On Player Agency and Art - Hamish Black
A favorite topic of games critics, theorists, researchers, and pundits is an—in my opinion, misguided—attempt to identify what makes games unique amongst the arts (aka medium-specificity.) Typically, whether game review or museum, the default answer has become “interactivity.” There have been many rebuttals to this reductionist, essentialist take, but Hamish Black’s “One Player Agency and Art” video essay on his Writing on Games channel, leads with an Anselm Kiefer quote about the difficulty of art and then proceeds to give one of the direct and approachable possible reframings, focusing on the way the lack of player agency is core to understanding how games function as art. One of the reasons I think this essay is so valuable is that, instead of self-proclaimed “art games” (which I love too), he deploys his alternate framing to read Dark Souls and Spec Ops: The Line, two fairly mainstream video games that are well respected amongst games fans. The longer I write and think about video games as an art form, the more I realize that a core area of the field that still needs a great deal of work is trying to figure out a robust engagement with games that are neither pure entertainment but do not actively seek the label of fine art. Some of the greatest, most majestic, most wrenching artistic experiences I’ve had with video games have come from titles that are resistant to and resistant by almost all of the fine arts discourse and institutional framework. Criticism like Black’s is especially valuable in this sort of community bridgework to showcase modes of artistic engagement that are still evolving to contain the fullness of video games.
Creator: Hamish Black
Website: https://youtu.be/9gWdemZuuJs
Connections
Mariko Takeuchi - Silence and Image (specifically, the eponymous essay)
Marcia Tucker - Out of Bounds (the essay “Why Art Matters)
Jesper Juul - The Art of Failure