exclude and destroy each other… In poetry, the old romantics deny the Parnassians and decadents; the Parnassians deny the romantics and the decadents; the decadents deny all their predecessors and the symbolists; the symbolists deny all their predecessors and les mages, while les mages simply deny all their predecessors; in the novel, naturalists, psychologists and naturists deny each other. And it’s the same in drama, painting and music”

 Tolstoy (1828-1910)

 Art is like a virus, it attacks and consumes all its rivals until it becomes the highest form of art and anything else is just swept away. Art is territorial like an animal and that’s why it refuses to acknowledge video games as an art, just like it refused to acknowledge films before it and Jazz before that and even plays because it fears for its own survival.  Art is just this conceptual mess of nonsense telling everyone else that they’re not the same as it, when art itself has no idea what ‘it’ is.

Art is the emperor’s new clothes, it’s nothing, it stands on the shoulders of the other mediums it mocks. This by no means answers the question ‘what is art?’ it just sort of tip toes around how the art community thinks, If anything it raises more questions. It’s often the case when you try to solve a riddle as old as this you find more questions than answers because the meaning of art is as elusive if not more so than the meaning of life.

 The true aim of art or what should be the aim of art is self preservation through commonality (Burke 1729-97). Much as with games, there are stories the world over of people making friends and getting married through games because what links them is commonality which is more powerful than the usual bindings that tie people together like money and convenience. Art is an educator, it teaches us about culture and people and more importantly how to be, it socializes us.


 “The aim of the whole life of mankind is the welfare of social life”
 -Sulzer (1720-79)

 It’s argued that the main aim of art is in fact beauty but it’s not as much beauty as it is ‘good’. Art’s ideals run in parallel with mankind’s in that they aim to improve life but beauty is not restrained by good nor evil, beauty is just beauty. Beauty could be a baby penguin feeding it’s chick as much as it could be a mallard duck gang raping a female mallard if you’re in to that sort of thing. So beauty is not a good way of defining art as it lacks intention and it can be found everywhere, in other words; beauty has no agency it’s ethereal, it’s subjective, art needs to have purpose behind it, it needs to make a point and convey some meaning or emotion from the artist.

 It’s important as a subject because being an artist and creating art is the closest to being god and even though I don’t necessarily believe in god I use that term because it adequately encompasses what I need to say. An artist is a creator; he/she is trying to encapsulate what was made by nature and what is captured by their senses, uniting not only the beauty of the natural world but the beauty of their perception of said world in something that they have created that they can share with the world. In other words their trying to make sense of the mysteries of life by duplicating them, they create to discover the meaning of creation.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

    Games in all forms have since inception been viewed as intellectually degrading, which is irrational (Johann Huizinga - play anthropologist) games are central to the formation of culture, we learn everything vital to being a person as a child through play. An example of this is God of War. Throughout the game we’re taught a rather twisted version of ancient Greek mythology but it has a basis in ‘real’ mythology and since mythology isn’t really real anyway what does it matter if it’s altered or not? Play is essential to civilised society. It’s a social pleasure and it mediates social interaction, but what if games could mediate or incite crime like the facebook riots?

We don’t really want to kill real people in games, that’s why they look so computerised (people in games don’t look like people in the real world usually but they’re starting to) or wear masks or are just plain reprehensible (Inhumane actions result in a character becoming less human), we dehumanize them, separate them, they become the faceless ‘other’.

Still the subject fascinates us as most taboo subjects do and video games allow us a neutral non-judgemental environment to play with these ideas of murder, crime and revenge. In that respect gamers are more like sense explorers, than children playing. They are the philosophers of the 21^stcentury; they sample a variety of emotions and sensations that not everyone can or is willing to experience, everything from fear and loathing to love and lust as well as pure child-like wonder.

The obvious worry is that people will learn or develop violent behaviour from playing games. In reality a video game has no more power of an individual than a film or a book, it’s just information, holding a gun or a knife and a controller are so far removed it’s laughable. Obviously it’s beside the point, erections don’t rape people, people rape people.

“The fighting game, like fighting itself, will always be popular “(Poole 2000). Sadly people are savage in nature, every art form we have originates from that savagery before the television we had public executions and the coliseum and still the most popular forms of media are those that glorify violence, but what’s wrong with that? If mindless violence is not entertainment, then what is?

Although we've had light guns for a long time in arcades that emulate the look and feel of real guns, reason dictates that one day there may be a game that could in some way teach you something be it combat or cooking but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Knowledge is without agency, although it is said to be power knowledge has no will of its own it’s what is done with that power that is paramount and that is up to the individual.

That being said although the subject matter of most games may centre around murder, games are actually more like sport. In a game the goal is not actually to kill but to win, killing is just the means to an end it’s not an end in itself. So although in the game Hitman you are a professional assassin and the objectives of the game are to kill people the pleasure doesn’t come solely from the act of killing (admittedly some of it does) the joy of the game comes from the journey and the eventual conquering of the game, saving the world/princess/Holy Grail whatever it is.

 Killing is just a minor part of whole game, it can never be the main focus. If there was such a game just about killing you could put all the names of the people buying it on a register because the only people that would play it would be undoubtedly insane and it would probably never make it onto the shelves anyway. If you say video games are violent in the sense that they train someone to be more effective at killing or increase aggressive tendencies then martial arts, body building, fencing, shooting, paint balling etc. should also be suspect.

Even if video games did increase the ability to kill they don’t necessarily increase the drive to. The drive to kill is down to the person playing. Just because you play manhunt carve out a niche in virtual butchery doesn't necessarily mean you would turn those new found skills to actual murder, the two are not in the same ball park, they’re not even the same sport. The game Madworld is a good example actually because although it’s a game about a murder game show your actual objectives are not to kill but to win the game show and you have this overarching story where you’re a government agent sent into to stop the game show.

