Remember when you were a budding post-adolescent and started having this almost instinctive urge to start “raging against the machine”? That feeling of needing to fight The Man, whoever That Man may be, though in retrospect probably juvenile and almost assuredly stupid, has become the basis for untold stories, films, and video games, though none have been created with such bravado and outright Japanese insanity as one of my most treasured experiences from my youth, Jet Set Radio Future.
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And somewhere right now, Roger Ebert is screaming into the night.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a program under the federal government created to decide which art projects are deemed worthy of federal funding, recognized video games this week as an official art form worthy of endowment, in a move that’s sure to have gamers across the globe smiling in a smug, “I-told-you-so” kind of way.
In an official statement, the NEA outlined their new revisions to what is and isn’t considered worthy for a grant application. Specifically, they changed their grant category of “The Arts on Radio and Television” to “The Arts in Media”, stating officially that “Projects may include…multi-part webisodes; installations; and interactive games.”
This brings up a great deal of intriguing new situations for video game developers. Aside from the distinct PR victory that is official government recognition of their work as “art”, there can be created in this funding an entirely new kind of game developer, one whom creates games for the public for free, to be enjoyed as art, while still being able to, you know, pay rent and eat food thanks to federal funding.
Though I feel safe in suggesting that EA and Activision won’t be clamoring for art endowments anytime soon, this could potentially allow the next Jonathon Blow (creator of Braid) or Playdead studio (the dev. house behind Limbo) to be able to create something beautiful, without the need to compromise their visions in attempts to “maintain fiscal solvency”.
Or, you know, the almost-certainly old men in control of the NEA could decide not to give a dime to video games, because they probably still don’t believe games can be artistic. Either-or.
