One of the most heated discussions in recent years, arising as a result of increasingly complex and elaborate narratives, is whether the video game is an artistic expression or not. However, this does not make it much easier for games to be seen in practice as a form of entertainment to be taken more and more seriously. The justification is that art, as defined by Walter Benjamin, is that unique artifact that holds an aura due precisely to that uniqueness. For example, the only Mona Lisa that can be seen as a work of art is that painting present in the Louvre Museum. Any other mass reproduction of it, such as the one that prints notebook covers, mugs or posters, will cause it to lose this attribute of “aura”, as described by the thinker in “The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility”, by 1936.
From this point of view, art is an impassive object of discussion. It is on a pedestal and there it becomes untouchable. At the moment, for a media that, despite having already advanced a lot in this area, still tries to consolidate itself alongside other more traditional ones, such as cinema, music or even theater, this sacredness is harmful, since it is from a discursive analysis that new ideas will emerge to help solidify the role of video games in human culture of the 21st century.
It would be much more beneficial, however, to leave this quasi-Shakespearean discussion about “to be or not to be” art a little to consider the video game media as mass culture. According to Edgar Morin, mass culture is that produced from industrial manufacturing techniques and propagated in a massive way, reaching a large-scale audience in a homogeneous way.
This definition coined in 1962 in the work “Mass Culture in the 20th Century” applies to the way the video game itself is produced as a marketing product and has a consumer as its final destination. Although each player has a different experience due to the fact that the video game as a means of communication allows unique and personalized forms of play – the proposal of No Man’s Sky, despite failing in the final delivery, is just an example of this – the product in question whether to be sold, that cartridge or disc that is in the sealed box, is still the same.
Culture, in itself, is defined by a body of images that penetrate common sense and directly affect social aspects that go beyond itself. The influence in question goes beyond the limits of the niche referring only to the video game itself.
It is this type of social impact that the video game needs to cause to establish its hegemony in modernity once and for all. It is noted, however, that it is also necessary to have a look at oneself that recognizes one’s position as an item that started to reach a popular sphere after the crash of the 1980s as a product whose main target audience was children. There should be no shame in admitting something like that. Cinema itself, now consolidated as the seventh art, started with nickelodeons, machines capable of reproducing short films and whose audience was the proletarian mass.
Video games cannot be just art. Video game is fun!
The main problem with the video game is that digital games are taking an uninteresting path towards something whose goal for consumers when experiencing it is entertainment, just like cinema in its most precarious forms. Classification as an art form contradicts this key concept in which the market itself is based. That is why there is a certain disdain for certain titles produced annually at an industrial pace, such as FIFA or Call of Duty, which can be seen as the materialization of this idea.
The next step in the supposed world domination of gaming culture should be to accept that this type of title is necessary for the consolidation of a media. This assumption that the video game is still struggling to stabilize itself as a hegemonic media in society may seem exaggerated or apocalyptic, but the numbers prove that the world already consumes less video games than it was consuming ten years ago. Analyzing superficially, it is possible to notice the decrease in graphics in relation to the equipment sold over the years . It doesn’t matter if it has been a while since the income of the gaming industry is greater than that of the cinema. The film industry, at least, continues to grow, despite having faced successive crises.
McLuhan, already in the sixties, predicted that new forms of communication would face this problem, of having to accept themselves as mass culture. According to him, “is it precisely because we have established the widest separation between culture and our new media that we are unable to view new media as culture”? It is something to question.
This definition of art turns out to be a double-edged sword. The reason is because, according to Morin, “Cults live in a valuing, differentiated, aristocratic conception of culture. That is why the term ’20th century culture’ immediately evokes not the world of television, radio, cinema, comics, the press, songs, tourism, holidays, leisure, but Mondrian, Picasso, Stravinsky, Alban, Berg, Musil, Proust, Joyce ”. Considering these two groups, the question remains open: which of them will the average, ordinary player end up being more entertained with?