Are video games art?

The development cycle of a video game is like a smaller version of the development cycle of a movie, really. And I can't say I enjoy movies more than I enjoy music... where creation of the latter is almost always more out of generosity and wanting to "move" people. Movies and video games are mostly made to make money, unfortunately.

But there are certainly exceptions. One could say Myst, Black and White, and the upcoming Ico are great displays of video games as art. The look, feel, sounds (VERY IMPORTANT to me) of these games justify the art tag in many ways.

I'm workin' on an X-box version of Lord of the Rings due a year from now... I have no idea whether it will turn out like the above, but I do give major props to the artists and designers for this one, so I can only hope. I'm very excited about it.

In a narrower sense, video games are art when artists use them in their work. Julian Opie has made some pieces which look like (extremely basic) driving games and Miltos Manetas actually uses rejigged sequences from games like Doom and Tomb Raider in his art.

I must say these much-vaunted electronic wars are looking as quaint as the dot.com boom now that America's Deadliest Foe is a man on a horse who lives in a cave in the mountains (and that's precisely why we can't get him).

Personally, I find it all very masturbatory with a thin layer of superficial aesthetic-frosting on top. The problem with escaping into "mini-worlds" is that our interaction within them doesn't tend to apply heavily to real life or humanity or all the things art is based upon. And the worst aspect about these games is how they never end. For many players, they become a "virtual life" rivaling life itself. And for what? "Complex" physical responses on a mouse/keyboard and the joy of manipulating eye candy. Seems purely visceral and cheaply so.

Admittedly I have a personal grudge over these games because I've lost friends over them. They all got neutralized and sort of.. ceased to be anymore.

(Meanwhile another friend of mine has probably spent more time playing RPGs than he has doing anything else. Strangely enough, he considers himself an aspiring artist while his inspirations are all based upon fictional worlds/characters/events/etc.)

------

Mmm, Civilization 2 ends when your spaceship reaches Alpha Centauri (trust me I did it with my Japanese society. Hail to Shogun Omar!). Starcraft probably ends if you have blown everybody to pieces. Fifa ends when the ref blows the final whistle. ;)

Tom you may be right, although it still has this, sort of ethic of folk art, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is going to be a blacklash against the mega-look-at-the-brilliant-introduction-where's the-actual-game type of games in favour of ye'olde folk-auteur games production. Mind you, i'm just speculating here.

I think the idea of Poole's book was to outline an aesthetics of videogames, rather than ask whether videogames made for good or bad art. Several of the responses above are interesting because they presuppose certain functional things art 'does' - engage with things other than itself, refer to humanity, etc. - which I don't think art has to 'do' at all in order to be art.

- in a democracy, each unit away from home increases the unhappiness of the population. - fortified units in mountain regions double their defensive capability )

I know nothing about "art" and I'm not so hot on my "literature" either. But I know a lot about dorky computer games. I'm loathe to call the way that they affect my life as ART cos then obviously I'd be a bleedin PONCE! But the game I've been playing most recently has affected the way I see the world (yes yawn, Final Fantasy fcuking Eight) due to character interaction, development... of course you could just say it's an anime with the odd bit of WHOOP-ASS but I'd disagree.

It's always seemed plausible to my little brain (who has never read an art theory book or studied or ANYFINK) that what art should do is affect the way you see the world, draw you in so when you're spat out you can see things differently - and of course video games can do that.

And they're FUN and not played by BLEEDING ART STUDENTS. Well okay they might be but you get my drift.

I often see the world in Pokémon terms.

More recent games are getting dangerously close to being akin to art. The Myst series is pretty much limited interactivity with paintings (even the new one), but more games draw players in like nothing before. Final Fantasy 7 and 8, for me, both evoked significant emotional responses when a main character died and there was nothing I could do. Similarly there are a lot of innovative Playstation games (Parappa?) that could be called art.

I guess if books and films can be seen as art then videogames can too. It's how you define the art-ness of the game that is difficult. Is it graphical finesse? Addictiveness? Emotional content? Black & White, for example, is widely considered video game turned art, but the damn thing is just soooo dull.

BAH BLACK AND WHITE TV means you play everything b/w thus making games with small details (inc. FF8) ESPECIALLY damn Grand Theft Auto pretty impossible to play.

When I create my own fantastic game, I'll make sure it can downgrade gracefully.

'Updating' classics of course is always dud dud dud. I managed to find someone who had NEVER PLAYED Manic Miner. So off to his computer the dorkier of us run, intending to download a copy. All we could find, without spending hours on emulators and fiddling with his files, was a damn 3D-esque updated version - with UPDATED MUSIC! WRONG SICK AND WRONG.

