ART, GAME AND NARRATIVE: AT THE END, A QUESTION OF TASTE

(Previous Spanish version posted on 11.19.06. It has been edited to be self-contained).

Beyond the usual attendance to diverse festivals and conference, offering instant information on phenomena allowing me to “carve out” an opinion about the relations between art and technology, my academical studies compel me to think about the narrative specificites in the digital sphere, but no matter how much I think about them, and no matter how much I try to do research on phenomena such as experimental cinema and the rise of videogames, I have the growing feeling that the debate should be focused on different terms.

Where does it really lay the prejudice against interactive narrative, or, to be more specific, against videogames? I already wrote about the divergences between narrative and non narrative digital art, regarding aspects such as historical background and further development in the structure of cultural capitalism. I still endorse what I wrote before, but I’d like to add a complementary dimension to the analysis: that of the question of taste.

The world of art (something that’s often called “the art instution”) assumes a certain taste, a certain aesthetic ground. The same happens with the music and movie industries, and, more recently, with the digital technological industry focused on VR devices, games and so on. There seem to be some predefined aesthetics (not one model, but some coexistent models recognised as belonging to a certain sphere). These are not eternal and can (and must be) transformed, but they constitute starting points working as an (unavoidable?) cerberus, preventing or providing the access to certain spheres.

Taking this idea a little bit (too) far, we could say that there are “erroneous” aesthetics that become accepted when some acceptance mechanisms are built or relaxed. As an example, I have in mind the exhibition cinema. There are some ways of making movies (or video) that make it easy to access the art context (for instance, those records on performance art, or those moving images regarded as experimental because they “join” an aesthetic model which is more abstract than figurative and narrative). There is another obvious way of access which is the passing of time: age allows Dziga Vertov, Nosferatu or even Alfred Hitchock (maybe because of the providential intervention of Douglas Gordon in the last case) to become artistic material.

In relation to games, art games have managed to build bridges between art world and commercial games up to this day, often resorting to the critical strategy of reverse engineering. But reappropriation shouldn’t be the only means to generate art. And maybe, in this same sense, aesthetics are still an obvious obstacle. Because, from an aesthetical viewpoint, Scarface the game can’t be compared to the movie it’s based on, 1983’s Scarface (needless to say it doesn’t stand up to the original film). Am I saying this because I’m not exactly a fan of polygon aesthetics? But taste is something you can educate. Should we educate our taste to include more mass culture phenomena, the same as we gladly accept tacky movie aesthetics because we’re used to them? Should we put some limits to this?

The answer is so complex that still scholars start by quoting Kant to analyse it, but I’d like to start to sow some dobut with a question: why we have been able to accept art as ugliness, completely awful works, and nonetheless we are sometimes reluctant to other uglinessess because apparently they are way too commercial?