Video games as cultural products

[Olli]

"Are video games art?" is, in my opinion, a boring discussion - it degenerates so easily into bickering about definitions of art, commercialism, authorship, and (often uninformed) opinions. Plus it's kind of a badly formed question to begin with, because it asks for a "yes" or "no" answer (perhaps allowing for "sometimes"). But if we pass on the complexity of defining what art is, I believe everyone can agree that video games are cultural products - inhabiting the same conceptual space as theater performances, books, movies, magazines, tv shows, software, crafts, and so on.

Thinking about games as cultural products is something that I feel is not discussed enough. All games are not cut from the same cloth, but at the same time, I think it's fair to say that certain traits are more common in games that mere random chance would dictate. For example, games often focus on violence as the primary form of interaction with other beings. Not always, and not exclusively, but it's a biggie.

Video games also foster communities (such as this very one!) and they have their own forms of culture. You could argue that one form of video game community culture played a large part in the 2016 US presidential election, for example. Online gaming culture can be awful, or real nice. We often focus on the outcomes of video games -born culture (negatives: bullying, doxxing,...; positives: meeting friends and partners through gaming communities, esports achievements,...), but not how the games themselves and their cultural ecosystems encourage certain types of outcomes.

Am I making any sense here? Is this a discussion that's been covered a hundred times already, am I just being a pretentious ass? Let me know.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I'll be interested in seeing how academic critics and historians trace video game trends against broader cultural contexts. Like, you see all sorts of discourse about how movies in, say, the 80s reflect certain anxieties and the zeitgeist. I haven't seen a lot of work in games the same way, like, "there was a trend of games about so-and-so in these years, because of the housing crisis" or whatever. Bad example, but you get me. My immediate gut reaction is that games feel a bit siloed off from the zeitgeist like that, but also it could be argued that it's impossible not to be part of and influenced by the greater cultural moment happening around a game's release. It may be something we can only start seeing in hindsight and with more experience.

 

[WildcatJF]

I've been waiting to reply to this as this topic is especially in my wheelhouse, but I've not had the energy as of late. I promise to come back tho!

 

[Olli]

One thought: Video games are not created in a vacuum. They get influences from other games (video and otherwise) and other cultural products. Certain pieces have had massive influences on the video game industry. Dungeons & Dragons is a big one. Not only are there numerous officially licensed D&D games, but the franchise's influence is deep and wide. As many members of this forum are aware, Wizardry - itself a D&D-inspired game series - has had a massive effect on Japanese RPG design sensibilities for decades. Another example is Record of Lodoss War, which is a multi-media franchise that started as role-playing game session transcripts of some sort. As these D&D-inspired and novelized transcripts (?) gained popularity, the franchise spread into video games, anime, comics, and various other media, many influential to some degree themselves. So while Dungeons and Dragons didn't either invent most fantasy tropes it exhibits or serve as direct source material for most role-playing video games, any new RPG can probably trace one or more of its features back to that origin. If nothing else, the creators make an explicit decision not to create another D&D-inspired game in all respects, which is of course just another form of inspiration.

 

[Aeonus]

I'll be interested in seeing how academic critics and historians trace video game trends against broader cultural contexts.

He's neither an academic nor a historian (not professionally at least), but you mean things like this video essay detailing how the Japanese economic bubble, and their history with state religions, is reflected in all the JRPGs that end with your plucky youngsters killing God?

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I'll be interested in seeing how academic critics and historians trace video game trends against broader cultural contexts. Like, you see all sorts of discourse about how movies in, say, the 80s reflect certain anxieties and the zeitgeist. I haven't seen a lot of work in games the same way, like, "there was a trend of games about so-and-so in these years, because of the housing crisis" or whatever. Bad example, but you get me.

I'll be interested in this too, but here's the kicker(s):

1) Games are still a young medium in the grand scheme of things. This kind of academic work for films took decades to slowly build momentum, and even longer for TV. It took the better part of a century for attitudes regarding TV to even be taken as a serious medium and not as a slum where the talentless/obscure toil when they can't make it in film. The kinds of cultural shifts that have to happen within the general population takes generations to accomplish, and we're still at the very beginning of this.

2) Related - the cultural shifts that has to happen for these kinds of things to take foothold in the popular zeitgeist, historically needs to be buttressed by lots of industry propaganda, which just isn't going to happen with video games anytime soon. Consider the pomp and circumstance surrounding film awards, and the various film industry institutions that are decades/centuries old that support the artistic view of those mediums. We just don't have that infrastructure with games, and even if we did it would take a long-ass time for those things to earn respect among the general public. The closest thing we have are very nakedly/transparent commercials that spend approximately 10x the amount of their time advertising new products to people as they do celebrating the award nominees, as well as being laughably decided by an unqualified popular vote.

