Warren Robinett on Games as Art
September 3, 2010 | In: Art, PersonalBlog, Programming
Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to speak to a legend in the video game industry: Warren Robinett. When you see his name you might recall that Warren was the co-founders of The Learning Company, who produced the Reader Rabbit and the Carmen Sandiego series of educational games. However, if you are a game nerd like me, you remember this moment from the classic Atari VCS game Adventure.
That’s right. Warren was the game designer who introduced the gaming world to the “Easter Egg”. Placed in the game as a reaction to Atari management’s stance on not giving the game designers’ credit for their work, Warren, unknowingly, established a video game convention that is commonplace among game development today and is the kindred spirit of the tradition that animators have long held; one in which they would slip unauthorized messages or images into a film.
After discussing the work being done on The Art of Video Games exhibition, Warren sent me a copy of the foreword that he wrote for the book, “The Video Game Theory Reader”, written by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. In the foreword, Warren discusses the emergence of video games as a new art form and dissects that trajectory. It is with Warren’s permission that I will share with you the first page from his foreword.
It is hard to say what ranks lower on the artistic food-chain than video games. Comic books? TV sit-coms? X-rated films? These rat-like vermin at the bottom scurry to avoid the thunderous footfalls of the towering behemoths of the art world. Everyone knows that:
· Violinists, conductors, and composers are real artists.
· Novelists, poets, and playwrights are real artists.
· Painters, photographers, and film-makers are real artists.
But video-game designers? Is that even art?
The established art forms have their prestigious awards (Grammies, Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards). They have academic departments devoted to their study (Music Departments, English Departments, Art Departments). They have God-like practitioners of the past to idolize (Beethoven, Shakespeare, Picasso), and, as arch-angels, the living masters (McCartney, Vonnegut, Spielberg). And for these living masters, has climbing to the top of the Food-Chain of Art benefited their wallets or their sex lives? The true answer to this may perhaps strain the imagination of all but the horniest of nerd-programmers, hacking at 2:00 a.m. on his 3-D monster.
But wait! Despair not, horny nerds! Sometimes rat-like vermin can triumph over towering dinosaurs. Things do change. New art forms do come into existence — not often — but, if you think back, there was a time when there were no novelists or poets or playwrights. Before the invention of writing, there was only story-telling and oral ballads. The written stories were a new art form spawned by a new technology (writing). Perhaps the oral balladeers scoffed at the time. But from our perspective in a literate culture, there is skill, technique, and yes, an art, to piling word on word to make a novel or a poem. Likewise, from a perspective slowly emerging, there is not only skill and technique, but also an art, to piling bit upon bit to make a video game.
There is a natural progression in the emergence of a new art form. Often there is an enabling technology that must first be invented and made to work. In the case of cinema, for example, this was the motion-picture camera, projector, and film. Then come the first works exploring the new medium. The pioneers are often clueless, from the point of view of later practitioners, about what you can do with the medium, and a great deal of experimentation occurs, with a few successes, and with some bizarre and interesting relics that soon disappear. If the public likes what they see, they continue to buy, and the medium has a chance to develop. The ideas that work give rise to genres, and all too quickly, the youthful efflorescence is over (Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose/ That Youth’s Sweet-Scented Manuscript should close.) and the genres harden. Critics arise when there are enough works that the public needs help sorting out the good from the bad. And trying to analyze what separates the good from the bad naturally leads to a theory, or theories, about the medium. Throughout the progression outlined here, in a healthy and developing medium, there is a continuous competition among the practitioners making new works. The critics and theorists cannot get started without a body of works to winnow and analyze, and their work is meaningless without a stream of new works being created, presumably being informed (somewhat) by their efforts. The wolf keeps the caribou strong. The players, the designers, the critics, and the theorists are natural members of a healthy ecosystem.
Thank you Warren. Now, to all of you, go buy this book!
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