at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, to 24 February 2019
IN A gallery, it is not only the quality of a piece that comes under scrutiny, but also its meaning. Gaming culture’s demand to be seen as “real art” sometimes runs alongside a resistance from many fans and creators to being subjected to the kind of analysis that art faces.
Can video games be art? Yes. Obviously yes. Video games are a medium as diverse as films or novels. Some are enormously profitable mainstream hits. Some are familiar rehashings of old tropes. Some are beautiful. Some are violent. Some are nuanced, self-aware, and explore and reflect human experience in ways that surprise and move the player.
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This isn’t a radical stance and video games are no strangers to prestigious galleries. Several of Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s were exhibited in 2017 alongside oil paintings and sculpture in New York at the , one of the longest-running exhibitions in the contemporary art world. Somerset House in London has hosted game design festival three times in the past four years, always with the support of Arts Council England.
Where Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt differs is in focusing not on the games themselves, but on the work of creating them. It should delight gamers and developers to see their world celebrated on huge screens. It will also fascinate those unfamiliar with the form and give everyone a chance to play. Bring the friends and family who still tease you for gaming and see them converted.
The first part deals with the craft of making games. There are pinboards covered in plot points, screens full of programming languages and sections on influences from film and fashion. The developer, whether a giant studio or an individual author, is brought under the spotlight, and their skill lauded. Some efforts to place the work within hallowed traditions are a little obvious: René Magritte’s (The Blank Signature), featuring a surreal scene of a woman on a horse simultaneously behind and in front of trees, is placed directly below a clip from , which uses the exact same impossible geometry. This is an homage, or a theft, depending on your mood, but we can all agree such borrowings say little. In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion of the extreme difficulty of gothic role-playing game Bloodborne: how the challenging, brutal fights were designed to produce cycles of struggle, satisfaction and pride in its players. There is a beauty, unique to gaming, in a perfectly shaped learning curve.
“Bring the friends and family who still tease you for gaming and see them converted”
In the show’s politics room, titles like “Let’s talk about sex” and “Why are videogames so white?” sound glib, but the content itself is forthright and thoughtful. Of course, race, gender, sexuality, class and other social factors affect the creation and experience of video games. Consider how it feels to an Arabic speaker when Arabic text is written backwards in a blockbuster war game, proving that no one from conception to marketing to quality assurance thought the language worth checking, even as this player’s home country is used again and again as a bloody backdrop for an outsider’s heroism.
In the final section, visitors finally get to play. The exhibition’s enormous scope is contained in a wonderful selection of tiny creations: a one-dimensional dungeon; a bear on a joyride; the 10-second heartbreak of . Even when they force us into difficult choices, even if we fail spectacularly at them, games are revealed for what they are: a medium of delight.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The art of video games”
