Where I come from, videogaming is very much looked down on. It’s considered a waste of time, something that destroys your mind and turns you into a loser or a nerd. I guess that’s the Midwest for you. There are exceptions, naturally. It’s okay if you’re having a party, if you‘re playing something multiplayer with other people in the room. It’s okay if the extent of your videogaming is sports games and Grand Theft Auto, and you don’t play for more than a couple hours in a single week. But under any other circumstances, it’s a horrendous action that turns a good-hearted child into a lazy, unproductive, and stupid person.

Yes, in this town where getting wasted every weekend is accepted as normal, and parents refuse to punish their children for their idiotic misdemeanors, something as innocent and artistic as playing videogames is shunned by the masses. Well, okay, I’ll concede that not many videogames remain very innocent. And the majority probably don’t have a whole lot of artistic value either.

Or do they?

It’s interesting to hear people talk about how videogames have become mainstream in the past five or ten years. It’s even more interesting to look at the history behind those claims, which is, I guess, the history of videogaming as a whole. To truly understand all that I’m attempting to hint at, I’ve got to start by taking you, my dear faithful readers, back to the beginning.

It was in 1958 that Robert V. Dvorak and William A. Higinbotham, technical specialists at a weapons researcher in New York, first created Tennis For Two. That game would later be adapted for widespread use into the legend of a game known as Pong. There are various stories about a computer version of Tic-Tac-Toe that was created before this, but Pong is still widely regarded as the first real videogame created.

Can’t you just see that? Two old, stodgy scientist-types, hunched over a small monitor, playing the world’s first game of Pong? I wonder how excited they were. I wonder how long they played.

I wonder who won.

It was well over 10 years after Pong’s inception before the first home videogame system hit the market. The concept of videogaming by the masses (or, at least, by the masses’ children) was well on its way to being put on the ‘bad things’ list. Parents seemed to fear videogames would turn their children fat and lethargic, as though television alone was not already beginning the process.

This pervasive attitude was probably the major sticking point in the length of time it took for videogames to permeate into the mainstream. Though popularity of videogames had its ups and downs throughout the 80s and early 90s, it wasn’t really until the age of the Playstation that videogames became something for more than just ‘nerds‘. Say what you will about the amazing console war that took place between the SNES and Genesis, or the great times you may have had with your Atari, videogaming was never truly accepted by a large audience until Sony started shoving its fast, flashy, hardcore marketing in the face of the (at that point, mostly non-gaming) public.

Since then, more victories have come and gone in the battle to make people realize that videogames aren’t satanspawn. Since the start of the latest console generation, more people are owning videogame consoles than ever before, with games flying off the shelves at record numbers. And in April 2002, the much-ballyhooed G4 channel finally a debuted. A television station devoted completely to videogaming, these guys started off their first week by showing one never-ending game of Pong. It was, to say the least, an epic week, though its quite arguable whether or not G4 has lived up to any true videogamers desires since then.

With all that said, it’s still only been less than ten years since the mythical birth of the Playstation. Many adults, and especially parents, still count videogames among their most hated adversaries. Like past encroaching threats, such as movies in the early 20th century and television in the 1930s, parents fear what this latest technological monster might do to their poor, easily influenced children (or our poor, easily influenced society). And, as with all forms of art, these fears are well-founded in some respects.

Yes, I said art. That’s the other thing that gets me about the new-found popularity of videogaming. Even among those who concur that videogames are an okay, even worthwhile, pass time, almost everyone I meet still scoffs at me when I call videogames a form of art. If this industry is truly as big as or bigger than the movie industry, like so many ‘analysts’ like to flout, then I want to know why the work of this industry can’t be accepted as more than just entertainment also?

Comparing the videogame industry to the film industry may be a very well-worn cliché by this point in time, but it’s still worth investigating on these terms. Movies are the only other new entertainment form that has appeared in the last couple hundred years. Books, music, architecture, etc., all of these have been around for ages, but film and videogames are both new, young, cutting edge, and thusly they have a basis for comparison.

So let’s take a quick glance at film history. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation came out in 1915. Most film buffs will tell you that this was the first movie ever widely considered to be more than just entertainment. At this point, movies had already been being created and consumed by the American public and much of the rest of the world’s population for almost 30 years. Of course, even some of the industry’s founders were hesitant about the extent of the power that the tools at their disposal might hold. Thomas Edison, whose Edison Studio was one of the biggest producers of early silent films, was adamant in his belief that movies were for entertainment value only and could never reach the level of art. It wasn’t until long after the introduction of sound to film that this was embraced by the common man as a plausible form of art.

So, keeping that pocket history in mind, is it not likely that people’s reactions to early videogames are immediately comparable to people’s reactions to early film? If this is true, it can only be a matter of time before videogames are also accepted as an art form, and it’s going to take serious gamers like myself and serious game makers (Miyamoto, Kojima, etc.; the Griffiths and the Langs of videogames) to make this happen.

Non-videogamers just write off the claim as bogus without any investigation. “What do videogames have, anyways?” they’ll say. “Sex, violence, drugs, crime. Nothing worthwhile or redeeming!” It’s a belief taken up by almost all people who’ve never played before. They often say this while conveniently ignoring the fact that movies, television, books, and music also contain these vices in droves. It’s kind of a characteristic of art: controversy.

Luckily for us on the video gaming side of things, we have plenty of structurally concrete evidence to point to in support of our cause. For example, Metal Gear Solid 2. This major Playstation 2 title was released to mass-praise from critics, but with a slightly-more-than-healthy dose of mass-confusion. Underneath all those mind-boggling layers of plot that the game’s lengthy cut scenes provided, though, was a very strongly post-modern piece of work created in large part by a very artistic man. If you can sift through the strangeness of it all, the message to MGS2 is a very clear and beautiful one.

Another recent example, also on the Playstation 2, is ICO. This is a game on the exact opposite of Metal Gear Solid 2 on the art spectrum, which isn’t to say it’s not art, but rather that it’s art for a completely different reason. Where in MGS2 it’s almost completely the story that makes it art, in ICO it’s totally based around the design. ICO’s story is amazingly simple, a save-the-princess tale that we’ve heard a million times before. But what makes this game beautiful is the amazing game design and the way the games creators take this elementary plot and create some truly memorable, poignant moments. When you’re playing a videogame where you honestly start feeling for the characters, you know you’ve got something special.

Of course the real question with a new art form comes as, “How do you know whether or not this is really art?” Who decided, for example, that Birth of a Nation is art, while other old silent movies like The Great Train Robbery are not? Or, more importantly, why did they decide as such? And from the information that the answers to these questions can provide us, what videogames can we definitively state as pieces of art as opposed to simple entertainment? These are the questions that I’m setting out to answer.

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