From Game to Glory: Alum Sees Art in Video Games

If you’ve ever been sucked into a video game for hours straight, you’ve probably felt that subsequent

Image from Cult Montreal.

twinge of guilt over spending so much time on the couch – or, at least, you’ve heard something along the lines of, “You’re wasting your entire day on that game! Go outside and live a little!”

Next time, don’t be so hard on yourself – and, if anyone bugs you about how you’re spending your day, just shake your head and reply: “Do you really think that art is a waste of time?!?”

More and more, video games are being considered an artistic medium. Take, for example, the 2012 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Art of Video Games, which described video games as “an amalgam of traditional art forms – painting, writing, sculpture, music, storytelling, cinematography” that gives “artists a previously unprecedented method of communicating with and engaging audiences.”

The idea of video games as art is one that Daniel Nesmith ’13 had discussed with friends time and time again, and – as an art history major – he spent a great deal of his time studying the intersection of technology and art. When he had the opportunity to do some independent research for a capstone course with Marian Mazzone, chair of the Department of Art History, he concentrated on evaluating video games as an art form.

“Typically, when looking at a piece of art, you would consider three major issues: the visual entity as a whole, the process and medium and its place in the artist’s body of work as well as the art world at large,” Nesmith says in the abstract to his research’s resulting paper. “Overall, video games are very difficult to evaluate in this manner.”

Nesmith, now an administrative assistant in the College’s studio art department, presented his paper at the Southwest Popular American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, N.M., last month. He was joined by his wife, Colleen Etman ’13, who is currently studying Shakespeare in pop culture through the College’s master’s of arts in English program. At the conference, Etman presented her paper comparing two movie versions of the “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Henry V.

“It was a very good first experience in the conference setting,” says Nesmith. “Everyone was very accepting of my research.”

The takeaway of Nesmith’s research is that video game art should be evaluated by the quality of the experience it provides through the choices it presents and through visual and aural reinforcement – and therefore allows for the traditional art-evaluation methods to suffice.

“Whether a game is pretty or sounds nice – while very good tools for enhancing the immersive experience – isn’t the determining factor,” he says, citing the genre of horror as an example of an experience that is actually better “if it looks ugly. So, overall, the experience of the video game is the biggest determination of whether it is good art or not.”

And, just so you know: In order to really experience a video game, you might just have to spend a few hours on the couch.