Art and the first-person shooter

Chris Suellentrop has an interesting story in Sunday's New York Times Magazine (read it here) about video console war games. The story wrestles around the concept but has trouble closing with the heart of the matter - neither he nor anyone he interviews (at least as presented in the story) can fully articulate what is going on in the games. let alone what the attraction is.

Part of the reason is that the story, and perhaps many of those interviewed, start from a false premise - it and they see the games purely as entertainment, rather than art.

When I write a novel set in Afghanistan - Leopards Kill, for example - no one is confusing their experience of reading the book with living through the reality of the battle. Even if I write a nonfiction book on a war - Rangers at Dieppe, for example - it's very clear that the experience the reader has is related to reading, not war fighting. One certainly gains knowledge and understanding about real events, but the primary goal of the experience has to do with entertainment, emotion, and (with luck) insight into the human condition.

In other words, it's art.

I don't have to spell that out on the cover of the book. There's a long tradition going back beyond Homer that makes that clear.

But if I tell a story within the context of a video console game - as I've just done in Ace Combat - I don't have that long tradition behind me. What I have are people's perceptions that games are only entertainment. Everything else that's important about them is either suspect or completely disregarded, at least in discussions.

Which is kind of ironic, given how many people are actually having that experience every day. In some ways, the problem is as much about the perception of what art is as what video games are.

That will eventually change; Suellentrop's story, in fact, is one sign that it is.