In his call for this month’s Round Table, Corvus Elrod asks whether games can teach the player anything, associating this question with snobbish criticisms of the medium as being artistically good for nothing. This hypothetical critic’s argument that edification is necessary to aesthetic seriousness is reinforced by the “serious games” movement, which often produces bludgeoningly enlightening pieces about the tradeoffs involved in World Problems.
But is edification a serious artistic goal? This is a careless assumption to begin with. The idea that art’s purpose is to explain complicated things certainly has historic associations with religious and political artwork. But moral and aesthetic weight don’t necessarily come from someone pushing a message, but from asking questions and challenging basic perceptions. The Impressionists painted the same scenes as everyone else. It was how they painted them that brought Modernism crashing down on the twentieth century. Real revolutionary artwork doesn’t explain the revolution, it formally embodies the revolution.
Even beyond general objections to edification, it hardly seems a good fit for videogames. True, developers in serious games have demonstrated gaming’s strength at explaining complex processes. Nonetheless, there’s something that doesn’t sit right about trying so hard to communicate through a medium that highly privileges individual experience. If you want to send a message, don’t let the recipient write it. My suspicion is that most games teach the player more about herself than anything else, and this introspective potential is a much more fruitful source of seriousness than edification could ever be.
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4 responses so far ↓
Corvus // August 11, 2008 at 6:05 am
Good post, thank you for submitting it.
I agree that setting out to instruct runs the risk of turning the medium into an interactive Chick tract, but does something doesn’t need to intentionally set out to edify to provide the material needed for valuable social lessons?
I also agree that asking the right questions is perhaps the greatest responsibility of an instructional medium. Do you feel games are exempt from that responsibility?
Line Hollis // August 11, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Corvus,
That’s a fair question. I don’t consider gaming exempt from any responsibility held by other media, and I do think it has potential as an instructional medium. But the implementation of that potential seems best left to teachers; my objection is to tying the question of instructiveness up with questions of moral and artistic seriousness.
Your second point has me thinking. A unique feature of games is that when they pose a question, the player is usually in a position to answer it. How does this change what it means for a work to raise a question?
William // August 14, 2008 at 6:41 pm
“Edify” strikes me as a particularly slippery word. I would use it to describe my experience playing Xenogears or Gears of War, but I doubt we’re using it in the same sense, in that case.
There’s a lot of grey area, though. If I feel that Bioshock sensitized me better to the effect of violence, was I edified? Does a game need to try to be edifying in order to be so?
I’m tempted to say that someone’s intentions in creating a game are irrelevant to how the end result should be interpreted, but that’s a bit of a knee-jerk reaction on my part. I’m curious what you think.
Line Hollis // August 17, 2008 at 6:23 pm
William,
You’re right, “edify” is definitely a tricky and loaded term. For my part, I’m using it with all the connotations of art-as-moral-medicine that can be unkindly associated with it, and that seem implicit in the view that a worthwhile art form must be able to teach you something.
That said, I agree that the supposed intentions of the artist ought to be left out of it. I’m more interested in how the idea of edification affects how we as players and critics interpret a game. As you point out, it leads to some grey areas. Internalizing the worldview of a game isn’t always a straightforward process, and it would be interesting to discuss more about how this happens and why it’s important.