Video Games as an Artistic Medium, or Why the Celeste Soundtrack Slaps

As a genre of video games, 2D platformers rarely catch my interest because I die too easily. I bought Celeste recently and learned that I still suck at platformers... but the Celeste soundtrack is amazing. It was nominated for Best Score at the 2018 Game Awards and won ASCAP's Video Game Score of the Year in 2019. I'd consider it a work of art.

Celeste. Maddy Makes Games. 2018.

On a related note, Polygon.com has a fun series on media hot takes, and their recent post on the writings of late film critic Roger Ebert have revived the debate of whether video games are art. I didn't know this was a question people ask themselves, but as an Art History degree holder, I'll shove my foot into this debate. 

A quote from Marcel Duchamp succinctly states my understanding of art production. Whether or not anyone else agrees about the quote's veracity is secondary to our the need to establish common ground:

“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Duchamp explicitly shares at least two facts:

• Creative acts are performed by an artist.
• Through interpretation, spectators connect creations to the outside world and become contributors.

The Fountain. Marcel Duchamp as R. Mutt. 1917.

I'll tackle the first point: who is considered an artist? Merriam-Webster defines an artist as:

1. A person who creates art (such as painting, sculpture, music, or writing) using conscious skill and creative imagination
2. A skilled performer
3. A person who is very good at something

Assuming people who design games are at least "very good at something" and use "conscious skill" to create objects from "imagination" in a virtual space, they should qualify as artists. But maybe the fact video games are commercial productions with dozens (if not hundreds) of developers and financiers corrupts this idea of artists and creations? Let's consider two viewpoints: 

• A conservative person might say, "Commercial gaming generates revenue by using software engines to capture audience interest. Artistic merit is secondary to how we get people to pay for the experience. Money is the creative force here." 

• A liberal person might say, "Gaming, regardless of finance models, is rooted in audience interest, and that interest is guaranteed through realizing the vision of creators who have mastered the craft of writing, directing, compositing, graphics, music, etc. People pay for good stories."

I feel both opinions would be right. Roger Ebert might yield that this portrait of the gaming industry as composed of corporate greed and countless craftsmen is eerily similar to the realm of film production. His own thoughts can be found in the article "Video Games Can Never Be Art," where he points out cathedrals need many people to construct them, yet they are arguably artistic creations. (He actually leaves this an open-question, perhaps not wanting to cause more trouble than he already has.)

Celeste. Maddy Makes Games. 2018.

Now let's tackle Duchamp's second assertion that spectators impact art creation. While this implies art is to be seen by others, video games produced privately on one's hard drive and kept from prying eyes are still a kind of creative practice, I think. Not all art is made to be seen: maybe the creator is embarrassed by it or changed their minds about selling it.

My Celeste stats, which are not impressive by any means.

Let's concede that many video game developers aim for distribution on commercial platforms. This means the spectators are the consumers who buy and play the games. These people, as I would extrapolate from Duchamp’s quote, add criticism and popular opinion to the creative act as they interpret the "inner qualifications" of any given work. This can be uncomfortable for creators because it removes agency from them, but it can also be liberating if we consider creation to be a communal process. This was exemplified in Roger Ebert, who was an interpreter of film because of his belief in its artistic qualifications, and therefore contributed to the form's legitimacy. 

To make a long story short, I think video games can be works of art. Celeste's soundtrack was recognized as a masterpiece upon release, and the game itself was nominated for and won more awards than I can articulate here. Yet, Duchamp would have agreed with Roger Ebert in stating video games are not art, if only because Duchamp's definition concedes to the subjectivity of art interpretation in general. And I'm perfectly fine with that.  

I'm Too Dumb for Spice and Wolf

The first arc of Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf sees Lawrence investing in a rumor that silver trenni, the most valuable currency in the kindgom of Trenni, will increase in purity. As a 21st century person watching a series set within a pseudo-European world still governed by kingdoms and the church, I was confused. What does purity have to do with coins? Why are there competing currencies? I really enjoy the dynamic between Lawrence and Holo, the titular wolf, so I'm eager to understand the economics that drive the plot along. The rest of this post covers my investigation into how economies work overall and how these principles apply to Spice and Wolf. 

Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf. Passione. 2024.

Let's start with our current economy as a baseline. We use fiat money, or money that doesn't rely on a commodity to determine its value; printed money is intrinsically worthless. The United States Dollar, for example, is valuable because the U.S. is a nation with political stability and high Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Our government assigns the denominations, prints the money, and allows citizens to use it. The money can be traded on international exchanges between nations that have their own currencies. This is a web of relationships that's necessary for the current global economic system.

Now, commodities are goods that can be exchanged at particular rates. In a fiat system like the U.S. economy, I could offer X amount of grain for a particular rate and receive Y amount of dollars in exchange; money would serve as the medium of exchange, or the thing that allows people to participate in the buying and selling of goods. Without dollars serving as the intermediary, I'd resort to bartering, or offering my grain for another commodity of equal value as determined by the traders or a third party. Value varies based on the intrinsic worth of these commodities (whether they are useful in and of themselves or parts of a larger product) and what value people arbitrarily assign to them. Grain, a product people rely on for survival, is literally consumed. Metals, on the other hand, are often constituent parts in a larger production processes like making armor and such.

Image by DevangshuNandi1540630. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The intrinsic value, or melt value, of a coin is determined by the ratio of silver to base metals in its composition; this is the definition of purity. In Spice and Wolf, the silver trenni's face value, or its denomination, should not change due to a new minting. If the purity of silver in newly minted coins increases, this might translate to increased desirability because a currency with more silver is a mark of a powerful nation with rare assets. The face value of a U.S. penny, for example, is always one cent, but there are prohibitions on the exportation, melting, or alteration of pennies because of the need to keep them in circulation, as well as consideration of the melt value of its copper and zinc. Such prohibitions are also the case for currency like the trenni in Spice and Wolf.

The reason for increasing the silver content in a trenni coin, according to Spice and Wolf, is to manipulate this desirability and increase the coin's circulation compared with coinage from other nations. As Lawrence explains in the light novel I bought to supplement my viewing of the anime: 

"Nations do not always fight through strength of arms. If your country's currency is overwhelmed by a foreign coin, you've been just as thoroughly conquered. All the foreign king needs to do is cut off your supply of money, and your marketplace will die. Without money, you can neither buy nor sell. They control your economy." 

It seems several nations in the real world use multiple currencies. In the case of Ecuador and Zimbabwe, this is because their native currencies suffered from inflation, or the devaluing of a currency because of its abundance, which then causes an increase in the price of goods as businesses struggle to make more profit using the weaker currency. As a result, Ecuador and Zimbabwe rely on USD to stabilize their economies but cannot print USD on their own. To pay for USD they're using, these countries enter trade agreements with the United States for items like bananas or other commodities. 

In Spice and Wolf, Trenni would be able to command the local money supply if more people use its native currency; this is possible if its currency is more desirable in the local market due to a purity increase. Internationally, desirability is judged by frequency of trades on the exchanges, but I won't dare venture into those geopolitics. In both instances, anyone's interest in silver trenni is heavily based in how much the citizens trust Trenni's economy and political stability.

I'm gonna stop here, as this plot unravels into something far more complicated than I care to dive into. There are many, many Spice and Wolf Reddit posts and forums dedicated to explaining this first arc. The barrier to entry on this franchise is unusually high--and that's coming from someone who loves Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I hope you've learned a little about economics, though!