So we’ve established games are art. Are sports games (something like Madden ‘07 to pick a random one) art?
Well, don’t pick a random one at all! Pick a specific one!
OK: Take ‘Sin City.’ I read the comic, didn’t like it. Thought it was very pretty; hated it. Right? So I already knew, going into the movie theater, that I wasn’t going to enjoy the movie in that regard, because I already don’t enjoy Frank Miller. (I’m not the hugest fan of the way Robert Rodriguez treats women in his movies, anyway.) Outcome: I enjoyed ‘Sin City’ HUGELY. After, I kept trying to understand why. And I realized the movie absolutely elevates “facsimile” to art.
A number of years ago a friend of mine was working on his Masters thesis in “themed environments” — I think his research is still ongoing, actually, even though he has his degree — and we talked a lot about simulacra, artifice, how the Tiki Room at Disney is like a video game, real surreal stuff. When he wasn’t working on his Masters, though, this cinephile liked to collect or *make* reproduction-quality movie props. Once I saw them I was totally obsessed with them, the same way I am obsessed with action figures and scale miniatures. You absolutely could not have convinced him these handmade movie props weren’t objets d’art, and as such I was not allowed to handle them.
You might think of any sports game as an attempt at a “scale miniature” — this genre is classed as a type of “simulation,” after all — and so a very good sports game might impress the same way a working model train, with all the bells and the smoke and the tooting, and then the little trees and motorized signs, might be riveting.
But that’s only facsimile, isn’t it. What does it take to elevate “facsimile” to “art”?
The last sports game I played with any real depth was probably ‘NBA Jam’ on SNES*, so I’m pretty far out of my element. But a lot of that game’s enjoyment comes from, it isn’t really a simulation at all, is it? I mean, it appropriates the functional design vocabulary of a “sports game,” but it hardly aspires to any sort of “realism.”
What about ‘Hot Shots Golf’? I’ve always called it a “Sunday game” because it is lazy and fun and nothing like a real PGA Tour. Then again, I’m not sure it constitutes “art,” but you know, at least it’s something different.
Similarly, while I like racing games, I do much better with games that delve into the fantastical — something like ‘Burnout,’ maybe something with a lot of blood and guts — than I do with, say, a NASCAR sim. These “fantastical” games willfully fudge the real-world physics of driving (which isn’t to say I haven’t managed to learn to execute a “drift” in my own car, because depending on the highway, I can, and good god I am probably going to kill myself sometime), but they do this while appropriating real-world architecture, like buildings and lights and sounds, all to ground the game in an accessible vocabulary. (Then you have F-Zero and wipEout which, ah, don’t. They don’t do this at all.)
So I don’t play enough “hard” simulation to readily assess whether a “scale miniature” can be the same thing as “art,” because I can’t (and why would I want to?). I CAN say that I recently watched ‘Moneyball’ and began to wonder whether games already apply the same kind of math to sports games. Wow!
But — and this is working from my experience as a person who avoids sports and “sports games” at any cost — I think you can add new, unlikely dynamics unto a “sports game” that really fundamentally change the experience from “artifice” and “simulacrum” into this new thing. Is the new thing “art”? Well, now we’d have to talk again about what art “is” and what art “does,” and no, thanks.
None of these ideas are very inventive, no, but that’s because you can apply them to all sorts of media and environments.
*this is a lie; I actually play a lot of soccer sims; for illustrative purposes, I lied.