3) And without broad popular support, or industry patronage, formal academic study will be stunted for the foreseeable future. The film studies programs at universities for example - those are generously funded by wealthy alumni and major studios all over Southern California. Tons of industry money gets put into those things because that industry and the people in them see the value in funding them. And we just don't have that kind of infrastructure set up for video games. And a big part of that is also because:

4) The attitudes of the general public towards games just haven't really evolved that much in the last several decades. Even if more people play games than ever, and we're getting to the point where the majority of our society grew up playing them and respect them more as a valid source of entertainment. It's still just seen as that - entertainment. Look at how juvenile and simple the discourse surrounding games are on average in the public spaces compared to just about every other medium. The general public just isn't even remotely interested in a deeper, more academic discussion of games as an artistic experience. And without demand, there won't be a rush to generate a supply.

5) And even if you set all of that aside, there are other hurdles that academic study of games will face that other artistic mediums won't have that will complicate any discussion of the medium in an artistic sense. There is a deeply rooted cultural expectation, stretching back to antiquity and beyond, that art is generally seen as the product of a singular creative mind. And while we know that is not the case, especially in modern media, it doesn't stop everyone from continually framing it as such. Directors in film, or showrunners in TV get an outsized creative emphasis/credit for their respective mediums. But outside of a few rare examples, the productions of games are such an inherently collaborate medium that it's almost impossible to attribute an overall vision to a singular auteur. And if the general public can't really associate a singular face/identity to the creative side of things, it's going to be a large hurdle for the general public to be able to associate artistic intent with the medium.

6) And speaking of hurdles, going back to the idea I'm quoting here about games being analyzed through their cultural context - games already have a harder time doing that, and the public is going to have a harder time seeing those connections when the development timelines of modern games have ballooned to truly ridiculous scales. Take Final Fantasy XVI for example. Production on that game began in 2015(!!!). That's an 8 year timetable for its development! The world changed a whole helluva lot in that time. One of the stated primary inspirations from the developers for the story was Game of Thrones. When you look back at that timetable, that makes a lot of sense - 2015 was the height of the zeitgeist of that TV show. But in between then, and when the game finally came out in 2023, that show ended, and in an infamous way that really soured the public on the experience. FF16 came out 4 years after that. So the appeal of a "Final Fantasy in the vein of Game of Thrones" was over a whole presidential term of office out of date by that point. So for a lot of games, even if they're capturing a cultural moment in history, they're very often capturing that moment way after the fact and might be completely irrelevant by the time they actually hit the public.

So yeah. It'll be interesting to see how things go, but I'm not going to hold my breath because I personally foresee a very long road for the discourse surrounding games to evolve and mature to the point where we can really begin taking it seriously. There's a lot of hurdles in their path that historically have taken other mediums decades to get past where we are with games into something recognizable as being something we can take seriously. And that's before you get to the evolving nature of capitalism in modern society - where the social contract between the public and private industry has been completely obliterated. Businesses used to have to at least pretend to need to contribute to society/the growth of culture/humanity, and thus keep up appearances of being good stewards of our collective culture. That idea has been unceremoniously taken out back and murdered on the alter of quarterly profits. There's zero incentives now for the titans of industry to even pretend they're working in our best interests or are furthering the cultural progression of our societies. Their money is better spent on crass wealth extraction methods like loot boxes/DLC, or dividends/stock buybacks, rather than trying to convince the public they're culturally enriching society.

TL;DR - it's gonna take some time.

 

[RT-55J]

Good writing on the cultural context of videogames certainly exists. It just has the same curse as any other genre of games' writing, where the best stuff tends to be written by relatively unknown people for an audience of no one.

Anyhow, here's a couple short articles about Contra and Punch-Out from last year that I enjoyed:

Contra [1987/1988] + Metal Gear [1987]

Here’s the thing: I think everyone who has ever been exposed to Contra [1987/1988] basically immediately recognizes that its inherently politically-charged trappings are to be regarded as mer…

arcadeidea.wordpress.com

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out [1987]

Boxing is raw, pure drama. Conflict at its barest. It’s just two guys beating the shit out of each other in a vacuum. Pretense is present, but minimal. It mainly takes the form of restriction…

arcadeidea.wordpress.com

 

[q 3]

Game preservation is also just inherently harder than other media. You can read a Jane Austen novel today and have an experience that is physically nearly identical to what a reader would have had 200 years ago, the only significant differences are cultural. Whereas today it's extremely difficult to experience something even as major as Super Mario Bros in the same way that it was at release - you'll either emulate it on a new system with different controls and screen technology, or you'll scrounge for used, refurbished, or remade "retro" cartridges and hardware that may be scarce or expensive and still not necessarily the same experience as it was upon release. And less popular games on less popular systems will have even greater physical - not just cultural or informational - barriers to experiencing them the way they were originally intended and expected, if at all.

