In the early 1970s, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell launched a revolution when he created one of the first video games, Pong. The game was groundbreaking despite its aesthetic simplicity: two paddles, a square ball and a vertical line.
Video games have come a long way since Pong. Today, games like Doom, Myst and Quake have evolved to create 3-D virtual worlds with lifelike sounds, elaborate graphics and complex plots.
But can video games also be considered a form of art?
That question will be among the topics discussed Thursday night at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Media Arts Council (SMAC) symposium, "ArtCade: Exploring the Relationship Between Video Games and Art."
Nolan Bushnell, inventor of Pong and founder of Atari; Will Wright, designer of SimCity and the Sims; Lev Manovich, media artist, theorist and author of The Language of New Media; and Margaret Crane, media artist and former artist in residence at Xerox PARC, are among the panelists.
ArtCade will also showcase a cross section of video games from the '70s to the present, demos of yet-to-be-released games, as well as CD-ROM and online work by artists using video games as a departure point in their work.
While topics such as violence in video games have been discussed ad nauseam, both the media and museums have rarely discussed the interaction between art and games.
The exhibit, which is expected to draw a full-capacity crowd of 300 people, has already struck a chord with the public resurgence of nostalgia for vintage games, said Linda Jacobson, co-founding editor of Wired magazine and moderator for the panel. The event will gather industry pioneers from both the art and gaming communities.
"It could only be expected that the two communities would converge," Jacobson said.
Gaming as an art form has gone widely unrecognized and is often dismissed by serious critics. But recently, a growing number of scholars and artists have turned their attention to video games.
The current explosion of cultural and artistic interest in computer games has been evidenced by a dozen major art shows in the last year, Manovich wrote in an e-mail.
The University of California at Irvine recently considered a proposal to make computer games and gaming an official undergraduate minor.
Games are also starting to converge with other media. Mainstream films such as The Matrix and Final Fantasy have used cutting-edge art drawn from video games.
Since the days of Pong, artists have been inspired by video games. Young people who grew up cranking quarters into arcade machines and thumbing joysticks have long recognized the pixel as the medium they want to use to make art.
"Both art and games have the ability to change the user; to change their perception of the world around them," Wright said.
In the past 30 years, games have evolved from using two-dimensional graphics, as with Pong and Pac-Man to 3-D, multimedia, pseudo-reality games such as Doom and Quake. Gamers no longer use stand-up machines; instead, they contort to sofas at home.
But what makes a good game, art or gameplay?
Art and video games can have opposing goals, Bushnell said. While art, for the most part, makes people want to think or feel, video games make people want to act.
"Many times, art is meant to push envelopes and force people to think, feel or emote certain things," Bushnell said. "The first rule of games is clarity.... In general, you want people not to have to struggle with the game."
In fact, the visuals may not matter if the game has a good story. The industry is littered with games that have beautiful art with bad gameplay and have failed, Bushnell said.
"Good gameplay can exist without art. Gameplay is necessary, whereas art is not," Bushnell said.
But others say that art may be vital in some games, such as an interactive game at a museum kiosk.
"Art is more important than gameplay, depending on the purpose," Wright said.
The video game industry has focused largely on what sells, rather than what works aesthetically. Companies such as Sony, Nintendo and Sega that are sponsoring the exhibit need to sell millions of copies of their games.
But unlike with games, "people don't buy millions of copies of art," Jacobson said.
"There is a line between games and art," said Alex Lloyd, chairman of the SFMOMA Media Arts Council. "A game is a commercial endeavor. But I think people will appreciate the interactive nature and experience (of a video game) and it will be considered its own art form."
Games like Myst have blurred the line between storytelling in games and narratives in art.
Both gamers and artists agree that video games will continue to evolve as an artistic genre.
"We've come a long way since batting a square ball around," Bushnell said. "It wasn't square because we wanted it to (be). It was square because it had to be."
The ArtCade will be open to the public July 20 and 21.
