First, however, let’s examine why videogames might not be art. It’s hard to call every instance of any medium art, though in a sense it is. Although painting a house is not the same thing as painting a portrait, the housepainter is still forced to consider the color scheme, to make sure the layers of paint are even across the house, to create a visually pleasing final product. However, seeing a basic garden-variety house doesn’t produce the same reaction in the viewer that seeing a painting hanging in a museum might. "How pretty" (or, if the housepainter is unfortunately unskilled, "How ugly") might be the extent of the thoughts running through the viewer’s mind before he or she moves on mentally to other matters. So a real sense of interpretation is missing from something so simple. In the same sense, a game as simple as Pong, or these days the ubiquitous “party games”—titles such as Mario Party and Fusion Frenzy, built entirely around simple multiplayer competition games and excluding any single-player or narrative components—do their job well but don’t make much of an impression on the player. There’s nothing really there to interpret.
Being bland isn’t so bad. Paint jobs may be hideous, but at least they don’t have the capacity to titillate or appeal to latent bloodlust, as some videogames inarguably have done. One-on-one martial-arts simulation games have been common enough ever since 1992’s Street Fighter II, but the violence in these games was the sort of bloodless, balletic fighting long seen in Hong Kong action films: these games literally focused around martial arts. Things changed with the introduction of Mortal Kombat. It was not popular for its gameplay, which in contrast to Street Fighter II’s aerobatic leaping style was rather quick and brutish, full of sharp movements and allowing for extended bouts of pummeling. What marked these two apart from other fighting games was the constant, unremitting "realistic" violence. In one sense, the violence was anything but realistic. Cartoonish gallons of blood spattered across the screen with every successful blow, and its fighters had outlandish abilities, similar to the special moves that warriors in other fighting games had. But the graphical style in Mortal Kombat, which involved digital recreactions of live motion-captured actors, made it look as if the violence was real in a way Street Fighter II’s hand-drawn characters did not.
The fundamental difference, though, wasn’t in anything that happened during the fighting matches but what came at the culmination of a bout. In Street Fighter II, one fighter finishes the match standing and over the unconscious form of his or her opponent. Not the nicest of outcomes, but compared to Mortal Kombat it’s Sesame Street: when one fighter falls, the player is invited to perform a "Fatality," which ranges from ripping the downed fighter’s skull and vertebrae out through his mouth to burning him alive, leaving a pile of cinders within moments. In Street Fighter II, the goal is to win. In Mortal Kombat, the goal is to kill. The legacy of this shift in mindset is apparent in subsequent fighting games such as Primal Instinct and Thrill Kill (which was never released due to its parent company’s becoming squeamish over its extreme content), and has since spread to other genres including racing (Carmageddon) and action (State of Emergency).
In his examination of what separates the work of a hack writer from the work of an artist, screenwriter Ted Elliott has this to say:
"During the sturm and drang leading up to the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole took the makers of MONEY TRAIN (written by Doug Richardsen and David Loughery) to task. In the movie, an arsonist is setting subway toll booth workers on fire. Two days after it was released . . . well, you can guess.
According to Bob Dole, this was yet another example of Hollywood's corrupting influence, lack of morals and destructive force on the fabric of society.
One problem: In MONEY TRAIN (as in the other two examples), the character who inspired the crime is clearly presented as a criminal. He has a spooky voice, wild eyes, burn tissue on his hands, and a hand-made gasoline pump strapped to his back. He sets people on fire, for God's sake. He's a bad guy -- get it?" (Elliott)
Elliott’s argument, and variations upon it, has long been one of the clearest rebuttals to those who say that the consumption of television, movies, or rap lyrics featuring violence inherently has a negative effect on its supposedly impressionable audience. But it falls apart in games such as those mentioned above, where you are put directly in the shoes of the one responsible for all the mayhem. How can players be expected to reject such lethal behavior when they and their onscreen representative are the ones responsible for perpetrating it?
This is not to say such games are entirely worthless—for some players, these games serve as ways to blow off stress or steam by acting as a safe expression of otherwise harmful impulses. But they’re hackwork on the face of it, appealing squarely to the baser human desires with no context or rewards other than the visceral thrill of spattering blood.
This is especially clear when one considers a game which has everything the bloodsport games do, but with added flexibility and interactivity: Grand Theft Auto III. There, the player is set in the middle of a crime-soaked, depraved city on par with Sodom or Gomorrah. The player’s avatar is a thug who unexpectedly finds himself free to act when the Mob attacks the bus taking him to prison, and starts from there as a small-fry operative in the criminal underworld, taking odd jobs here and there in order to work his way up the ladder to crime kingpin.
At this point in the description, it may as well be one of the bloodsport clones, or as Lt. Col. David Grossman refers to them, "murder simulators." But the key phrase here is "free to act." The game’s structure never forces players to accept or even seek out missions from the Mob higher-ups. He or she can make the decision, for instance, to become a vigilante by listening in on police radio and driving to crime scenes in order to protect the victims from the very criminals that the main character would otherwise be working for. Grand Theft Auto III would still never satisfy opponents of violence in games: there’s no nonviolent option or one that allows for police cooperation, and the missions on the side of justice won’t allow the player to "finish" the game. But that shouldn’t overshadow its accomplishments as one of the first videogames to allow true moral choice during play, which takes it into an entirely different realm than visceral stress-relief. It takes the first steps, in fact, into the realm of art.