Although I did laugh at the thought of being a MAN-BOAR. What good PIRATES games are out there?

I could kick arse at Typing of the Dead. I bet. Although perhaps ALLY K can type quicker than me. 100wpm? I'm not there yet.

also, to throw another wrench in momus' vid games = folk art theory, increasingly games and game series are becoming more and more synomous - outside the hardcore fanbase - with their creators. (witness the guy who created wolfenstein/doom/quake or the fellow responsible for almost all the great nintendo series - mario/zelda/metroid - both of whose names escape me.) movie- style "credit sequences" are showing up more and more in the openings of final fantasy and metal gear style games. but this all goes back to the ruskie who invented tetris, no? (the first vid game superstar?)

Art in the end, all comes down to monkeys.

Picasso: if I paint enough, I will see a monkey!

Or if you kill off all the other Civilisations, which I always found was way easier. Getting your spaceship to Alpha Centauri takes too goddamned long! Killing other Civilisations and stealing their cities is dead easy though. Unless the fucking barbarian hordes start attacking, then all bets are off.

I play two video games, Civilisation and the Sims. Haven't played either in ages. I'm really dying to buy a copy of Oregon Trail, actually, that game kicked ass.

I was always Roman, until they made the new version that has like 800 different nationalities, that kicks ass.

oh, how many hours of fifth and sixth grade were spent playing this because it was "educational"? meeeeemmmmooorrriessss....

I remember Civilization 2 had a realistic looking world map (probably with some option for randomized worlds, yeah?). Also noticed that one tribe would kill of the weaker tribes with you early on, and then its mano a mano. Most of the times those Frenchies. But like I said Japan is the best, easy to defend, takes the enemy ages to cross Asia. you have nice expansions in China plus Indonesia and Australia and basically your home-free. Just get to that atom-bomb first ;)

There was a time I could waste days playing that game.

Um, no. How we were thrilled when we got new fangled Windows 3.1! Solitaire! Minesweeper! Damn. How to prepare me for office life.

QUAKE IS BORING. "Ha ha you're dead my young chappy oh bums I'm dead too aha but as I have cheated to give me infinite lives I am not tee hee OOOH LOOK A CHAINSAW" etc.

Actually, that sounds GREAT, yet why do I not like Quake?

I agree.

I can't talk about Civilisation anymore otherwise I'll just end up playing it all weekend and that is good for NO ONE.

No, I think the sort of art that people want video games to be like is pre-modernist, realist, non-avantgarde, narrative-based, figurative, corny. Academic, victorian kitsch, actually.

If video games are like that kind of art then video games should stop being like art.

(x-post)

video games

i think video-games would have artistic value, but when would the differences decifer by the purpose it was made for? i think people like bill viola have done some video game stuff, has anyone seen this? does any of this make sense

Since Duchamp, then, everything can be art. The only thing that might possibly discount something from being art after Duchamp is that it has artistic qualities! The argument that video games are art because they have artistic qualities would therefore be a way of discounting video games from being art. See?

Car mechanics do lots of things that other workers don't do, but their unique contribution to culture does not make what they do art.

Nobody is arguing that video games are just the same as everything else. That's not the question. The question is whether video games are art.

If someone really wanted to, and has the talent, they can make a game that really move people, or awe, shock, etc. I was playing the WWE Smackdown game the other day and oh my god I was outraged when Chris Jericho ambushed me with a Sledgehammer. Then I got my revenge.

and video games are not always collectively made (although nowadays most are). and a lot of the time the core concept is from one person, sure they have others doing the actual "artwork" (sorry, as in the graphics) and music and whatever but the idea is from the designer - compare this with a lot of modern "artists" who often get someone else to "implement" their ideas (damien hirst does this sometimes??)

of course video games don't HAVE to be art - it's just a medium, like how a photograph isn't always art, they can be just functional, but if someone uses video game as a platform for expressing their ideas, it becomes art.

much like some models of cars can be seen as works of art, and some mechanics may well have been in the design process of them.

obviously Duchamp has more to offer this thread!

i think their could be more artistic value in some video-games than say some of the work that gets exibited in the tate modern. dosnt this whole thing open up to the question of what is art and if it is art if it requires no skill, designing a computer game requires more skill than displaying three flashing lights.

Being skillful doesn't make something art. All the unskillful art in the Tate (etc) proves it!

Skill is associated more with the circus than the art gallery, anyway, so that's definitely not the issue.

personally i belive art can be anything in form of expression of the artists mind, if you have a vision and you choose a media to express it, whatever that media may be, what you create is your art.

or, art is the +

This is the Renaissance theory of art. It goes back to the C15th. It is basically the attempt by Michelangelo's generation to distinguish themselves from craftsmen. Craftsmen get the job done, but artists do something more than that.

