Video Games as Works of Art?

The game I played from the Kuma website was National Bloodsport. I joined an existing game and played in a team setting. The specific game I played was called Battery. For this game, there were two teams (red and blue) each with home bases. There is also a middle-ground. The objective of the game is to control the middle-ground and protect it. Once in control of the middle-ground, that team can try to penetrate the other team’s base and tag it to get a point. However, only the team in control of the middle ground can score points. The team on the defensive’s objective is to protect their base and try to gain control of the middle ground so that they can go on the offensive.

The interface of National Bloodsport is user-friendly. The game allows players to communicate with each other both verbally and textually via the keyboard. The game also offers a radar to help players orient themselves. Moving, shooting and changing guns is fairly simple once getting the hang of it. The graphics are decent for an online free computer game and the sound(e.g. gunshots), in my opinion, adds greatly to the experience of the game. It is also easy to discern team members from non-team members because the game labels all players (this helps create the point of view of an enemy). I did not experience any lag during my game play which is also a positive. Overall, the game that this world creates works because the trailer to the game gives the player an arc story about the virtual world the player is playing in. This helps the player build a connection to the game and create the sense of greater involvement through providing a storyline.

I think that National Bloodsport is not a legitimate form of art. Even though this game teaches us about war strategy and war tactics, it is not the first game to do so. It is simply reproducing the many first person shooter games that have come before it with almost identical premises. I would agree that National Bloodsport is a reproduction of a form of art with that form of art being the first popular first person shooting game. As Walter Benjamin puts it, National Bloodsport lacks “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” This statement is accurate of National Bloodsport because it is not a unique game in today’s gaming culture, giving it little exhibition value. I think games in general can be forms of art, however. As mentioned, I would consider the first successful first person shooter game to have great art value because it brings the player into another world and it is the first game of that nature to do so. Games following that original groundbreaking game are simply acts of homage and create no new significant artistic value.

Question: What is the main difference between exhibition value and cult value?