Action Morphs Into Art

Three decades after “Pong” ricocheted into popular culture, video games are bouncing into the rarefied world of fine art.

A vocal clique of academics, curators and critics is asking whether digital muscleman Duke Nukem deserves the same study and reverence as, say, a Degas sculpture.

The movement has given birth to college classes deconstructing the symbolism in digital dollhouses such as “The Sims,” academic papers exploring the “aporia and epiphany” in shoot-’em-up games like “Doom,” and exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

“Games are a powerful, artistic medium just now coming to maturity,” said Rene de Guzman, visual arts curator for the Yerba Buena Center. Together with Stanford University, the gallery is hosting an exhibit called “Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts” that runs through April 4.

“They’re a form of interactive storytelling,” De Guzman said. “There’s performance involved when you play the game. And they obviously have powerful visual elements. I think some games are, frankly, very beautiful.”

It is a sensibility that strikes some in the game world as off the wall.

“Trying to strap meaning onto entertainment sometimes can be ridiculous,” said Rand Miller, chief executive of Cyan Worlds Inc., a game development studio in Spokane, Wash., and co-creator of “Myst,” a visually arresting game that set new standards for artistry. “When I see a magic show in Vegas, the last thing I want is a silly attempt to attach deeper meaning.”

But scholars say video games are an emerging art form, whether their creators recognize it or not.

“There were lots of filmmakers in the early years who also felt that what they were doing wasn’t art, that it was just entertainment,” said Chris Swain, who teaches game design at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, which offers a master of fine arts degree in game studies. “Over time, film became legitimized as an artistic medium because there were people who wanted to push things forward. The same will happen with games.”

Until the mid-1990s, video games were relatively crude diversions. Graphics were blocky and clunky. Music was little more than repetitive ditties of pings and beeps. Plots were simple: Shoot the aliens, eat the ghosts. The focus was on high scores, not high art.

Since then, the proliferation of cheap, powerful microprocessors has permitted movie-quality sound and visuals on $200 game consoles. Games now boast special effects, lengthy scripts with elaborate plot twists, original soundtracks and voice-overs by professional actors. Imagination, not technology, defines a game’s limits.

Few games illustrate this evolution better than “Return to Castle Wolfenstein,” issued in 2002 by John Carmack, a programmer whose “Doom” franchise of games is among the best-known in the industry. Carmack’s company, Id Software in Mesquite, Texas, has sold millions of copies of “Doom” since its release in 1994.

The original “Castle Wolfenstein,” created in 1983 by the late Silas Warner, an early innovator in game design, was a simple adventure through an ancient castle crawling with Nazis. The enemy soldiers were two-colored stick figures with pixelized swastikas on their chests. The biggest technological feat in the game was that the Nazis barked commands in digitized German.

Carmack’s version -- “Return to Castle Wolfenstein” -- borrows more from cinema. The game is what’s known as a first-person shooter, meaning players see the action on screen as if they are in the game, standing in the shoes of its hero, Army Ranger B.J. Blazkowicz.

Meticulous programming allows the three-dimensional world to pivot as players make Blazkowicz run, dive and duck through a labyrinthine castle. Physics dictate the trajectory of bullets fired from Blazkowicz’s gun and how flickering torches cast shadows in dank corridors. Impossibly complicated subroutines manage the artificial intelligence of Nazi goons who decide whether to stand their ground or run.

“My personal work is engineering,” Carmack said. “If you squint real hard, you can see some elements of artistry in almost any engineering effort, but styling it as art is usually an excuse to avoid rigor.”

But if art is, as novelist Leo Tolstoy once observed, the passing of an experience from one person to another, “Return to Castle Wolfenstein” cannot so easily be dismissed as simple engineering.

Celia Pearce found the game so engrossing that it drowned out the Friday afternoon hum outside her Venice loft. Pearce, an instructor of game design at UC Irvine, navigated the game’s gothic dungeons on her custom-built laptop. Down a flight of stairs, she noticed the gossamer cobwebs tucked in a corner.

“From a graphics perspective, I think this is beautiful,” Pearce said.

Hearing the murmur of voices, Pearce headed in that direction and found herself outside the lab of a mad scientist with a thick German accent. With a few keystrokes, she unlatched the door, sneaked up behind the scientist and shot him.

As the digital madman crumpled to the floor, the lab exploded in a rat-tat-tat of gunfire and screams. Pearce squared off tensely against a Nazi soldier. A firefight followed, leaving Pearce’s Blazkowicz dying on the stone floor.

Pearce tossed back her long red hair and sighed. “Well, that was kind of exciting,” she said.

“I don’t see how you can argue that games aren’t art,” said Jason Rubin, co-president of Naughty Dog Inc., a Santa Monica game studio that created the “Crash Bandicoot” and “Jak and Daxter” series of games.

Rubin is part of the team selecting pieces for display in a May exhibit sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art titled “Into the Pixel.” It’s the first time LACMA has waded into the world of video games, said Douglas Blake, chairman of LACMA’s Graphic Arts Council, which raises money for acquisitions and educational programs.

“In the long run, digital art will be inside of the museum’s purview, just like the Gutenberg Bible,” Blake said. “In the 1890s, Toulouse-Lautrec painted posters, and no one thought that was art. A hundred years later, they are very much a part of the art world.”

