uiowa.eduArt Form for the Digital AgeArt form for the Digital Age pg. 2Art Form for the Digital Age pg. 3Art Form for the Digital Age pg. 4Art Form for the Digital Age TechReview.com Current Issue | Past Issues | About TechReview | Search | Feedback | Home Art Form for the Digital AgeBy Henry Jenkins Home page 2 page 3 page 4Video Game TimelineThe real problem with video gamesUnderstanding violenceThe changing face of child's playStudents dreaming of game designThe industry's top creative mindsFuture ReleasesCounterpoint• Video games shape our culture. It's time we took them seriously Last year, Americans bought over 215 million computer and video games. That’s more than two games per household. The video game industry made almost as much money from gross domestic income as Hollywood. So are video games a massive drain on our income, time and energy? A new form of “cultural pollution,” as one U.S. senator described them? The “nightmare before Christmas,” in the words of another? Are games teaching our children to kill, as countless op-ed pieces have warned? No. Computer games are art—a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless. Over the past 25 years, games have progressed from the primitive two-paddles-and-a-ball Pong to the sophistication of Final Fantasy, a participatory story with cinema-quality graphics that unfolds over nearly 100 hours of play. The computer game has been a killer app for the home PC, increasing consumer demand for vivid graphics, rapid processing, greater memory and better sound. The release this fall of the Sony Playstation 2, coupled with the announcement of next-generation consoles by Nintendo and Microsoft, signals a dramatic increase in the resources available to game designers. Games increasingly influence contemporary cinema, helping to define the frenetic pace and model the multi-directional plotting of Run Lola Run, providing the role-playing metaphor for Being John Malkovich and encouraging a fascination with the slippery line between reality and digital illusion in The Matrix. At high schools and colleges across the country, students discuss games with the same passions with which earlier generations debated the merits of the New American Cinema. Media studies programs report a growing number of their students want to be game http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/webclass/student/kapler_anne/tracingimage/index.html (1 of 2) [1/10/02 10:36:05 AM]Art Form for the Digital AgeThis web page was designed and created by Anne Kapler.designers rather than filmmakers. Find video game chats. The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century. I will admit that discussing the art of video games conjures up comic images: tuxedo-clad and jewel-bedecked patrons admiring the latest Streetfighter, middle-aged academics pontificating on the impact of Cubism on Tetris, bleeps and zaps disrupting our silent contemplation at the Guggenheim. Such images tell us more about our contemporary notion of art—as arid and stuffy, as the property of an educated and economic elite, as cut off from everyday experience—than they tell us about games. NEXT –> http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/webclass/student/kapler_anne/tracingimage/index.html (2 of 2) [1/10/02 10:36:05 AM]Art form for the Digital Age pg. 2 TechReview.com Current Issue | Past Issues | About TechReview | Search | Feedback | Home Art Form for the Digital AgeBy Henry Jenkins Home page 2 page 3 page 4Video Game TimelineThe real problem with video gamesUnderstanding violenceThe changing face of child's playStudents dreaming of game designThe industry's top creative mindsFuture ReleasesCounterpointpage 2 of 4<– BACK photo courtesy of witney.orgThe Witney Museum in New York CityNew York’s Whitney Museum found itself at the center of controversy about digital art when it recently included Web artists in its prestigious biannual show. Critics didn’t believe the computer could adequately express the human spirit. But they’re misguided. The computer is simply a tool, one that offers artists new resources and opportunities for reaching the public; it is human creativity that makes art. Still, one can only imagine how the critics would have responded to the idea that something as playful, unpretentious and widely popular as a computer game might be considered art. In 1925, leading literary and arts critic Gilbert Seldes took a radical approach to the aesthetics of popular culture in a treatise titled The Seven Lively Arts. Adopting what was then a controversial position, Seldes argued that America’s primary contributions to artistic expression had come through emerging forms of popular culture such as jazz, the Broadway musical, the Hollywood cinema and the comic strip. While these arts have gained cultural respectability over the past 75 years, each was disreputable when Seldes staked out his position. Readers then were skeptical of Seldes’ claims about cinema in particular for many of the same reasons that contemporary critics dismiss games—they were suspicious of cinema’s commercial motivations and technological origins, concerned about Hollywood’s appeals to violence and eroticism, and insistent that cinema had not http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/webclass/student/kapler_anne/tracingimage/index2.html (1 of 2) [1/10/02 10:36:08 AM]Art form for the Digital Age pg. 2yet produced works of lasting value. Seldes, on the other hand, argued that cinema’s popularity demanded that we reassess its aesthetic qualities. Cinema and other popular arts were to be celebrated, Seldes said, because they were so deeply imbedded in everyday life, because they were democratic arts embraced by average citizens. Through streamlined styling and syncopated rhythms, they captured the vitality of contemporary urban experience. They took the very machinery of the industrial age, which many felt dehumanizing, and found within it the resources for expressing individual visions, for reasserting basic human needs, desires and fantasies. And these new forms were still open to experimentation and discovery. They were, in Seldes’ words, “lively arts.” NEXT –> http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/webclass/student/kapler_anne/tracingimage/index2.html (2 of 2) [1/10/02 10:36:08 AM]Art Form for the Digital Age pg. 3 TechReview.com Current Issue | Past Issues | About TechReview | Search | Feedback | HomeArt Form for
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