Mr Biffo

Our columnist is feeling brave and tackling the whole, ‘Are videogames art?’ subject

There’s an argument that gamers of a certain age sometimes engage in: whether or not videogames can be considered art. It’s weird that nobody really worried about this in the Eighties and Nineties. It was a debate which rose up once games started getting a little bit more mature and ambitious in their storytelling, and when graphics became more realistic.

Back when I was growing up, it would never have crossed my mind to discuss with a friend whether Chuckie Egg or Ah Diddums could be considered a work of art. I’d argue that the corner began to be turned with Deus Ex Machina, Mel Croucher’s ambitious multimedia ZX Spectrum title.

There were interactive whatnots before that, which arguably blurred the line between art and game, but Deus Ex Machina was the first to get mainstream coverage in the games mags of the time. Frankly, when I was 13 years old, I thought it was a load of old guff. I sort of liked the music, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Now that I’m (slightly) older I can appreciate what Mel Croucher was going for.

For me, it’s a little more complicated than whether games are art or not. I mean, surely it isn’t as binary as that? Games – interactive entertainment – are as broad a canvas as cinema, or TV, or literature. Personally I’d have thought it was obvious that games can be both works of art and mindless shooters.

Not so. In his review of the Doom movie, legendary US critic Roger Ebert damned games thusly: “To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, videogames represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

Unfortunately, all that suggests to me is that Roger Ebert had never played a videogame in his life, and needed to better experience what he was criticising. Doom is just one corner of an industry that has come to encompass work as moving as Life Is Strange and Journey. Roger failed to see that potential.

So, of course, videogames can be considered art – something that you wouldn’t necessarily say about, you know, a Fisher-price Chatterbox Telephone. But at the same time, I don’t really care. What I get from games isn’t an appreciation of beauty, or empathy, or to feel more cultured and civilised. It’s more profound for me than that; they speak to that child inside of me. They give me permission to use my imagination to pretend and to play, and to forget about adult life for an hour and just be a kid again.

Never once when I was a child did I stop to ask if games were art. They were just games. And that was enough.