Adam Hammond is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and author of the new book The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of JETT.
Ten years ago, something happened that shocked me. I played a video game that struck me as a work of art. The game was called Sword & Sworcery EP; it’s an indie game that achieved a tremendous amount of critical acclaim and made some best-of lists at the end of 2011. For those who haven’t had the joy of playing it – it has sold more than 1.5 million copies – it might be best described as a retro point-and-click adventure game that makes ingenious use of time and has an unforgettable soundtrack by Canadian musician Jim Guthrie.
But looking back on that moment in 2011, I still wonder at my shock. Video games have existed for more than 50 years, are one of the most popular media of our era, and generate more revenue than movies and music combined. Why should it be surprising that one would feel like a work of art?
The first point to make is that the category of “art” is hopelessly vague. There are no absolute qualities that determine whether something qualifies. So the more interesting question is how anything comes to be recognized as “art.” As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it, “The production of discourse about a work of art is part of the production of a work of art.” In other words, artists aren’t just people who make beautiful things or tell uncomfortable truths. They’re also people who struggle to get their work accepted as art – who try to bend and twist the definition of art so that it fits the stuff they make, which in turns allows them to get the things they seek: grants, shows, recognition, prestige.
Although there have been endless debates about whether video games are art, or what boxes they would need to tick before they became art (Steven Spielberg famously said they would have to make us cry) the fact is that video games still don’t fit comfortably into the category. For all their successes in crafting memorable experiences and pushing billions of dollars’ worth of product, the makers of video games haven’t yet managed to reshape our notions of “art” in a such a way as to encompass their productions.
My experience in 2011 was probably quite typical for “arty” people. At that time, I was deeply committed to “art.” I had just finished a PhD in English literature, I was obsessed with post-punk music, and I was going through an intense David Lynch phase. All these interests fit together: watching Blue Velvet drew me closer to X-Ray Spex and Virginia Woolf. Video games, on the other hand, felt like they existed in a different universe. At that time – I had just turned 30 – I thought of them as something that belonged to my childhood, something I’d had to outgrow to establish myself as a connoisseur of the arts.
And when I occasionally checked in with the world of video games, I could see that there were good reasons for this. Even the titles that generated some artsy buzz – for a while, the Objectivist first-person …….