In 1826, the art critic and collector Robert Balmanno wrote a stinging review of the latest JMW Turner exhibition. He berated the artist for his descent from naturalism into "excessive colour" – he saw only chaos on those giant canvases of sky and land. And he wasn't alone. Turner was widely derided and mocked by contemporary critics. His swirling, eerily blurred landscapes – though now appreciated as formative impressionism – were seen as an affront to nature; they weren't art.
On Monday morning, Radio 4's Today programme held a short debate on the cultural value of video games. "Let's put aside the question, is it art," suggested presenter James Naughtie. "I mean, anything is art if people think it is. The question is, do [video games] have a kind of power and integrity? Where do video games sit in our firmament? Do they make us think?"
In the studio was Sarah Kent, an art critic and contributor to the website The Arts Desk. Her response? "We have this ongoing debate, should we write about video games? Most people are against the idea because it feels wrong – they're not serious enough, they haven't got the right intentions. It's just a marketing tool for kids... They don't count as art because they don't have any kind of self-reflection. They don't think about what they're doing. Their function is to get you involved, unthinkingly and obsessively, like a drug."
Already, we are on depressingly familiar ground: the idea that somehow games are just for children, that they have nothing to say except "buy me", and that they are not a medium for broader communication. But of course that's exactly what they are – as long as you look beyond the exciting, enthralling mainstream hits, and seek out the works of, say, Richard Hofmeier, Anna Anthropy, Zoe Quinn, Christine Love, thatgamecompany, Tale of Tales or, oh wow, the list is so extraordinarily long.
Alex Evans, co-founder of Media Molecule, one of the world's most artistic and creative developers, was in the studio too, and he mentioned Jason Rohrer's haunting temporal study Passage, and Rod Humble's minimalist experiment The Marriage. "A blanket description of all games as equally adrenaline-fuelled is doing a disservice to the breadth there now is," he protested. "Most games don't want to be art, but on the other hand there are games that absolutely are reflective."
And there are. Really, there is such an obvious comparison to be made here: you would never debate the artistic potential of cinema by focusing solely on mainstream Hollywood films. Although even the most brainless rom-coms and action flicks have valid things to say about culture and society (just as mainstream games can, and do, explore interesting often self-reflexive themes), you would seek to consider the whole canon, the whole history of the form. You would think about Eisenstein, Renoir, Hitchcock and Kubrick – you wouldn't base an argument about cinema as art on the works of Judd Apatow and Michael Bay alone, because all cinema critics know that, as funny as Apatow's movies are, as filled with visual spectacle as Bay's are, they don't represent the whole gamut of cinematic history and intent. Grand Theft Auto is no more representative of games as a whole than Knocked Up is of cinema, and yet there are critics who seem to think that a few minutes with a Rockstar game and they're qualified to write off an entire medium.
Kent went on to describe the games she had looked at. "I was shocked and horrified at how dull and cliched they are," she said. "The images were so cluttered – there was this idea that the more you had in there, the more information, the more exciting. Art is about editing, it is about taking out, not stuffing in." And sure, she's right about some games; some games are horribly loud and cliched. But wait, so is a lot of art. So is a lot of television, a lot of cinema, a lot of literature and a lot of theatre. But, as critics, we tend to understand that the loudest works should not be mistaken for the most representative. And, actually, amid the apparent noise, there is aesthetic quality, there is meaning; you just have to take the time to decode it. It's a shift of thinking that allows you to read schlock 50s horror flicks as paranoid commentaries on communism and nuclear terror; it's a willingness to engage and interpret that turns flashy 80s pop into a comment on Thatcherite politics and rampant consumerism.
But not all games are about noise. Evans highlighted Journey during the debate, a beautiful minimalistic adventure. He could also have recalled Dear Esther or Proteus, or Monument Valley, or Thomas Was Alone, or Antichamber, or Limbo, or Gravity Bone, or Bientôt l'été; or, as a developer has just pointed out to me, mainstream titles like Super Mario Bros. Or, of course, Media Molecule's handcrafted works – LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway. Evans didn't mention these, although he could have. I hope he manages to get a copy of Tearaway to Kent (although her own site has indeed reviewed games like Kentucky Route Zero, Child of Light and Jazzpunk, which all challenge the idea of games as noisy adrenaline-boosters for kids.)
Does it matter? Not much, I guess. It doesn't matter that some people don't understand games, or don't look beyond the most controversial or successful. But then, it does matter to me that people will go on a national radio programme and denigrate a medium they don't understand or have experience of. It matters to me that on Monday morning, seven million Today listeners heard games being dismissed on the basis of a tiny minority of the annual output. It matters how consensus develops around new artistic forms.
I tweeted this morning that, as a critic, once you find yourself questioning the validity of a new cultural medium, you are no longer relevant; you have consigned yourself to a time frame, and your frame is over. Art and creativity are boundless and open; they are joyous. We are fortunate, perhaps, that John Ruskin provided an almost scientific appreciation of Turner's work in his critical masterpiece, Modern Painters. He laboured to overturn the consensus. As gamers, we should all do the same.
It isn't really good enough to shrug and say, well, that's typical of mainstream debate, we should just ignore it. We shouldn't; we should question it. Because denial is harmful; it harms artists and it will harm game makers. There are many hundreds of people, right now, making sensitive, extraordinary and subtle games, who are pouring their frustrations, fears and anxieties into these projects, often working alone, using whatever tools are at hand. They are doing this because games are a way they can communicate and express themselves, just as Turner expressed himself through canvases of light breaking through hazed, muted shadow. So to denigrate their work is to denigrate them as artists and people.
As gamers, we owe it to these people to question the consensus on games and to point out where it is wrong.
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