An Exhibition That Proves Video Games Can Be Art

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In April 2010, a brouhaha erupted in the gaming community that still reverberates today: The film critic Roger Ebert had opined that video games could never truly be counted as art. “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form,” he wrote on his blog. But three months later, in an erudite follow-up titled “Okay, Kids, Play on My Lawn,” he recanted. Great works of art, he speculated, “could instruct me about life, love, disease and death, principles and morality, humor and tragedy.” Ebert admitted that he hadn’t spent enough time with video games to know if they could, indeed, evoke these feelings. “I don’t know if they can be inspired to transcend themselves,” he wrote. “Perhaps they can. How can I say?”

Had Ebert played the game Passage for five minutes, he might have had a definitive answer.

Passage’s creator, Jason Rohrer, is the subject of a new exhibition at Wellesley College’s Davis museum, “The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer,” which is being touted as the first solo art museum retrospective for a video-game designer. (Passage is already a permanent part of MoMA’s collection.) Aside from putting to bed any lingering doubts about the genre’s artistic potential, the show presents an oeuvre that spans genres and conceits that would be difficult, maybe impossible, to tackle in a different medium. “It works both as a kind of philosophical object, but it’s also an immersive, playful experience that transcends any kind of interpretation that I might offer of it,” says Mike Maizels, the exhibition’s curator. Maizels first learned about Rohrer’s work via a Wired magazine article about the game Chain World, which was conceived to exist only as a single copy on a flash drive, to be played once and then passed on. “I was attracted to the provocation of making something that was always thought to exist in a profusion of digital copies into a kind of singular neat object,” says Maizels, who is also interested in the way in which some things are “relegated to mass culture” while others get “validated by a wealthy collector base,” as he says: “I am very interested in games insofar as they don’t self-conceptualize as works of art.”

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