Artistry in the arcade

I always find it interesting how we've internalized what film critics call the auteur theory. Whenever you talk about a Scorsese, a Bergman, a Tyler Perry or a Michael Bay, you assume that the director was the biggest, baddest presence behind the film — and that the best films, moreover, are the hand-crafted works of mammoths. It's somewhat reductive, but it works. And it sounds like it's going to work for video games.

A recent article in The New York Times Magazine focused on indie game designers who strive, self-consciously, to create art. It couldn't have come at a better time: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 raked in $500 million in five days last week, proving that the industry is liquid gold but artistically stagnant. Indie designers have a lot of blockbuster syndrome to combat, and they've responded, admirably, like a Justice League full of Lars von Triers.

"Games don't need to be fun," designer Jonatan Söderström says in the article. "They can get intensely weird and freak you out."

Roger Ebert is one nemesis of these designerati because he said, once or twice, that games can't be art. His theory: They're too interactive, and their authors don't have enough control over the audience's engagement. "Carrie" wouldn't be "Carrie" if you could tilt the analog stick and make her avoid the blood bucket — that kind of thing. Their response: I can control everything! Look at my existentialist version of Pac-Man in which Pac-Man eats himself!

The debate is a pageant of sorts, reenacting the coming-of-age of any medium whose artistic potential wasn't agreed upon from the start. Which is fine. It's gaming's Bar Mitzvah. Personally, I don't agree with Ebert at all: I think art can exist in any medium, no matter how interactive, and a crucial component to artistic merit is, actually, interactivity. Why do we consider "The Hurt Locker" art but not "Transformers 2?" You can engage with the former, take it home, wrestle with its implications. Confronting the latter is like finding a big chunk of metal in your Chicken McNugget.

That said, I'm also skeptical about the paradigm put forth by this group of dudes (which is similar to Ebert's viewpoint): Namely, that games can be art only if they've been squeezed out of the brains of individual artists.

Sure, gaming needs its avant-garde — everything does. But we should always be careful about licensing the term art to a self-selected few. Not every post-structuralist thought experiment with an X button should be labeled art as soon as it escapes the womb. Nor do all games need to be self-conscious. Zelda is art. Metal Gear is modernism. God of War is what Pauline Kael would call "great trash."

Thus far, the biggest success story shared among this intellectual conclave is Jonathan Blow's Braid, a side-scroller released last year that's sort of a post-modern Mario. I've played Braid. The time-shifting gameplay is ingenious, no doubt, but its ideas are impenetrable. Memory, time and quantum mechanics? At the end, Blow drops in a vague Hiroshima reference and goes all like, "boom." It's like that time I wrote a 17-pager for "Writing the Essay" that only I could understand. You know what Blow needed? An editor.

Matt Margini is Pretentiousaurus.