Pregame: How Are We Going to Play This?

Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate. All video games are games, obviously. They're designed, they're digital, they have rules, they give an audience some type of vicarious experience. Beyond that, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron and NBA 2K12 do not on first glance appear to have a hell of a lot to say to each other.

I think we're pretty much done with the Are Games Art? question. How about this one: Are Sports Games Art? Not a few of the people who make sports games, I now know, regard that question as somewhat hilarious and way, way too parlor-room aesthete. (They probably wouldn't put it that way.) Many of the games most of us feel comfortable viewing as art are, most basically, rule-set systems made dynamic by human interaction, out of which some kind of "story" emerges. This is, in fact, what excites a lot of us about video games: a brand-new narrative form, etc., etc., but here is my question: Sport itself is another such rule-set system, isn't it? It's based on just that kind of rules-meets-human-interaction dynamism and permits almost exactly that kind of emergent "story" to appear. Remember that the whole crux of the Ebert Position was that sports — and, thus, games — aren't art but rather activity, no matter how beautiful and compelling said activity can be from the spectator's point of view. Art, though, has intent and direction, meaning and submeaning, and is definitively not something that happens to arise within seemingly arbitrary rule sets.

Obviously, this whole conversation is hampered by the fact that people who talk about video games, myself included, often turn to those games' narrative, atmospheric, or aesthetic content when discussing their artfulne...