By Paolo Cosejo
In 2009, when I was still young and naïve and had yet to fully form my own critical lens on videogames as artistic medium, I interviewed IGN contributor Michael Thomsen for a paper I was writing on the aforementioned subject. In “Citizen Prime: Is Metroid Prime Our Citizen Kane?” Thomsen wrote how gamers don’t need to wait for their artistic masterpieces to appear because they already exist, that videogames aren’t an emerging art form, they are already an art form. During the interview, Thomsen had very interesting things to say, things that I wasn’t able use in my piece. Here and now, I share with you all the thoughts he shared with me.
Paolo Cosejo: What is your definition of art? Do videogames fit your definition of art?
Michael Thomsen:
To me, art is simply an abstract expression created by a human being or a group of human beings. I think the idea of abstraction is essential to art, what separates poetry from instruction manual, and film from commercials. Art doesn't have a singular purpose so, in many ways, defining it conceptually is pointless. But my broadest understanding of the idea is anything that gives body or voice to all the experiences of living which we don't understand. To somehow formulate all the things we don't yet have words for here.
PC: What are some games you would consider art? What’s artistic about them?
Thomsen:
Metroid Prime, for reasons I've already stated.
Super Mario Bros. for its creation of the interactive journey and its formulation of communicating through interaction. SMB is a primal work, but it's implications are powerful. I intuit the experience of a journey, which to me seems awfully Homeric in purpose, episode, and imaginative setting, simply by moving through the world. As the backdrops change, the player progresses from hillside fields to sewers to mountain tops to ocean floors, to dark and dank dungeons. It is an Odyssean trek to save a woman from a monster. There's something primal and instinctually beautiful in that experience, a gravitational pull to brave the world's worst antagonisms to find an intimate partner. The joy of movement in the game, the adolescent thrill of running and jumping, combined with the hopeful quest of finding the princess is a perfectly optimistic expression of just how suggestive can be the simplest games.
Electroplankton is a kind of interactive post-modernism, matching open-ended play with emergent emotional participation. The longer I play a particular mode in Electroplankton the more I find myself bending the shapes of its rule sets to render some emotion of my own experience, to find some solidarity of experience within the abstract creation of someone else, whose primary purpose was to provide that abstract emotional solace (joyful, mysterious, or morose -- the player decides, while the developer sets the terms).
Killer7 is a brilliant embodiment of schizophrenia and guilt. It removes freedom of exploration and forces you to confront abstract phantoms that can't be seen, either because of the mechanical limitation of the camera angle, or because they're literally invisible. Instead of relying on your traditional sense of sight to go through each level, you have to listen for cues of confrontation and obstacle. It's a hallucinatory rendering of the collective weight and experience of violence and its attendant fantasies of the apocalypse, the antithesis of the hero-shooter. It's a concession of the animal insanity inherent in the act of harming another human being, imagined or otherwise.
I don't want to say too much about Shadow of the Colossus or Ico because I think their function and theme are quite similar to Prime, but I would like to mention the wonderful poetry of command in both games. Especially the evolution of the R2 button, which in Ico is the command to hold Yorda's hand. In Colossus your companion is dead and you are all by yourself. The R2 button remains is still a "hold" command, but absent a companion's hand to hold onto, this becomes the desperate clutch with which you hang onto backs of the Colossi as they try and buck you off. In Ico the command is a comfort and reminder of companionship. In Colossus it dramatizes the extent to which you are alone and the intense length you must go through to bring back your companion. It's a beautiful use of control, made more beautiful through continuity between two companion-pieces.
There are dozens and dozens of others. All games can be considered as art. The biggest distinction is in the player, not in the game itself. It's worth noting
PC: Roger Ebert claims that interactivity hampers games as an artistic medium because “art is created by an artist” and player involvement interferes with art. What are your thoughts on that considering the strong emphasis on interactivity in “Citizen Prime?”
Thomsen:
Interactivity is the art form and the medium itself. Interaction is what mechanically defines games as art and is the essential expressive core that designers have to express themselves. It's not an impediment to artistry it's the essential core of it. Games are created by people just as much as films are created by people. Every member of the audience has a different experience in both media, but that's the nature of art throughout the ages. If we all reached the same conclusions then art wouldn't be art, it would be an instruction manual, a public service announcement, or an eBay page. Film is the act of creating association, of editing images together to give an abstract impression of something. The ultimate conclusion is dependent on the audience and the personalizing lens of their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. In games, designers create limits and consequences to create these abstract experiences. The conclusions players make are their own, but the sensations with which they base those conclusions have just as much capacity for personal expression and artistry as film. Designers can affect movement speed, point of view, levels of environmental activity (e.g. can you do more than shoot? what happens when you shoot someone? what happens when you try and touch someone?). Cinema is the art of juxtaposing two disparate experiences on a linear timeline. Interactivity is the art of composing consequences to a selected choice of possible actions.
PC: Although Ebert says videogames can be art, he claims they can never be “high art.” Do you make that distinction of “high” and “low” art?
Thomsen:
I wasn't aware that cinema had ever been officially claimed as high art. Is The Bicycle Thief really more nourishing than Proust? Does Orson Welles really leave us in a better place than King Lear? Are we better off for having traded poetry and language for reductive film dialogue and montage? Ebert's argument is simply invalid because it argues on conclusions that can't be objectively supported. His concept of "high art" is based on historical pomp, rather than the actual merits of different expressions irrespective of the weight and import of their canonization. It is enough to say something is art, all other distinctions are either personal or academic and his statement contains neither personal admission nor academic factuation (though his film criticism does a fine job of employing both).
PC: Do you ever see videogames being held in the same regard as other mediums by the artistic community or mainstream society?
Thomsen:
They already are. My non-game oriented friends, the 35 year-old gay interior designer, say, to whom I make the same Metroid Prime-Citizen Kane analogy takes me just as seriously and respectfully as if I were arguing that Kane is the Beethoven's 9th Symphony of cinema. The more important question is when will game culture be more open to talking about the artistic qualities of games, instead of building up a wall of reasons why no games deserve distinction as exemplary acts of human expression, that shouldn't yield to any other form in history. The answer is not when games become better, but when those who write about them and their experiences with them become better. So far, we've done worse than have game designers in validating the emerging art form. We're failing our colleagues by giving their work short-shrift.
PC: What is your opinion on the ongoing debate of videogames as art? Are videogames making progress as a medium simply by this debate existing?
Thomsen:
The debate exists nowhere else but in the hermetically sealed culture of video game enthusiasts. I have yet to encounter a non-game player who discounts my point that games are art. They always concede this point, but that concession doesn't make them want to play games in the same way I could tell you Mrs. Dalloway is the finest novel in the English language but you'll still spend your time reading Harry Potter, Twilight, and the DaVinci Code. The debate is over. Games are art. No one seriously contests this. The larger question is why are games still thematically and aesthetically irrelevant to most people? It's not a debate of art, it's a debate of taste, and it's hard to argue that many games are developed in poor taste by people with the aesthetic aspiration of an adolescent. So why should anyone care about that?
