Is Art Games? Turning the debate around

So much time has been spent now talking about how we can have games taken seriously as an art form, yet so little conclusion has come of it. I would like to demonstrate something that, in my opinion, demonstrates how we can adjust the way we look at games, and the way we treat them, so that we might better understand the medium of interaction. Rather than attempt to demonstrate the ways in which games are an art form, I would like to demonstrate how we can view the world of art as a game in itself.

The phrase "art must be challenging" is a tad controversial within the art world. Certainly, the extremes of the modernist art produced under this mantra may have proven to be the downfall of modern visual art, but the fact remains that without a challenge to our perceptions, without making us think about our perceptions of reality, art is not so much art as entertainment.

For art to truly engage the viewer, then, it needs to challenge them just enough that they "get it" without being turned off. Following this logic, the key to creating accessible (and hopefully popular) art would be to strike a balance between understandable imagery and challenging content - between what a viewer would find "easy" to process, and what would be difficult.

Compare this to this image, used by Jesper Juul in his paper "Fear of Failure: The Many Meanings of Failure in Video Games":

"A Better Flow": Noah Folstein, 2004

With this diagram, Folstein (and, by extension, Juul) show the optimum difficulty level increase wherein a game will reach be at its most engaging to the player. A game that is too hard is impossible to play, yet a game that is too easy offers no challenge, thus teaching nothing, thus imbuing no sense of fun in the player.

Let us now briefly address an argument from the opposite direction. Within the gaming world, there is much debate on the subject of Shared Authorship - the idea that a game's story should be viewed as something created in partnership between a game's designer and the player of a game. Quite where the line between these two elements of authorship should lie is a subject worthy of a great deal of discussion.

Now, read this quote from Marcel Duchamps, herald of the modern art movement:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

If Duchamps is correct, art - and specifically the process of appreciating, understanding, and/or being moved by art, also shares the parallel of shared authorship with games.

In short, then, I believe that the appreciation and understanding of an art form is a game - just as socializing, learning, and almost every activity that involves the process of interaction - either physical or emotional - is also a game. Understanding just how and why this happens is key to understanding how we can better exploit the games we make, and produce a deeper and more meaningful experience.