Game News Elden Ring, God of War, Ico, The Last of Us, GTA, Monkey Island: Can these video games be works of art?
The video game is a work, but is it a work of art? This question, put back on the table a few days ago, has already been the subject of debates that span decades. Let’s highlight the opinions of experts.
Are video games an art? This question comes up regularly like a chestnut tree and each time raises a multitude of points of view. This year, it is an article by BFM TV baptized “How the video game is supplanting the cinema” which encouraged its reappearance, and especially the reaction of Jean-Pierre Mignard, lawyer at the Paris Bar. The author, Jérôme Lachasse, underlines the unique prowess of the format and quotes in particular the praises made by Mathieu Bablet, the author of Carbone et Silicium.
When the video game does not try to ape the cinema and uses a narration specific to the video game to tell stories, it not only supplants the cinema, but it also supplants all the other arts. Thanks to its interactive dimension, the video game is the ultimate art, the one that allows the narrative experience to be pushed further.
But for Jean-Pierre Mignard, followed by some 30,000 subscribers, the video game cannot be a work of art. A tweeted opinion (the tweet is now in restricted visibility) which did not fail to make hundreds of Internet users react outraged by what they consider to be a lack of knowledge of the format. However, the creation of a video game undeniably calls for artistic skills, but also technical, just like cinema.
The place of video games in France
If its cultural weight is no longer to be defended, on the other hand, we tend to forget that video games are also recognized as being the tenth art. It was even designated as a form of artistic expression by the Ministry of Culture some fifteen years ago. And more recently, it has also integrated the Culture Pass offered by the government; “The video game is an art, so there is all its place”, assured Minister Franck Riester on this occasion. So why are we still questioning the legitimacy of the format as an art form? Perhaps because the video game is still very recent and like any new medium, it has to rely a little on its longevity for its legitimacy to be recognized.
Yet it’s been a while now that video games have found a place of choice in museums, such as the museum of modern art or the museum of playful art. We often speak of it as a total art, as it can include a multitude of other forms of art, such as literature, cinema, drawing, etc.. The sociologist Emmanuel Ethis writes in the Obs on this subject: “The video game, in itself, is a form of the total art of the 21st century which is likely to carry the same recapitulative ambitions that we have known with certain masterful works of cinema such as that of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, Walt Disney, Hayao Miyazaki, Terry Gilliam, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson or Ingmar Bergman, with certain series such as “Lost”, “Alias” or the “Prisonnier“”. And as the journalist Erwan Higuinen says, “all the subjects regularly addressed by the other arts are also covered by video games.”
If we say that the video game is a total art and therefore brings together a slew of art forms, doesn’t it still have its own originality? It is believed that this generally lies in the game mechanics. To return to the BFMTV article, Mathieu Bablet cites in particular Icoa work already dated 2001 in which “a narrative and emotional bond is created through gameplay” or Brothers : A Tale of Two Sons which constructs a narrative in the same way through mechanical means. The singularity of the game lies in its interactivity and the narrative that it can build around.
L’art total
There are games that are almost unanimous and to which we easily lend the title of masterpiece: God of War, The Last of Us, Monkey Island and GTA, licenses as much acclaimed by the press as the public. Their technical, graphic or even screenplay quality is certainly not to be proven.. Doesn’t their masterful reception earn them the title of masterpiece as these names have forged the history of video games and given them their letters of nobility? If we stick only to the simplest definition of the Larousse dictionary, a “masterpiece” is a “capital and superior work in any kind; the best work of an author“. Don’t the titles mentioned above all meet these criteria? If the answer naturally tends towards “yes”, there are some who don’t care at all. Jean Baptiste Clais, curator at the Eugène Delacroix National Museum, said in the columns of 20Minutes: “Gamers don’t care if video games are total art or not. What matters is that they are having fun. It’s like literature, there are Nobel Prizes and station novels, in video games it’s the same. Some are bad, others have amazing storytelling. For example, Flowers and Portal are masterpieces“. Also, can we consider a Call of Duty in the same way as a Journey ? Finally, we come back to the question of taste and colors. Thomas Morisset, researcher and author of What is video gaming the art of? for the magazine Nectart, writes:
How do we see that a practice belongs to this restricted domain of the arts that we are pointing out? By the fact that we make judgments of taste on these works, the most common of which is the formula: “it’s beautiful”. This very particular judgment is a sensitive judgment that evaluates the pleasure we take in viewing, reading a work or simply encountering a natural or artificial object, whatever its origin.
And you, what is your opinion on the subject?