Having weighed in on the subject of whether or not videogames should be considered art on several occasions, we at Level Up are loath to do so again. But when we read the following story from the Washington Post--our sister publication, for those who like full disclosure--we felt compelled to return to the scene of the crime. In the article, Post tech columnist Mike Musgrove discusses the experience that his colleague, Pulitzer prize-winning book columnist and sci-fi fan Michael Dirda had playing 2K Boston/Australia's recently released BioShock. Implicit in the piece is that Musgrove wanted to see whether the 58-year-old Dirda would consider BioShock to be a work of art. As Musgrove writes:

Given that the game has been widely acclaimed for its stylish setting, its moral complications and its invoking of Ayn Rand, it's entirely understandable that Musgrove would use this game for his experiment. But when he returns to Dirda, having given his fellow Postie a couple of weeks to play the game, he finds that his plans have hit a snag. Dirda is stuck in Neptune's Bounty, the third section of the game, because he keeps getting killed by one of the enemies and he can't figure out how to use the first-aid kit to, uh, save his life.

Musgrove, for his part, admits that he accidentally torpedoed his own experiment by not setting the game's difficulty to easy so that Dirda "could have spent more time taking in the game's story and less time grappling with the mechanics." Our antennae went up at that statement, because in the ludology (gameplay) vs. narratology (storytelling) debate, we generally come down pretty firmly on the side of gameplay. In other words, if there's art to be found in BioShock, a preponderance of that art had better be located in the gameplay. Otherwise, Ken Levine and his team would have been better served by writing a novel, an essay or a screenplay.

It soon becomes clear that Musgrove's experiment, though well-intentioned, was doomed to failure because Dirda doesn't play games regularly enough to be familiar with their vocabulary, their mechanics, their systems. Musgrove and Dirda both acknowledge this, saying:

Dirda, to use his word, doesn't know the "rhetoric" of video games. Me: I've spent so much time playing video games over the years that I'd forgotten people aren't born instinctively knowing how to "circlestrafe" a monster. 

For what it's worth, Dirda liked the parts of the game he was able to survive and seemed to enjoy kicking around the ideas presented in its introduction and early levels while tossing out theories about how the story would progress. The game prompted comparisons, from Homer's "Odyssey" to "Die Hard 2."

"I could lose myself in this, in some ways, easier than in a book," he said.

Dirda said the game showed him that video games "obviously have artistic value" and will likely become more of a recognized art form.

So: Is BioShock art? "I would hesitate to go that far," he said after a short pause.

When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?

To paraphrase a Washington Post slogan from the days of my brief stint there in the early '90s, if he doesn't get it, he doesn't get it. Please understand, we don't mean this in a pejorative way. We're simply saying, as we've said before, that we "see" videogames with our hands, so asking a complete novice to play BioShock rather than, say, Wii Sports is like asking a four-year-old who's got a so-so grasp of "Fun With Dick and Jane" to skip the funny pages and go straight for "Ulysses," "Lolita" or "The Bluest Eye." Or asking someone who's got some half-remembered high school Spanish to read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in its original tongue. It's a fool's errand.

As for the requirement that games make you feel sad or depressed in order for them to be truly considered art, if that's the threshold, BioShock and one or two fistfuls of other games have already vaulted that hurdle. We understand that Musgrove has likely distilled his conversations with Dirda for space constraints, so even though it's a representative statement, it's nevertheless extremely reductive to single out sadness as the bright line that must be crossed.

The fact is that BioShock, at its best, is capable of evoking some complicated responses from players--among them, shame, guilt, remorse, regret, and, yes, sadness--using not only its story, but most interestingly, its gameplay. BioShock's weakness is that it doesn't elicit these complicated responses nearly as often as it could, which we'll get into at greater length in our ongoing Vs. Mode exchange on both BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. So while Musgrove's experiment was noble in purpose, what he intended as an examination of the art of videogames ended up being a critique of their accessibility, and even though that may be worthwhile, it's not the same thing. Thus we conclude, as we did in our recent rebuttal of Roger Ebert, that we can't look to outsiders to explore the art-ness of videogames, nor should we keep asking them to validate this medium. We're all for accessibility, hand-holding and encouraging non-gamers to come in and educating them to get their skills up. But until they've developed their gaming literacy, why would we ask those who are blind of hand to lead us simply because they've established their critical bona fides in another field? No, we're going to have to keep doing this ourselves, and while that work may be difficult, it is, we believe, worthwhile.