Framing the game

LIKE ITS ONCE downmarket cousins cinema and the comic book, the video game will no doubt soon be hailed as a viable new art form -- at least, that's what poet and video-game enthusiast Shannon Compton hopes. In pursuit of this vision, Compton has assembled "Gamers: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of the Pixel," a newly published collection from Brooklyn-based Soft Skull Press, where she moonlights as an associate publisher. Featuring everything from a story by novelist Richard Powers in which the early, text-based computer game "Adventure" is described as the "transcendental Lego set of the human soul," to a lesson in Newtonian physics via such vector-graphics arcade games as "Lunar Lander" and "Asteroids," "Gamers" is a manifesto of a generation formed during the Atari age and the halcyon days of the American video arcade.

"Games are as much a part of our lives as film and poetry and fiction and fashion -- but to my mind they have the potential to become more engrossing than any of those things," e-mails Compton, whose introduction revisits her formative arcade-haunting years in a small town in central Texas. "The kinds of games I like best are narratively interesting, visually beautiful, intellectually challenging, and plain old fun."

Yes, but is it art? Almost, says Compton, who compares video games to the responsive sculptures of Robert Rauschenberg. "There, the viewer's voice or motion causes lights to blink on or mud to bubble or whatever. But the piece is only capable of a small range of responses: light on or off, mud bubbling or not," she scoffs. "In the case of video games, the player's decisions and actions directly affect the piece, change the arc of the narrative, destroy or rescue ships or planets or enemies."

So what's missing? "Collaborations between the makers of games and the makers of art," replies Compton. "You can bet the designers and programmers are thinking about the genre's next move."