Reader Response Theory and Video Games: Thoughts on G. Christopher Williams's "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art"

I’m a little late to the game on this one (no pun intended), but I’d like to offer a few thoughts on Christopher Williams’s piece for PopMatters, "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art." Giving his article a read before this one will probably elucidate many points here and is also worth reading for its own merits. The main thrust of my thinking in this post begins with something Dr Williams says early on, commenting on a quote from Roger Ebert’s famed “Video Games Can Never Be Art” article:

The really crucial observation to me exists in that last sentence, in which Ebert is suggesting that the player is doing something in playing a game, whereas normally an audience’s relationship to art (be that a painting, novel, film, etc.) is merely “experiencing” (in some passive sense of the word) the object before them, allowing meaning to “wash over them”, rather than actively participating with the artwork.

My problem is not with Williams's assessment of video games (even though I take issue with this aspect of Ebert’s original article) but in his later assessment of where value arises in other art forms. Williams discusses the history of aesthetics, citing Aristotle and Eliot in his discussion and gives some credence to the notion of personal interactivity in the field of rhetoric, but mainly examines Art with a capital A through the assumption that it is something you watch from the outside, not experience as a participant. In discussing Joyce, Willams does discuss the ways in which a person brings something to a text, but he only allows for true meaning to arise when the participant has stepped away from the art work, after the interaction is completed. I would like to discuss this focus on looking at a text from the outside in opposition to a view that sees meaning as arising from an interaction with a text. The reader-response theorists of the twentieth century probably provide the most helpful analysis in this area.

Reader-response theorists, incudling Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Louise Rosenblatt, Roland Barthes and others, have argued that the act of “reading,” both literally and broadly speaking, is an interactive process. Perhaps more importantly, the act of making meaning occurs not after, but through a "transaction" or interaction between the reader and the text. In Literature as Exploration (1938), Louise Rosenblatt takes perhaps the first stab at this type of thought:

The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text (30-31).

To Rosenblatt, meaning arises, not when one looks at the text from the outside, appreciating from an intellectual and emotional distance its various impressive and brilliant efforts, but through an intellectual and emotional connection made through an understanding of its elements as they connect to your own life. This doesn't mean that a book needs to be about someone like you or relate to your life in some concrete and literal fashion, only that the ideas, emotions, characters and words need to resonate and relate on some level. I don't need to live in 19th century Russia to appreciate Notes from Underground, but I do need to have some idea of what existential angst is like, what it feels like to be an outsider, and how "rational society" can create a sort of insanity. Or, I could read the book on any number of levels, with any number of interpretations, and the meaning that would arise would depend on which aspects of the book resonated with my experiences. Here, I am not taking up the banner of extreme subjectivity. I can't decide that Notes from Underground is about loving puppies or the war in Iraq. However, I will not understand it and I will not take meaning from it except on the level that I can connect it to something outside of itself. And so I must interact with the text.

It may help to discuss this sort of meaning-making in relation to a video game. When I was playing through “Flower” on PS3 a few years ago, I was initially floored by the dreamy, transcendent quality of it. Here I was in New York City, in front of a TV in my 8th floor walk-up, drifting off into some green wonderland where, as far as I could figure at first, my only goal was to make flower petals fly around and spin them into dizzying wondrous patterns. As the game progressed, I started to see that the ways in which my experience of flying around and making flowers bloom was altered as the landscape became darker and gloomier.

However, this experience alone, interactive as it was, was not enough to see a particular meaning in the game as meaning is traditionally understood in art and literature circles. I had to go beyond the game and beyond my direct physical interaction with it to make sense of my experience. I needed to interact mentally with the game as I played, to think about what I was doing on something other than a tactical level, as I would with any other artistic text. And as I played, I thought about pollution and the destruction of the environment, the disappearing green space in urban communities and the inattention that all of this receives from our political leaders. And most importantly, I thought about how this was mostly understood as an abstract concept. Environmental change occurs so slowly that it is difficult to understand experientially. We need Al Gore and millions of scientists in order to make sense of our gloomy prospects. And I thought about how this game gave an experiential way to understand the destruction of the environment by allowing me to play in a wonderland only to watch it degrade before my eyes. Without both my physical interaction with the game as game and my mental interaction with the game as text, I would not have been able to derive the same meaning. And the same type of mental interaction that I had with this game occurrs with a book, a film, or a painting. As you read or watch, you think about what you're experiencing and you combine it and connect it with your own thoughts on the world and you make an interpretation.

This account is an almost disrespectfully simplified example to illustrate reader-response theory and one that ignores many other strands of the field. As well, I don’t mean to imply that my process for making meaning was as conscious and direct as it may seem. Understanding texts is not an easy and simple process, it occurs through various interactions, through literal and metaphorical re-readings and re-examinations. Just as you can "get it" as you do a re-reading of a book, experiencing the story anew and seeing new aspects, the act of playing a game can facilitate the process of understanding and making meaning.

In arguing for an interactive theory of meaning-making, I also don't intend to propose that reader-response theorists should be taken as gospel and swallowed whole-heartedly. However, a crucial component in most discussions of video games as art is the fact that previous aesthetic theory and previous thinking on art in general has ignored or shunned interactivity. And so, where do we turn to examine this new medium? The reader-response theory provides an examination of a crucial aspect of video games, interactivity, but does so with a more time-tested medium, literature.

I think meaning is possible in video games, or maybe more accurately, meaning is possible through electronic media commonly referred to as video games. Perhaps it just exists in ways that are not obvious when you look through critical lenses designed for different formats. And perhaps the interactivity that seems so strange and bewildering to us as we try to understand exactly what this medium is and does has been with us all along.