For DmPerspectives class: I would like about 1000 words on "Video Games and Art." I will leave it up to you on how to address this topic. You may write about the fine artists who use gaming as a medium or you may write about a popular game and make the case that it is a work of art. You may struggle with this paraphrase of Alfred Stieglitz's inquiry, "Can a Video Game have the Significance of Art?" You all have some idea of what a video game is, and you all should have an opinion of what art is. Can a video game be art? Yes or no? Justify your response. Somewhere address the issue of the specific interactivity of gaming as a plus or minus to the aesthetic experience.

The question "What is Art?" is as unanswerable as it is useless. To the layman, the question is irrelevant, because any blue-collar guy worth his salt can tell you what Art is "just by looking at it." To the Artist, the question is useless because he or she has already defined his or her work as Art by defining him or herself as an Artist. In popular press, the question "is this Art?" usually devolves into "how can we sell this?" or else provides the fodder for a cute New York Times Sunday Arts supplement to be consumed over bagel and lox, no further.

Perhaps curators are the only people truly interested in the question of what exactly defines Art, but then, they did put Harleys in the Guggenheim, so what do they know?

Duchamp says it's Art if an Artist says it Art. Manetas says its Art if he signs it as Art. I say everybody's got a different opinion, so I let the Art World rule: if it's in an established gallery or museum , then it is Art. I may think other pieces are art according to my own little subjective criteria, but for the purposes of the Art World, it is not Art until it's Institutionalized. Of course, this can often destroy what was original and fantastic about the work in the first place.

Take Aboriginal Artists in Australia, for example. They were grudgingly accepted as Artists in academic circles, but didn't catapult into the Art world until a few aboriginal Artists were shown they could sell a lot more of their stuff if it were distributed on neat squares of canvas rather than on two-ton boulders. And what of graffiti, torn from its essential street context to wither on easels in galleries. The stuff on the street may seem less Art-like, but it is considered more legitimate and respectable within the graffiti world than its shriveled, feeble bastard-cousin in the gallery. These are two examples in which gaining acceptance in the Art world has meant the destruction of the context, energy and "aura" that originally made the work worthwhile.

With that in mind, lets approach the question "can a Video Game be Art?" Or, more to the point, "what is changed about popular Video Games to make the few that are accepted as Art, Art?"

I would consider Miltos Manetas' Video Game works to be unquestionably Art for the simple reason that they have been featured in established museums, galleries and biennales. However, and Manetas himself has agreed with me on this point, if some 12 year old flash kiddy were to create the same work it would most certainly not be Art. His People Against Things shows the helmeted protagonist from a first-person shooter seated on a stairway, abstaining from the killing. His Abstract Super Mario rendered the popular Video Game as an abstract field of pixels, and tried to pit media icons "at least as well known as Super Mario" at the controls.

Eddo Stern's Vietnam Romance uses the imagery of Video Games to romanticize the Vietnam War. These pieces have been shown, respectively, at the 3rd Seoul Int'l Media Art Biennale, the Centre Pompidou Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, Spain, and thus they are Art.

So, what changed to make these Video Games Art? Well, the first and last works are not Video Games, they're actually videos of Video Games. And you can't even play the second Video Game because you can't see anything. Cory Arcangel takes a similar approach, removing the cars from a racing Video Game, and Mario from Mario Brothers, leaving a quiet, undulating landscape devoid of any game.

So it seems the answer to the question "Can a Video Game be Art?" has been answered by the Art world, "Yes, as long as it's not a Video Game any more." Or, really, "as long as it is not a good Video Game any more." So far, the parameters that define a good Video Game: a clear goal, a test of skill, a level of interactivity, are not what define a work of Art that is a Video Game.

So, what is going on? What happens to a Video Game to make it Art once skill and goal have been removed? Perhaps it is precisely this frustration that bridges the work from just a game to a game that is Art. When the goal is unattainable or unclear, the "player" leaves the experience still thinking, unsatisfied. In other words, when the goal of a Video Game ceases to be about completing the game within its own confines, the goal becomes something more akin to that of Duchamp's Large Glass, requiring the observer to complete the work on his or her own.

Perhaps this is when a Video Game becomes Art.

Let's test this theory by looking for Video Games that both have goals and are Art. Natalie Bookchin's Intruder is a work of Video Game Art that has a clear goal: complete the series of games and complete the story. The games suck, and the method of reading the story is annoying, yet the work is undeniably Art. What makes it Art? I guess it is the impact of the piece that makes it significant, as opposed to the tweaked numbing most Video Games achieve. The same purportedly holds true for Brody Condon's Adam Killer, in which the protagonist murders a series of identical Calvin Klein Models, and Feng Mengbo's work in which players in the form of Feng Mengbo himself must murder enemies in the likeness of Feng Mengbo himself.

How "Ironic."

These three works manage to have goals and be Art because they have a lingering impact beyond the game, because they cause us to reflect on ourselves or the world around us. Which is not only an appropriately vague and ambiguous definition, but also brings us to the Alfred Steiglitz paraphrase, "Can a Video Game have the Significance of Art?"

There are two ways to answer this question. The first is to denigrate Art to show that not all Art has significance. The second approach is to postulate forms of Video Games that would be significant. Must I chose from the myriad of insignificant Art works we have all come across, or just allow each of us to think of our own image of a piece that is certainly a work of Art but also certainly not significant. Alas, I fear I must give some examples.

I won't dredge up the familiar Duchamp Fountain example because I consider this one of the most significant Art works (in terms of its impact on the Art world) in the last couple decades. Instead, lets look at the Mona Lisa, which has no significance whatsoever. Although an expertly crafted and beautiful work, it is not significantly better crafted than other works of its time, nor did it hone any technical skills or introduce anything new at all to the Art world. It is not more beautiful, more striking, more anything. It is simply more popular. But is it more popular than Super Mario Brothers?

On the other hand, I am reminded of an experience I had playing Halo, in which I accidentally killed my helper. Armed with only a crowbar, I rounded a corner to come upon a man holding a gun, so I impulsively started beating him to death with my crowbar. As I watched him watch me, wide eyed, not quite confused, but certainly passive as I dug the crowbar deeper and deeper into his neck, I became aware of my friend (in the real world now) yelling at me, "No No don't kill him, he's here to help you!"

Too late.

And as I bent down to pull his gun from his dead fingers, I felt bad. Sincerely. No Artwork has instilled this feeling in me. Horror, peace, giddy inspiration: yes, but sincere pesonal guilt? Only the Video Game.

And since the question is no longer "Are Video Games Art" but "Can Video Games Have the Significance of Art," I answer definitively, yes.

But I am not going to let that answer lie unchallenged. Because to the question, "would I rather play a Video Game that is not Art than one that is Art?" from experience so far, I also answer yes. And to the question, "are Video Game developers better at making Video Games than are Artists?" I also answer yes.

Clearly the potential for marrying motion graphics to non-linear hyper-narratives in a seamless and rich interaction means that Video Games are the obvious platform for the development of digital cinema and interactive media. But as we have seen in the examples provided in this paper, focusing on The Art Question can be reactionary and counterproductive.