Video games are one of the most significant developments in the mass arts of recent times. In commercial terms, they are now among the most prominent of the mass arts worldwide. This commercial and cultural success does not exhaust the interest in videogames as a mass art phenomenon because games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3 are structurally radically different from previous forms of mass art. In particular, the ontology of video games, the nature and identity of their works, and how they are instanced and evaluated is a departure from the familiar mass arts of film and popular music. This paper explores these differences in an attempt to fit videogames into a theory of mass art, but also to provide guidance on the issues of criticism and evaluation that surely follow from their ontological distinctiveness.
1. Video games and Ontology
Video games are one of the most significant developments in the mass arts in the last fifty years, and they have become one of the most recent concerns of philosophical aesthetics.[1] While the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV is notorious for its graphic depictions of violence and crime, it also provides a richly immersive experience where the player enters the fictional world of Liberty City as a character within that world. Mayhem, and art, ensues. There is reason to expect that our dealings with games such as Grand Theft Auto IV have ontological implications of the kind found in the arts generally, that is, issues concerning the ontological status of the artistic works and their varied instances, the nature of artistic performances, and the role of creators and consumers vis-à-vis works of art and their performances.[2] Indeed, I contend that understanding the ontology of videogames shows what is genuinely distinctive about this new art form.
Generating most of the interest in the ontology of videogames should be the observation that what is ultimately depicted in video games is largely shaped by the activities of the player. The world of Grand Theft Auto IV is not fixed at the time of its production, as seems the case with traditional mass art fictions; rather, the game exists as a set of possibilities awaiting the input of the player. This interactivity has a profound impact, not only on the artistic structures of videogames, but also on the appreciative practices that attend them. The participatory role the player takes in videogames, that is, in making decisions and performing actions that affect what is depicted by the work, sets video games apart from other forms of mass art. What, then, is the work appreciated in Grand Theft Auto IV that is so dependent on the decisions and actions of the player for its display? Indeed, why should we think that videogames constitute single works, when individual playings can generate such widely divergent instances? Settling these ontological questions is a prerequisite for understanding the appreciative practices of videogames and formulating an art-critical framework for them.
2. Video games and Mass Art
What is the ontology of a work of art? In aesthetics, a theory of ontology is meant to explain how individual art works or art kinds exist. As well as clarifying what appreciators engage with when they encounter an art work, the ontology of art works has a bearing on issues such as what it is for art works to be created or destroyed and on work identity. One of the most significant ontological distinctions in the arts is that between multiple instance and single instance art works.[3] Some art works are embodied in single objects: the Washington monument, for example, finds its singular location in the National Mall in Washington D.C. Other works can have multiple instances. The National’s album, The Boxer, can be can be instantiated at multiple discrete locations and times by playing the disc or digital file on an audio player.
It is relatively clear that video games count as multiple instance works, and so, on some level, are appropriately grouped with such works as films, plays, music albums, prints, and novels. It seems reasonable to conclude that the ontological schema appropriate for videogames will be of a kind that captures the multiple instance ontology in these other works. Video games are also obvious candidates for being what Noël Carroll referred to as “mass art,” a form of art that Carroll argued is in part defined by its multiple instance ontology.[4] Carroll claimed that an art work is mass art if and only if
1. x is a multiple instance or type art work, 2. produced and distributed by a mass technology, 3. which art work is intentionally designed to gravitate in its structural choices (for example, its narrative forms, symbolism, intended affect, and even its content) toward those choices that promise accessibility with minimum effort, virtually on first contact, for the largest number of untutored (or relatively untutored) audiences.[5]
On the face of it, conditions (1) and (2) seem unproblematic in regard to video games. First, Grand Theft Auto IV has multiple displays because the game can clearly be played by many different people in what Carroll referred to as different “reception sites.”[6] Second, game consoles and personal computers are quite obviously mass technologies.
Condition (3) might seem to be more problematic given that many popular video games such as Grand Theft Auto IV can be very demanding of a player’s skills and game knowledge, and so rely on a base of relatively experienced players for their popularity. A lack of gaming skills, which are themselves quite diverse and are built up slowly over a significant period of gaming, can be a real barrier to new players experiencing these games (as non-gamers will quickly discover if they try playing Grand Theft Auto IV). Many so-called “hardcore” video games are at least as inaccessible to the uninitiated as are avant-garde works of art.[7]
There are two responses available here. Carroll also allowed that mass art works do involve some previous awareness of the genre or form of art that one is dealing with, so audiences of mass art are not entirely untutored. Much of the tutoring comes through formulaic repetition, an observation that is equally apt for videogames.[8] The appropriate comparison class for the category of mass art is avant-garde art, and when this comparison is made it is quite clear that videogames tend to sit alongside uncontested mass art works because of their characteristic artistic structures and concerns. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is of a kind with military thrillers and action movies, and Grand Theft Auto IV is very derivative of crime films and television shows, such as Heat and The Sopranos. Second, what makes demands on videogame players is not necessarily game-specific knowledge or taxing interpretative tasks, although games do demand these to some extent, but the game’s physical challenge. Carroll’s theory is not framed to account for videogames. Therefore we should not judge his theory on the basis that it does not account for the particularities that arise from videogames’ distinctive combination of gameplay and art;[9] nor should we assume that because he does not address this issue of player skill, videogames are not, in his terms, mass art.
Hence, and I think quite intuitively, videogames such as Grand Theft Auto IV and the post-apocalyptic open-world role-playing game Fallout 3 fit Carroll’s conception of a mass art work. When we look more closely at the details of how videogames work, however, it becomes clear that there are some significant differences from mass art forms such as movies, television shows, and music albums.
One of the most persistent and useful ways of framing the multiple instance ontology seen in mass art works is in terms of the logical type/token relationship.[10] The type/token relationship prevails where a type can be instantiated by a number of particular objects, such as the movie Star Wars, which can be tokened by any number of showings, while not being identical with any one of its instances. Considered as a type, Star Wars is an abstract object and is instanced by a number of concrete particulars through which we come to know the type. Though the type is known through its instances, the instances themselves are determined by the nature of the type.[11] What is it about the type that does the determining, that is, what is shared between instances by which they are a type? In the case of Star Wars, it is the representational structure that constitutes the work; that is, the collection of audio-visual presentations that depict a plotted sequence of events, such as that Luke Skywalker leaves his home world of Tatooine, joins the Rebellion, and destroys the Death Star.
All properly formed instances of Star Wars share this artistic structure, even though, by itself, the shared structure might not be sufficient since a genetic component may also be necessary for identity. Upon travelling to a galaxy far, far away where they encounter an ancient alien civilization and discover an audio-visual artifact looking and sounding identical to what they know as the movie Star Wars, our space-faring descendents might wonder whether this actually is the movie or merely bears a strong (and exceedingly unlikely) resemblance to the work, perhaps being, instead, a dramatic reenactment of actual historical events in which a historical figure, Luke Skywalker, helped to defeat the Empire by destroying the Death Star. Settling the issue, presumably, would be the discovery of some relevant kind of causal or intentional link, or lack thereof, to the historical creative act that first tokened the movie.[12]