What's wrong with this is that artists have not been doing this since the Baroque - when artists first started to distort for effect, rather than do things correctly. After the baroque, and particularly since Impressionism and Expressionism in modernism, the bit that you think of as the + has been achieved without what you call doing the job - skill. In fact, skill and competence have been seen as a hindrance for artists. Simply, if it is not what makes art art - and it hasn't been since the Renaissance - then it needn't be part of art at all.

Hence, art can't be the + because it is not in addition to skill and competence, but the negation of skill and competence or what is left when manual skill and competence are got rid of.

It's as if the word 'art' confers value on something. As if, if we value it then we should call it art. Why? Why not just call it good?

Maybe what we're talking about is some odd linguistic effect. Maybe the word art has colloquially come to mean something we value - and this definition began as related to historical art practices, but doesn't have any connection with art anymore. Like when someone says you look divine! It's just a metaphor now, perhaps. Because one thing's for sure, when you argue that video games are art you are not comparing them to contemporary art practices!

It is painting, and painting dominated the definitions and institutions of art for a long time. But portraiture always had, at best, a lowly status within art. When painting lost its dominant position within art, lower genres such as portraiture, still life and so on, lost the best claim that they had to being art.

The National Portrait Gallery in London was always a peripheral place in terms of the artworld and nobody takes its annual competition seriously.

beuty is in the eye of the beholder. the kind of modern art should reflect whatever is going on in the world around us, weve no need for glitsy masters who paint cathedrals, weve also lost that sense of divine purpose that fuelled ressainaise art. if thier is a new media their will be a new artform to come out of it. photography and digital formats are new to art, but only time will tell how they co-ordinate with the art-world. artists reaching a point of realisation that they dont need skill, and working solely with abstract concept poses questions of arts relevance, which is what they now intend to do, yeah duchamp and dadaists..etc probably kicked that off, but dosnt a new generation need to express from original viewpoint, such as graffitti or photography being accepted into the art world. what is the right presentation for video-ganme format, does it belong in an art gallery, has there been a computer game that has reason enough to serve the mind in more compolex ways than simply to entertain that deserves to be seen in the same light as gallery work. does the realisation that inspires amaturish work, eventually get to a point to render itself obsolete. if art can be seen in this then why do we need to go see it, when we can see it just see it around us, but then has that art served its purpose in making you see inspiration in life and see art around yourself. this is probably all bullshit, i got kicked out of as-art so maybee i dont know whart im talking aout. everything can be art but does it deserve to be. and if everything is art what is the point in art galleries.

ok there were loads of posts when i was typing this so i hope it still makes sense

well, someone asked the question "are video games art?" and we're attempting to find the answer. In my opinion, i think video games (or computer programs in general) can be art, not all of them are. I see a computer like a bunch of paper, you can do whatever you like on it, sometimes you do sums on it (excel vs long division), sometimes you draw pictures on it (paintbrush vs watercolour), sometimes you make animations out of it (computer program/modelling package vs a flickbook)

In the past ten posts you've repeatedly said how such and such isn't art, yet i am struggling to see what in *your* opinion is art. What are your criteria for something to be art? Do you believe art exists at all? i guess unless we can establish what you consider as art, it'd be hard for me at least to see your points.

Has there been a particularly subversive/political mainstream videogame as yet? And I don't mean political purely on the basis that it happens to feature a war.

I'm uninformed here... How much have people played with the potential of the narrative side of video games? I once read an article (author's name escapes me) claiming that video games, along with soap operas, are a new form of literature where previous conventions don't apply. Is 'video games are literature' a more ridiculous statement than 'video games are art'?

Computer games don't have the same problem/advantage as they are not considered to be associated with a known artform - borrowing just as much from sculpture, architecture, and installation art as it does from film, books, etc.

+ In the same way a lot of early film bit hard on other art movements (literature adaptation in one sense, expressionism in another), computer games already bite hard from other mediums (Final Fantasy, and Resident Evil with their love of movies for one) meaning that this theory is useful for discussing how they adapt these elements into the computer game.

oh wait, that makes "Train simulator" a post-modernist game haha that is not right.

There are a few IF games I can think of that are more like art - there was even an art comp to make "interactive experiences" rather than games with preset goals. http://members.aol.com/iffyart/eastwing.htm

You could say this about GTA, too.