USC offers the nation’s only academic program focused on the artistic elements of games. Electronic Arts Inc., the largest game publisher in the world, on Monday gave an $8-million grant to the program. Other schools offer technical degrees in game design, usually as part of the computer science curriculum.

“When USC started a film school 75 years ago, there were skeptics,” Swain said. “We believe games are the literature of the 21st century. When you look at games today, it may be difficult to see that. But the pieces are in place for this to happen.”

At a recent seminar on “Digital Game Studies,” instructor Tracy Fullerton asked whether a game should be critiqued, like literature, based on the quality of its storytelling or on the quality of its gameplay and the variety of choices players can make.

Student Bob Buerkle argued that the narrower the choices, the more it conveys “the vision of the artist.” Chris Hanson disagreed. “There’s too much focus on the narrative of games,” he said. “To me, the interesting part of a game is the interactivity.”

Fullerton loaded a popular PC game, “The Sims,” on a computer and showed her students a family she had created. The game allows players to create virtual people and families, even entire neighborhoods, and then let them loose to see how they interact.

Two of the characters in the game were sobbing at a grave outside their home. She explained their tragic story.

The family had consisted of a father, a mother and two children. It was an idyllic family until Fullerton purchased a rocket launcher for one of the children. The kid used the launcher in her bedroom and ignited a fire. When the dad ran up to try to save the girl, both perished in the flames.

“I felt really responsible for ruining their lives,” Fullerton said.

The game, she later said, is a sort of digital “Babbitt,” the Sinclair Lewis novel in which a prosperous man fantasizes about a life outside his own.

But Will Wright, who created “The Sims” for his Maxis game studio in Walnut Creek, Calif., said his game is no more art than is Adobe Systems Inc.’s Photoshop, a popular program for storing and editing digital images. “People create really amazing things with the game, but the game itself is just a tool,” said Wright, whose company was purchased in 1997 by Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts.

“I set out to create interesting experiences where the player has as much control as possible over what happens,” Wright said. “Whether it’s art, that’s arguing semantics.... I find the word ‘art’ to be pretty much useless, personally. Everybody has a different interpretation of art. Just about anything can be considered art.”

First, though, a game has to get made. And for that to happen, it has to have a market.

“Can games be art? Not with the existing business model,” said Tim Schafer, designer of “Grim Fandango,” which follows the tale of Manny Calavera, travel agent in the land of the dead.

“We’re trying to do a little of that,” said Schafer, who runs a studio in San Francisco called Double Fine Productions. “But we’re not selling that point, because no one wants to hear it and no one wants to fund it. So we have to hide it.”

Bridging art and commerce is nothing new. With games, the hurdle is higher.

Games cost millions of dollars to develop and millions more to market. They cost as much as $50 apiece -- significantly more than books, movies or music. And because a game can take dozens of hours to play, players are especially choosy about what they pick.

As a result, publishers and designers go out of their way to make their games fun so people will buy them; artistic considerations often become secondary.

“Their primary purpose should always be entertainment,” said Amy Jo Kim, a Half Moon Bay, Calif., game designer who has worked on such games as “The Sims Online,” “Ultima Online” and “There.com.” “If a game is artistic but not fun, I’m bummed.”

Fun evidently was not top priority for artists who used games as a medium for the pieces exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. For this milieu, video games represent a tool for social, political or artistic expression.

At the center of the gallery is “PainStation,” constructed by an artists’ collaborative in Germany. It’s a “Pong” arcade, retrofitted with electrical shocks, a tiny rubber whip and a heater used to zap, slap and burn the player’s hand.

“One of the themes of this exhibit is the blurring of game experience and real experiences outside the screen,” curator De Guzman said. “ ‘PainStation’ extends the game experience with real-life consequences.”

The exhibit is meant to inspire artists, said co-curator Henry Lowood, who also oversees Stanford’s history of science and technology collection.

“What we’re trying to say is that if you’re an artist, you should pay attention to this,” Lowood said. “Games have storytelling and aesthetic power to them that can be really valuable for people in the arts.”

If games are art, Swain, Fullerton and others say they deserve the same intellectual scrutiny as music, theater or dance.

“Game reviews today focus on the features and the fun factor,” Fullerton said. “They rarely address the player’s emotional or intellectual experience with games. With film, those aspects are the core of the review. At some point, I hope we will cease to be fascinated by the technology of games, and the questions will shift from how something is happening on a screen to why.”

Some of that is already starting to happen. The online journal www.gamestudies.org features articles titled “Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy,” “The Dungeon and the Ivory Tower: Vive La Difference ou Liaison Dangereuse?” and “I Lose, Therefore I Think: A Search for Contemplation Amid Wars of Push-Button Glare.”

Site editor Espen Aarseth said he founded the online journal to encourage scholarly scrutiny of games, which he feels is not being taken seriously.

“It is vital to foster a field that can integrate the social, artistic and technical aspects of games,” Aarseth said by e-mail from his home in Norway. “We have had arts and literature as scholarly fields for more than two thousand years, so now it is time to include the dominant art form of the 21st century.”