 

[MetManMas]

Yeah, video games being tied to specific hardware they were designed for or made compatible with remains a huge barrier for video games preservation. Frankly the closest we've come to it is outright piracy, which may not make for an accurate original experience but is a way to circulate the tapes.

 

[Olli]

Good writing on the cultural context of videogames certainly exists. It just has the same curse as any other genre of games' writing, where the best stuff tends to be written by relatively unknown people for an audience of no one.

Anyhow, here's a couple short articles about Contra and Punch-Out from last year that I enjoyed:

Contra [1987/1988] + Metal Gear [1987]

Here’s the thing: I think everyone who has ever been exposed to Contra [1987/1988] basically immediately recognizes that its inherently politically-charged trappings are to be regarded as mer…

arcadeidea.wordpress.com

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out [1987]

Boxing is raw, pure drama. Conflict at its barest. It’s just two guys beating the shit out of each other in a vacuum. Pretense is present, but minimal. It mainly takes the form of restriction…

arcadeidea.wordpress.com

These are very good!

 

[Büge]

1) Games are still a young medium in the grand scheme of things. This kind of academic work for films took decades to slowly build momentum, and even longer for TV. It took the better part of a century for attitudes regarding TV to even be taken as a serious medium and not as a slum where the talentless/obscure toil when they can't make it in film. The kinds of cultural shifts that have to happen within the general population takes generations to accomplish, and we're still at the very beginning of this.

I disagree with this take. Pong was released in 1972. Videogames are at least fifty years old! By the time broadcast television was 50*, it was the 1980s. We were deep into the lifespan of TV at that point. Furthermore, academics like Marshall McLuhan were examining TV as a mass media in the 60s. I'm not saying it didn't take a long time for TV to come under academic scrutiny, but it still didn't take as long as you seem to think.

I'd also like to note that video games came about as a new media in an age when media studies was a well-established academic field. It was far easier to adapt rubrics for earlier visual media (film, television) and adapt them for studies on video games, than it was to develop media studies wholecloth.

*I'm using the 1936 Olympic Games as a benchmark for broadcast television

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I'm not saying the academic study of games as an artform doesn't exist. I'm saying that the field lacks the support and scale to be as meaningful and influential as other mediums. I've seen some universities attempt to support the study, but the funding and interest just isn't there to support it on the scale that exists for film. It's still super niche. We're talking one or two faculty members if you're lucky, hanging on tenuously by a thread scraping for funds, on the fringes of art departments or CS programs. Versus go down to a place like UC Santa Barbara - a public university - and see the immense scale and money poured into that institution's film studies. It's obscene, and it's all essentially built upon donations from the private sector. Games as an artistic medium just factually don't enjoy that kind of support. So unless Jeff Bezos decides tomorrow to just turn around and do to the academic study of games as an art, what Carnage did back in the day for public libraries, it's going to take generations for academia to organically build that support up to the level where it can rival films or other classic art mediums, and thus begin to start leaving a comparable impact on society/the medium as a whole.

 

[Exposition Owl]

I'm not saying the academic study of games as an artform doesn't exist. I'm saying that the field lacks the support and scale to be as meaningful and influential as other mediums.

Not to mention the fact that we’re living in a time when all university arts and humanities programs, even in centuries-old fields like literature, face crashing budgets and all-but-nonexistent job markets. On top of that, the scholars most interested in studying video games are the young ones, who have even less of a voice than other academics. If the university system (and, y’know, industrial civilization) survives long enough, then I’m sure we’ll eventually see video game studies programs that get taken as seriously as, say, film studies programs. It’s just that that cultural change is facing a lot of headwinds these days.

 

[Baudshaw]

Perhaps one part of it (and I know it may be a bit of a hot take) is the pricing/economics around games. They have so many formats, costing anywhere from free mobile games to massive 70-dollar releases. Also, time is a problem. Even though they're technically a more efficient medium in terms of money per hour, they take a whole lot longer than most other works, meaning that the barrier to entry for consumption and review is high.