"GTA has no final goal as such, apart from the final goal"

i think i'm thinking about a game maybe a little like the sims, maybe, but even in the sims there are things you can "achieve" like making someone have a really successful (or really awful) career/life.

and like GTA you can achieve killing people, smashing up cars. and furthermore there is a storyline and mission with a grand finale

But they are without the core quality of video games, that you can play them. Like 4'33: made from the same material as "actual" games, but off to one side.

NYT bit from E3, which seems to have the only point that the writer concludes that video games still aren't to the level of a Mahler symphony, based on his own reactions to the demos of Mass Effect and Fallout 3.

Uhm, okay.

The art school that I attend has gaming and machinima classes.

Do they have a special "gamedev" major or somesuch? I'm disappointed when I hear about all these schools that teach games, and don't require you to take any liberal arts classes. One way to definitely insure that you have a deep, well-thought-out game is not to know jackshit about history, philosophy, literature, etc.

I believe that that they are in talks with "people" to develop a major just like that, yes. As for now, they are an option for students doing mixed media/experimental and tradition animation who also have a good side helping of critical, theory and liberal arts classes.

why do people desperately need games to be validated as "art"?

because the fact that they make money isn't good enough

for $60 a pop i should be getting some art in my game

more art please

Results 1 - 18 of about 17,900 for cliffy b.

We always make the mistake of trying to bring new technologies out of their swamps and into our culture. And then we ruin and neuter them and forget what made them so vital. This is the process by which things become "art".

yeah, but the games that people would describe as "art" aren't neutered by any means.

in the year 2 tousanddddddddddddddddddd

http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/rss_media/cloudsscroll.gif
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/rss_media/cloudsscroll.gif
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/rss_media/cloudsscroll.gif

dragon clouds so high above
ive only known careless love

belllabs otm

that was a stupid fucking article kingfish

Do they have a special "gamedev" major or somesuch?

in the UK Rockstar & Team 17 have partnered with University of Bradford, University of Hull and Sheffield Hallam University to set up game dev degrees, with summer work experience at the game companies.

adamrl we have ruined and neutered video games a thousand times over at this point, try to make them "art" isn't necessary, just the right sum of money and the correct franchise tag

RIP Segan hedgehogs

anyway I've come around on this topic to thinking a certain set of gameplay mechanics (mostly formalized at this point) and a certain milieu (mostly stolen from elsewhere, but occasionally and rarely born fully-formed from nonsense logic) can totally qualify as a fully-formed work of art.

I think I was getting hung up on the mechanistic bits of games and the procedural aspects of playing them, back when. Now I think of "RPG," "FPS," etc. more like folk traditions.

probably but thanks for me addressing directly.

I guess that looks funny because it seems like I'm referring to video games as "new", but what I'm really trying to say is that for newspaper writers, etc. to write about them they have to say something about/to contribute to our culture, and that's not why I play games.

newspaper writers are a dying breed anyway

I would only call myself a casual gamer in terms of buying new games and reading about games, but I in fact play games every day. And usually when I play games I am listening to music or talking to my wife or commuting to/from work. They rarely have my full attention but that doesn't mean I don't like games. I tend to just enjoy the repetitive/automatic aspect of it.

read: newspaper writers OR their modern info-age equivalent PLUS the people that pay too much attention to this type of info source and believe too uch of what they read

That said there is that little thrill you get when you pull something off in a game, that little chemical release that maybe you other game people are familiar with, which sort of proves to me that games do reach parts of the brain that other activities do not. There's a special game lobe that pulses when I score a particular goal, or take out several motherfuckers with one strafing move. Once I leave the gameworld, that brain corner is noticeably dormant.

So when people talk about "elevating" video games to that status of art, I tend to assume that these are folks who want to understand gaming from their existing criteria, criteria that exclude the paramount importance of that little brain corner pulse.

I've never cried or laughed at a Jackson Pollock painting (or at any painting!) but that doesn't mean they aren't art. In fact, I'm pretty sure paintings are art, despite the fact that they're just 2-d renderings, with only the slightest three-dimensionality, and very little narrative or interactivity! I mean, if you think the story for a GTA game is bad, try a Rothko.

A lot of people who write about videogames treat them like comic books; IOW, they are viewed as children's entertainment that must have some "deeper meaning" to justify adult enjoyment. This is a patently untrue yet pervasive assumption that mars a good 75% of the discourse surrounding games.

you can't go head to head with a friend in a mondrian painting

but anyway, the answer to this thread is clearly this:

http://hitparade.ch/gameimages/super_nes-mario_paint.jpg

If you want to talk about it in grown up terms, there is a sense of something base and primal in that game thrill and the only other sensation that comes close (for me) is in the creative act. But in the latter, the thrill is less than perfect because I am working within a self-defined framework as opposed to one given to me by a game designer. The game thrill is even more pure because it comes without self-doubt. It's the thrill of playing (and winning) in somebody else's playground.