Another example of this is Manhunt a very controversial game by those lovely people at Rockstar who brought us Grand Theft Auto, that amoral classic. Manhunt is a game about making a snuff film but that’s the goal of your captor not your character, the characters goal is just to survive and get out of this maze of death and kill the director and stop the snuff film. So as a player you sort of a play a rival director following the snuff film directors orders for the time being so as to get closer to him and put a stop to him.

The bottom line is that actually it makes no difference because there is nothing to kill in the first place because it’s just a fantasy, the people aren't real, all the meaning and the consequence of their lives were imagined and taking their lives has no permanence because you can select ‘new game’ and do it all again.

Imurder

“Real, unreal what’s the difference? As long as you don’t get caught”

- Trickster (Brainscan 1994)

Brainscan was a brilliant nineties film starring Edward Furlong (Terminator 2 1991, American History X 1998) about what the Wii would be like in a perfect world and the reason the film really interested me was because it laid bare this vital truth about video games; they’re all about murder. A slight slippery slope of an argument coming up but please stay with me. We live in a time where people can socialise on-line they can visit casinos and virtual strip clubs, they can shop and take tours of places without ever having to meet with anyone condescending, so why can’t they kill?

On-line hunting is currently locked in legal battles with animal rights groups trying to have it banned all over the globe. For anyone who is not familiar with on-line hunting it's basically the commercialisation of remote control robotics that fire guns instead of make coffee. Similar to the ones used by the military to clear caves or go anywhere an american soldier might encounter ghosts, but you pay to shoot at animals rather than foreigners.Supposedly it’s targeting disabled people who can’t go hunting or just lazy people who can’t be bothered to put on a high visibility jacket and wellies. The possibilities are limitless, literally turning killing into a game, setting up this strange nexus between real and fantasy.

There are enough accidents that happen in real hunting imagine how many ‘accidents’ will happen when the person is just clicking a mouse and feels no real responsibility for the lives they’re taking because they feel so removed from the actual act as they’re not actually there. It's very much like Brainscan, it's basically a film about a video game where you commit a murder but it actually happens in real life. So that being said why not on-line murder for people that want all the thrill of being a serial killer without all the mess.

 It goes without saying that it wouldn't exactly be legal but since when has that stopped anything on the internet? Half the allure of the internet is that it’s basically the wild west of information, too big and too wild to be tamed by any law enforcement agencies but I think it’s fair to say it’s also a pretty scary place when you think about it. I still support that idea of real freedom even though it inevitably leads to deviance.

What I'm trying to say is; what if, like Brainscan, someone could make a real murder feel like a video game? People could in theory be tricked into murdering someone with an on-line game, and have no idea that real people were being killed as a result of their actions, it’s possible but wholly unlikely. On the other hand why couldn't a killer wait outside a house with webcam on his head and an earpiece in his ear to receive instructions from a paying customer how to commit a murder? The pretence would basically be that the killer was going to kill regardless and the customer would simply be paying to choose the method and tools used. Basically it would be up to the customer to suspend his disbelief to whether it was real or fantasy and would probably get the benefit of the doubt in a court of law. There could be a massive market for selling someone a murder fantasy that could be entirely staged but still leaving room for doubt. You may ask yourself ‘what’s the point?’ but you could say that about almost anything on the internet. What's the point of putting a cats face through a piece of bread? The fact is it doesn't have to make sense, it’s just supply and demand and there will always be demand for the taboo.

Video games are already used to train pilots and terrorists use them to map locations they plan to terrorize. It seems really strange when you think back to the Robin Williams film Toys (1992) of which the premise was that the military were making toys that could kill controlled by kids who thought they were playing video games and looking at today’s predator drones (the unmanned remote control bombers used by the US Military) and realising the only difference is they’re not controlled by kids, just under developed macho man children. Where do you draw the line when murder is legalised and a click of a mouse away?   The reason I love video games is that they’re honest, they operate on the principle that there’s a killer in everyone, they just allow the killer to come out and play.

The Spirit of an Age

“It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” 
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

 Video games are fun right? but to a lot of people video games are dangerous. They fear the power video games have, they fear the privacy of the act of playing video games, most of all they fear change but really it’s just an extension of the oldest fear man has ever known; The fear of the unknown.

If there’s one thing I've learned about life is you can be sure that anything anyone finds fun there’s always someone trying to ban it for some reason. Video games supposedly will not only pollute the artistic minds of the future but also render other art forms obsolete. The reasoning being they believe that the public would rather play a video game than read a book or look at a painting and although as the author of this blog I would much rather play a video game than look at a painting or read a book it doesn't stop me from doing either. 

The libraries didn't all close when internet was born and plays weren't banned when they invented the tv. New art forms don’t replace the old, they just add to them or combine them, they cross pollinate and feed off each other, synergising; books become films become games. They don’t kill off their predecessors, they if anything; are monuments to the art that came before, because what this boils down to why art critics hate and fear and refuse to acknowledge games is because of a basic fear for their survival that is obviously completely irrational. Times and people change and video games are more popular than they've ever been but some things will never change.

People look at video games and think of a golden age where families talked and did things together and pretended to give a shit, go to church, make things, hate the same things, eat food that didn't come out of a microwave, listen to the radio, trust people, but its all bullshit. There was never a golden age of man, men have been killing each other and screwing each other over since rock met bone, and you think video games will make that worse or better? I don’t think it’ll make a bit of difference but who knows maybe it could, maybe video games could change everything. 

Time marches on we can never go back, no matter how many people want to go back before television and video games to a time where people were supposedly ‘better’ or more cultured, it just isn't going to happen and to block out the future will do nothing to impinge the mockery of the ticking clock.