Frank Lantz, the Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, has a new book out with MIT Press, titled The Beauty of Games. The blurb opens thus:

“Are games art? This question is a dominant mode of thinking about games and play in the twenty-first century, but it is fundamentally the wrong question.”

It’s a standard academic bait and switch – everyone’s asking one question, but really they should be asking this other question that I came up with. It’s not an illegitimate form of argument, but it can feel self-serving, especially when it’s posing as a solution to a slightly dated conversation. I don’t know that anyone’s still arguing over whether games are art. Is that really a dominant mode of thinking, or is this new framework a solution in search of a problem?

I don’t mean to swipe at Lantz – I do broadly like his work. He was the director of Gamelab in the 2000s, when they made Spybot: The Nightfall Incident – it’s a 2002 Shockwave game made to promote Lego Spybotics, and it’s a core part of my childhood. There are fan remakes and all sorts. And I do think the book sounds interesting – it approaches games as “the aesthetic form of interactive systems,” which sounds like a productive way to go about it. I just have some reservations about some of the book’s framing and marketing. It probably didn’t need to be pitched as a “provocative” solution to the question of ‘are games art’. Video games have been considered art according to every possible metric for well over a decade. Dwarf Fortress was added to MoMA’s collection in 2012 – it’s a settled question. The thing this copy does get right is to suggest that ‘are games art’ is the wrong question. I think everyone always sort of agreed it was wrong-footed. Walter Benjamin knew it was the wrong question back in 1936, when he was writing ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’:

“Much wisdom had already been thrown away on trying to decide whether photography was an art (without asking the prior question: whether, with the invention of photography, the very nature of art had undergone a change).”

That question (here’s the bait and switch) seems like the better place to begin. It’s not whether games are art, but whether, with their invention, the nature of art has changed. Here in Melbourne the triennial has started, with robot dogs and a digital Bosch triptych. There’s an interactive piece from Yoko Ono, My Mommy is Beautiful, where audience members are invited to write their thoughts about their mothers and stick them on the wall. There’s play, emergent artworks, community-driven collaborative pieces – plenty to talk about that would resonate with video games. But let’s step slightly sideways. Exit the National Gallery of Victoria, leave the triennial, and walk down St Kilda Road. You’ll eventually come to St Kilda Junction, a seven-way nightmare intersection that looks like this:

Curve down Fitzroy Street past the park, turn left onto Acland Street, and you’ll come across Jackalope Pavilion, current host of the Rain Room. If you’re not familiar, the Rain Room is a large-scale art installation. The pitch is that it’s raining, but there are motion trackers controlling the flow of water, so you walk through the rain and never get wet. It’s a large, dark room with a single light source, which makes it really good for photography – the light catches the rain and gives people these sharp silhouettes. Obviously the whole effect depends pretty heavily on the technology working reliably. If the motion trackers bork themselves, you’ll get doused. So you enter in controlled groups, with a guide who takes you in and explains how the motion trackers work – and specifically how they get confused. If you move too fast, you get wet. The trackers aren’t able to keep up. If you peel off from a group, the trackers would ignore your movement – they would disregard it as random noise, and you’ll get wet. If you are rained on for longer than five seconds, it meant the sensors were glitching, and you should exit the installation altogether. The Rain Room website promotes the installation as merging “art, technology, and nature.” Really, it’s about the way technology facilitates our interactions with the natural world. The irony of Rain Room is that you’re not actually getting rained on. It’s rain impersonated, funneled through pipes and controlled by motion trackers. It’s a clumsy, grasping attempt to harness and direct the power of the natural world, to control the weather and abrogate its effects. What if it was raining but you never got wet? In Rain Room, artists and tech-bros join together to invent the umbrella.

Much of the marketing for Rain Room deliberately capitalises on its Instagram potential. The Rain Room website describes it as “Melbourne’s most talked about and Instagrammed solo art exhibition,” while supplementary pieces in Concrete Playground and Broadsheet describe it as “Instagram-fave” and “much-Instagrammed”. You can see why: it’s easy to photograph, and it includes the human subject, readily accommodating itself to the practices of curating identity online. When you take a photo at Rain Room, it’s not just a photo of the artwork – it’s a photo of you experiencing the art. The Room itself becomes a site for performing and curating identity. That’s something the exhibit consciously incorporates into its spiel. In the introductory session, the guide explained how to get particular effects, certain types of photo. There were a couple of Instagram girlies in front of us nudging each other and nodding attentively at these instructions – they knew exactly what they were there for. Inside, they spent their time alternating between photographers and models, finding angles and posing, doing things with their hair – I don’t know, Instagram stuff. And – you know, to be clear, this is not an attack on Instagram culture or girls taking photos. I’m not here to say that it’s inauthentic or superficial, that they failed to be present in the moment. They were very present. They engaged with the Rain Room as a site of curation, as a participatory space. The social dynamic of Rain Room is not one of artist and audience, but of architect and players. It is a sculpted environment handed over to the audience to make of what they will. In that sense, there’s nothing to criticise with the Instagram girlies. They were playing in a space that was given to them to play with. They got it: they went straight to work. They treated the Rain Room like a construction site for personal identity, tugging out the implicit subtext of all those pipes and metal gratings.

Walter Benjamin asked in 1936 whether the invention of photography changed the nature of art. Here in the twenty-first century, we might well ask the same question about video games. It’s not necessarily a historical question – it’s not about tracing exact lines of creative influence between individual texts. There’s a wonderful Killscreen article by Aaron Fox-Lerner arguing that the long one-shot Mexico City sequence at the start of Spectre draws direct influence from video game cinematography – it’s a compelling article, but that’s not what we’re doing here. We don’t need to go that far. The Rain Room simulates the experience of a natural real-world event, sanding down the rough edges of reality to make a play-space for self-expression, for performing and curating identity. All I’m saying is that in the broad view, there’s not much difference between that and Call of Duty.