Chris Crawford

(On TV, February 2022) You can feel lucky if movies appeal to one facet of your personality, but here TV documentary The Artists (a fix-up of ten shorter episodes) manages to reach me twice: first, by straight-on making a sustained argument that video games can be art (it opens with that Roger Ebert quote,) and then by taking a look at something I lived through: the early days of computer games. It hits many of the high points of the burgeoning videogaming scene (Atari designers leaving to found Activision, the creation of Electronic Arts with the famous “Can Computers make you cry?” ad, Infocom text adventures, MULE and the personal transition of its designer, Chris Crawford raising hell in his own industry, Doom, etc.) and bolsters its argument by interviewing several legends of the field, from Crawford to John Romero, Trip Hawkins, Nolan Bushnell and others. It’s fascinating when it describes how, even at a comparatively laughable level of technical sophistication, programmers were becoming artists in a brand-new field, being portrayed as rock stars and grappling with the meaning of what they were doing. The documentary has a nerds-to-fame quality but doesn’t necessarily brush over the less-pleasant parts of that history:  The ostracism that followed Danielle Bunten Berry’s gender transition, the failure of Atari, the post-Doom breakup of id, the market forces discouraging innovation, Chris Crawford’s legendary Dragon Speech and so on. But as someone who still has an original copy of the “Can Computer Games be Art?” ad, who was reading reviews of Crawford’s Balance of Power when it came out, who played MULE on the Commodore 64, who lived through the PC gaming transition from CGA to EGA and then VGA—this documentary hit all the right spots. Better yet, it seriously considers the obvious notion that video game designers are artists striving for emotional reactions, marrying technical elements with evolving notions of game design to produce something that can be considered an art form in its own right. Roger Ebert’s hasty declaration that video games cannot be art (something that he entirely recanted later on) did have the positive effect of leading to an entire corpus of games demonstrating what was obvious to players since, well, at least the 1980s: video games are a new artistic field, building upon other fields to create something that cannot exist in any other medium. That argument is stronger now than it was back when Ebert opined, given how the greater accessibility of game-building tools now enables individual designers to deliver highly personal works. Much, indeed, like the pioneer days of the 1980s when you could assign artistic ownership of a game to a single designer. The Artists could have spent more time making that link, but no matter—what’s presented in rather stylish way is a coherent documentary on a fascinating topic, and I can affirm that it gets its facts right.