How to Experience Games as Art - Tracy Fullerton | grokludo 15

In 2007, while at E3, the question "are games art?" was one of the hot discussion topics. Interviewing for ABC's Good Game, we asked developers on the show floor what they thought, and one of the most concise and thoughtful answers came from Tracy Fullerton:

"If someone could define art for me, then I could give you an answer to that. But seriously, to me, videogames are an expressive medium, that's more an important question to me than whether they are an art form or not. I mean art carries with it a number of connotations culturally, whether we respect it or not, how legitimate it is, but for me whether games are an expressive medium or not is the core question, and its a resounding yes, in my opinion."

Of course, the debate is now considered settled. Games are art, and we've had many examples of it as such.

Now, Fullerton is back with a handbook – not for making games as art, but for experiencing them as art. Art requires us to bring ourselves fully to the experience, to reflect, and to share with others. It requires work from the beholder.

Fortunately, there's a long history of art interpretation for us to build on.

The Well-Read Game builds on fields like reader-response theory in literature, and pulls from work by John Dewey, Louise Rosenblatt, and James Paul Gee, to provide a model for doing a "reading" of a game.

There's a process here – some of it new, and some of which has already been practiced in literature classes for decades. Keeping a reading journal, for example, is common in literature. Taking games seriously as art involves implementing these practices too. It's doing the work.

Crucially, a game ripe for reading can hit us very differently at different stages in our lives. Somewhat like the quote about a person never stepping in the same river twice, every time we revisit a game, we are different – as will be our reading. Journals help us compare these readings with less biases interfering with our memory.

It's definitely a different way to play – goodness knows, with my background in esports, and my years in criticism focusing on the mechanics, dynamics, and systems in games, this was well out of my comfort zone. It felt like I had been missing out on a dimension of play all these years.

In the above episode, Fullerton explains a little about how to take an "aesthetic stance" towards games, which is a sort of phenomenological practice, though I recommend reading the full book – especially if you're participating in Guy Blomberg's The Game Club. Book clubs for games seem tailor-made for "readings" of games.

I hope you enjoy the episode, and thank you for supporting grokludo!