Video Games as a Solution to One-Sided Art

In October, I wrote a post in defense of gaming in which the central argument is a claim that any person who takes experiencing art as an important human experience should consider certain types of games as a worthwhile use of time as well.

Some games are basically interactive films, but some are much more interesting and original forms of interactive art. If you close yourself off from this world, then you close yourself off from deep artistic experiences that you can’t get elsewhere.

The Problem of One-Sided Art

A few months ago I did two posts on David Foster Wallace, his philosophy of art, and how to get the most out of Infinite Jest.

One of DFW’s central concerns in art was the one-sided nature of art. The artist puts in hundreds of hours of work, and the viewer/reader/whatever passively experiences the work.

He thought of the artist/viewer relationship as an honest relationship. If it is completely one-sided, then it is a defunct relationship and you won’t get much out of it for very long.

To have a successful relationship, both sides have to be putting in reasonable amounts of work.

Classical Responses

This is one-way people justify postmodernist writing. You have a bunch of endnotes or footnotes or you pull the reader out of the reading experience in other ways by drawing attention to the fact that they are reading something.

You write in stream-of-consciousness from points of view that change every couple of pages, so that the reader can’t immediately tell what is happening.

Whatever the literary device, the idea is that the reader has to put in work.

The point is that the more work the reader puts in, the more they will get out of the experience. Just like in a relationship, the reader has to invest something if they want a meaningful experience.

Of course, the relationship becomes one-sided in the other way if the author just uses a random word generator and plops nonsense on the page for the reader to spend months trying to decipher.

It needs to be a symbiotic relationship where neither side carries too much of the burden.

Solving the Problem

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this problem is a real problem, and what writers, filmmakers, artists, etc have come up with so far merely mitigates the problem.

There hasn’t been a really good way to get the viewer to truly participate in and invest in the work of art … until the fairly recent paradigm shift in thinking about games as art.

I’m definitely not the first to propose this, so I won’t spend a lot of time making this into a long post. Now that I’ve blogged around this topic a few times without actually addressing it, I thought I would just point out that games are one obvious solution to the problem.

They provide an interactive experience where the “player” has to fully invest in the work.

In fact, if artists are scared of the idea that their art will be “played” and hence will not qualify as “serious” (two notions that are extraordinarily hard to define or separate), then they should check out some recent games like To the Moon.

video games as solution to the one-sided problem of art

The gameplay is extremely minimal. The player experiences a moving story by progressing through the game. The gameplay consists of moving around to collect some items and at the end of certain segments of collecting you “solve a puzzle” (sometimes only 2 or 3 clicks of the mouse).

Still, this level of interaction is vital to fully immersing you in the story as if you were really the main character. This type of interaction is impossible with film or literature.

Conclusion

After centuries of trying to solve the one-sided problem of art in various ways, we finally have a medium for artistic expression that closes the gap.

Games serve as an interactive artistic medium in which the “viewer” can fully interact with the artist in a two-sided relationship.