It is not uncommon for the guardians of so called "high culture" to dismiss forms of new culture, forms that currently most often appear in the digital medium, as so low that they do not qualify for the requisite level of art or culture to which they might ascribe. Recently, the United States Supreme Court struck down a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children, a ruling that is particularly notable for the sentiment expressed by Justice Scalia in the majority opinion: that the court must not fear technology simply for the fact of its being new. In fact, he went so far as to draw an analogy between classic forms of children's entertainment and the violence therein, such as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the violence of video games.
The academic roots of Justice Scalia's opinion are felt in the burgeoning field of criticism that takes up video games as a new pillar in the artistic production of contemporary culture. It is not at all uncommon, in the new horizons of both academia and more broadly in culture as a whole, for video games to take up alongside older disciplines (such as print, music, film and the plastic arts) as a legitimate subject of study. However, the same problems that have assailed those other disciplines in the past strike at video games now. Charges of indecency and corrupted morality are often levelled against the producers of video games in much the same way that the arts in the past have been represented as the domain of loose morals.
Unfortunately, in its current state, the video game industry has not fully found the means to justify its own existence. Despite the ruling of the Supreme Court, video games have not been seamlessly tied into the history of the development of the culture of art in either a legal or philosophical sense. Justice Scalia's opinion simply ties video games into a preexisting order in which violent texts already exist and therefore applies the protections of the American First Amendment; in its plainest form, the opinion casts video games as more of the same of something we have seen before. Further, Justice Scalia expresses deep misgivings about the ability of video games to work with sexual material - a qualification that would seem to shut off what has always been a primary inspiration for art. Therefore, while video games are subject to the protections the arts have claimed in the past, they are also constrained within the same old bounds that have plagued the reception of artistic work. The ruling does not see any paradigmatic shift in culture so much as the need to uphold those standards derived from the past.
One can imagine the problems that would be associated with the publication of any video game that strove to portray intimacy (putting aside the kind of puerile --and off screen-- sex in game such as God of War). Even more problematic would be the depiction of non-normative sexuality or sexuality that posed a challenge to the standard of the day. For instance, James Joyce's Ulysses, which had its own problems with the English standards of morals upon its publication in the early twentieth century, would not only pose artistic problems in its digital representation but would also be assailed by manifold bureaucratic and economic difficulties. Granted, without the patina of time, and canonization, many texts have fallen from the cultural consciousness because their historically informed challenges have proven to be of not enough substance to stand the test of time. However, equally, figures such as the Marquis de Sade, who offended in his own time, have maintained their relevance and even now inform how we learn to think about ourselves in the broadest sense.
Perhaps the greatest challenge video games face in their validation as art is one that criticism has fought, vigorously, in the past century and is yet a fact that most have not yet learned to live without: authorship. While censorship has a long history, the fight against censors is equally historically informed and, moreover, invokes some of the greatest names in the canon. John Milton, author of what is most often considered the greatest English epic poem in Paradise Lost, wrote Aeropegitica, a persuasive and eloquent defence of the right to publish illicit material, in the belief that a discerning English public would be bettered by the chance to decide what ideas they might be believe. Likewise, many of the other great writers in the canon have served double duty as critics, sometimes within their art itself. While more recent critics, many of whom are lumped into the amorphous and poorly defined category of the "postmodern" although the strain of thought is also expressed further back by those such as T.S. Eliot, have proclaimed "the death of the author," it seems that the we are culturally not yet able to let him or her die. That is to say, somebody remains responsible for art but, in the emerging digital culture, it is not at all clear who that may be.
What video games lack is a clear author figure. In the nineteenth century Percy Shelley defended poets on the grounds of their keen insight into the human condition and thereby elevated them to the post of "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." However, in that vein, whose insight is expressed in a game? First, the actual production of games entails the work of so many individuals, witness the length of the credit sequence at the end of a modern game, that the intellectual work of any one person is indiscernible from the whole. While film may suffer from the same confusion, we are at least prepared to parse a film and recognize its constituent parts (such as direction, scripting and acting) in a manner not yet attained in the consumption of games. Therefore, games are produced by "teams" rather than "authors" and, it seems, we are not yet able to think about this new form of cultural production. This new form of work, a kind of collective effort of thought, does not fit with the personal and subjective origins that most still ascribe to art. Moreover, because a team remains something less than a culture, it also fails to take the form of what some think of as cultural productions. From the spines of books we have be trained to think about art as the work of one, potentially great, mind and video games leave us unfulfilled in that regard.
However, the most pressing and distressing complication in authorship is almost Freudian in it's nature; in video games, we find ourselves as authors and producers of the work. In what is an odd twist, considering how video games have been denigrated for their destruction of the modern attention span, games invoke the gamer in a way unattainable by books, film, music or visual art. In a very real sense, we produce our own experience along with the makers of the game. While the intellectual quality of the experience is a debate for another time, the mode of engagement is truly a new frontier in art. While art has always gone through revolutions, the role of the viewer has never been more active than it is in this new, emergent art form and, therefore, the problems of viewing art and the imperative working through of art's meaning have never been so visceral.
As someone who is fascinated by art and it's reception, but also happens to be a gamer, I struggle with the opinion offered by Justice Scalia. While, on the one hand, I cannot help but be pleased by the extension of the legal rights of art to, what I think of as, an emerging artistic medium, I also struggle to think through how video games do and do not ingratiate themselves within the preexisting canon and its standards.
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