Tom Sutcliffe: Games find high art in low places

The week in culture

Why is it that our imaginations are policed so much more vigilantly when engaged in video games than with any other form of fiction?

That this is essentially true seems indisputable. Novels and films aren't entirely free of constraints, it's true. But their freedom of movement in dealing with difficult or violent subject matter is far greater. A novel, for example, which put the reader at the heart of a terrorist group killing civilians as they moved through a modern airport might raise eyebrows here and there. But it would be unlikely to become a news story or a provocation for op-ed columns – as the video game Call of Duty did when it included just such a scene in its last installment.

What's more, the right of a film or a book to engage with contemporary events would be unlikely to be questioned at heart – as it was when the BBC reported on the forthcoming issue of a video game series called Medal of Honor which abandons the Second World War settings that made the series a success for a storyline that unfolds in present-day Afghanistan, from where body bags are still returning. In the game you can play as an American soldier or an insurgent – meaning, I assume, that it may be as popular with armchair warriors in Peshawar as it is in Idaho. Interviewing the president of EA Games about this forthcoming title, the BBC journalist lead off with a question about the ethical propriety of employing a hot war as the backdrop for cool entertainment.

The word "game" is one answer to the question, I take it. We permit to art liberties that we do not permit to toys – and video games, whatever their creators think of them, still have one foot wedged in the toybox. Games and toys are meant to be innocent and yet these, with their arterial sprays and dying groans, manifestly are not. It's why those involved in the business strive so hard to shift the perception of what they produce into the realm of art.

EA's president did it by suggesting that his product was just a new version of an ancient tradition. Just as soldiers in previous conflicts had fed their experiences into novels and films, the combat veterans who had been consulted on authenticity here were doing so as a kind of testimony.

"It's a way for the soldiers to tell their stories and give people a sense of what it's like in those situations and in those environments," he explained. At which point it became clear that novelty is also a problem.

Video games have been around for years but they are still struggling to pass through that long gestation that any new creative form must go through before it matures from frivolity into art. And intriguingly the attacks and the defences have very familiar shapes. When Pamela was published, in 1740, there were those who attacked Richardson for putting indecent thoughts into the imagination of his readers, and those (including Richardson) who countered that an imaginative encounter with sin could expand your wary knowledge of it rather than make you more susceptible.

But the real problem, I suspect, is agency. Novels and films do something that, in the language of games enthusiasts, is increasingly regarded as a failing. They put you "on rails" – giving you no choice about where you turn next or from what angle you approach a narrative crux. You are in the action but your implication in it is a complicated affair. Even in first-person narratives you are granted a third-person exemption from culpability, because you are there as a witness only, not as perpetrator.

In video games, it is your finger on the trigger and a bullet will only emerge if you so choose. It is hardly surprising that we should feel wary about the imaginary places to which such a technology might take us – but perhaps it is a clue too to the fact that it may yet take us to a place that can only be described as art.

Just a click away: the glorious art of messing around

One of the more dynamic Venn diagrams of recent times has been that which marks the overlap between "Contemporary Art" and "Just Mucking About". There was a time when these two conceptual sets did not meet at all – but, since Marcel Duchamp onwards I guess, the area of intersection has steadily increased... And it was given a mighty shot of growth hormone by the arrival of low-cost video, which meant that an artist – or high-minded mucker-about – could easily create a permanent record of their mucking. You can see some fine examples of the result at Tate Modern's new exhibition of the work of Francis Alÿs – a Belgian-born artist who works mostly in Mexico. For one piece, Alÿs went into a Mexico City gunshop, bought a hand-gun, loaded it and walked out into the street to see what would happen (all of this recorded by a friend tracking him with a video camera). He then took the raw tape of the original experience and re-shot it, with a little more cinematic art, so that both versions play side by side – a touch of art only made possible by the restraint of the Mexico police. The video was the key though, transmuting a kind of Jackass stunt into something much more provoking. And now anybody can have a go at elevating their mucking about to the status of art – since the Guggenheim in New York is running an open competition called YouTube Play, to select a video work to go on show in the museum (http://www.youtube.com/user/ playbiennial). Entries close on 31 July. You have until then to prove that there's a great mucker-about in all of us, just waiting to be let out.

Intelligent drama deserves praise

There aren't many taboos left alive out there – but I felt one give a little kick while watching Rev the other day, James Wood's new sitcom about an inner-city vicar. Fifty years ago, of course, any kind of irreverence itself would have been the taboo. To show a vicar working up a satisfactory sexual fantasy with his wife or swearing at scaffolders would have been quite unthinkable. These days both are a walk-over, but other areas, while not formally out of bounds, remain fenced off by an unstated embarrassment. In the case of religious comedy it's the fact that the characters might actually have sincere religious beliefs – a fact which tends to be swept under the carpet by most clerical comedies. Rev, by contrast, makes a feature of it. I don't know whether this is because Wood himself is a Christian, or simply because he wants to create a real character rather than a cartoon, but the effect is mildly startling either way. As an atheist myself I don't entirely buy the theology. In the first episode of Rev, for instance, one believer holds up a snail shell as a refutation of Darwinian materialism – signally missing the point that a snail shell is a near perfect example of how beauty can emerge from the simplest of genetic algorithms. But to have moral seriousness in there at all is a gratifying surprise. Added to which Rev is steadily and intelligently funny. It's almost enough to make you believe.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk