The Tenth Art

Films, plays, ballets and operas have actors and soundtracks and set designers, they have awards and critics and fans and t-shirt sales and porn parodies and so do games. Who knows maybe in the future there will be no line between games and films and someone will be receiving an Oscar for their performance in resident evil 36 attack of the enormous load of shit. Games and films acknowledge each other, there are films about games like Gamer (2009) and eXistenZ (1999) (which was partially funded by sony I might add) just like there are games about films or that reference or try to be films like Max Payne or Heavy Rain and L.A Noire. There’s even a game by Quantic Dream the people who made Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit called Nomad Soul which was co-created by David Bowie, he also starred in it as two separate characters and makes up a large portion of the soundtrack.

 Games are the tenth art (Alain et Frédéric Le Diberder 1998 l’univers des jeux video) they are a 'bizarre digital hybrid' (Poole 2000 Trigger Happy) that follow the same principles as films do; just like a film they include the arts of music and acting and design and editing but they add game play. ‘You’ are what separates games from films. This is why games have the power to be far more engaging than films or books or plays because you are a part of it.

 The difference between a book and a game is that a book doesn't need you, when you put the book down and leave the room the words stay on the page. The video game requires your input, without you to play it nothing happens, it ceases to exist. In the same way a film will play when you leave the room a game will not, you are central to its existence (Ludo Ergo Sum), it is a symbiotic relationship you share with the game. 

Although you could argue the same can be said for a book because it requires you to engage your imagination, but you cannot determine the outcome of the book you are still just an onlooker, you can only effect the story aesthetically, changing how the people look or their surroundings in the book, you have no power in the world of the book, you and the book are still separate.

Games tick all the boxes of sense experience of plays or paintings and push further into that realm of undiscovered pleasures. Video games are the new coliseum where someone can indulge in all the violence and implied sex their heart desires and until recently (as in the last 10 years or so) they were seen as a child's pursuit and now undoubtedly they are much more. Reaching down into hidden parts of our minds tickling our lizard brains and taking us to places we dare not go in reality. So why can’t they be art?

The level of work and effort that goes into them and the minds behind them, the music, the story, and the aesthetics are all as much a part of games as they are films, so what’s the difference? A huge amount of thought and creativity not to mention time goes into just one game, and today; acting talent as well, a la Heavy Rain and L.A Noire, the line is blurring. Still there is so much scepticism when it comes to acknowledging games as art.

 Art is all about sense experience yet video games are the masters of the senses taking us further than any film ever could. There's not a film on the planet that could hope to compete with the cold sweat and terror mixed with a biting feeling of loneliness and melancholy I felt walking through the streets of Silent Hill. The depth of despair and raw adrenaline cut with madness conjured in the mind of Max Payne. The awe struck by games like Shadow Of the Colossus when you come face to face with one or when you first set eyes on Rapture from the bathysphere in Bioshock. 

No block buster on the planet could ever come close to that feeling because you are there right in the moment, you feel everything whereas a film or a painting is a hand me down set of feelings it's the crumbs from someone else's sensory plate. You see someone crying and you should feel sad, you see someone smiling you should feel happiness the art world is full of all these signs telling you how to feel. Games sometimes signpost themselves like this in terms of moral choices but most of the time the way you feel about a game is purely subjective, the same game I rave about for weeks a friend of mine could turn around and say; "S'alright" and I just give a little smile and in my head I just scream "Uncultured wanker!" and walk away.