So maybe the "games as art" thing works better when you consider the model of games-player as artist rather than gaming public as "art audience".

That is, if you feel like considering it.

Part of my problem with the article was that the guy felt the need to make his pronouncement on the not-as-worthiness of games due to two fucking demos, at a trade show filled with hundreds of them and only allowing the experience of minutes of play.

Like if you're going to up and deem one art or media form as unworthy, at least bring some fucking perspective to bear before you make your stupid declaration.

Judging games on demos = judging art on studio visits

=D

I think the biggest takeaway from this is "Don't pay attention to know-nothing douchebags."

but they're published so often!

For the "justifying" a media form as worthwhile for adults bit, I think that automatically happens as a response to the western habits to ascribe certain media for children and children alone. We still do it, too. Comics, animation, games, and genre fiction("storybooks", pulp, sci-fi or otherwise). We have a history of consigning entire modes of narrative to the rubbish heap, as well as corresponding folks who dig them back out. It always takes the gatekeepers(and the unadventurous sorts who listen to them) decades to come round.

ART

http://www.freewebs.com/zombieflesheater/katamari2.jpg

Last Chance to Nominate: Best Video Games of 2008

Is this really what people were asking in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?

I just found out that my best D&D buddy from high school was the lead game designer on Wall-E games, Fear Effect, Tron 2.0, etc. Maybe I should have stuck with RPGs after all!

The IGN rebuttal of Ebert's most recent declaration that video games will never be art, at least not in our lifetimes, begins with this paragraph:

One of the great thrills of being wrong comes during the moments after having made a demonstrably false assertion. You can begin to feel the adrenaline flow as you try and defend your position while your claimed territory constricts around you. I remember one night on the eve of a friend's wedding when I'd made an off-hand remark about Charlemagne having played a crucial role in the American Revolution. My friend, now a tax attorney in Texas, spat out a mouthful of beer in disbelief. I could see the gathering relish in his eyes as he realized he had me pinned to a wall. Charlemagne obviously had nothing to do with the American Revolution. I had been thinking of Lafayette, but the difference between Charlemagne and Lafayette had, after five hours of celebratory drinking, passed me by. As I saw his coming antagonism, I didn't stop to think about what I'd said, I simply entrenched myself in the idea that I was right. After having my stupidity corroborated by literally every person invited to comment on the matter I was left to embrace the awful idea that I had been wrong, even while trying to say something positive about the long history of Franco-American cooperation.

http://i39.tinypic.com/20jlo49.jpg

I realize that a key question I should ask myself is why the fuck I was reading IGN

but anyways, take THAT Ebert, ya butt, dang

I don't play Donkey Kong to "win," I play it to survive a surreal assault by a higher power in service of rescuing a woman I presume to love. I feel anxiety in the prospect of being hit by a barrel not because it would mean the computer had beaten me, but because of what that defeat would mean.

http://www.fybertech.com/fychan/img/11762679557502.png

i dunno that ebert's right (i mean: MYST, right?) but the strawlady he takes down does seem pretty dum

(and by dum, i just mean: completely unprepared for a discussion of the history and theory of arty stuff)

Are video games art? Only sensible answer is: they require artifice, therefore they are art, but equally so, they do not yet access the same emotional power as so-called "high art". It is an open question whether they ever will.

i have sympathy for ebert and don't need to think of my video games as art, but his criticisms of the specific games are less about art and more "this sounds like it's probably a shitty game"

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

this is a big pile of evasiveness and kindof the crack that the object of his argument disappears thru. all of these are full of ideas, and if he means that they are not explicitly content-driven, that does not mean that they do not position themselves as artistic items in argument & conv. w/ the cultural and artistic landscape that they emerge against. all art is a kind of argument or idea bc it is an argument abt what art is and can be.

The last time I checked, video games contain images -- 3d/2d animated and/or photographed -- which the last time I checked were considered art forms by most people, including Roger Ebert. So even if the essential game-ness of a video game isn't an art (a point I do not necessarily concede), video games can be constructed of elements that are art in and of themselves.

It's not unlike saying that you don't consider a museum to be art, or a television, or a theater. But the difference is that maybe the medium is ALSO an art, or at the very least involves artistry.

Walter Pater has a lot to answer for.

Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.

also this kind of argument, where extraneous detail, in this case the design and look, the invocation of a partic. type of symbolism imagery on top of the strategy, ie. an attempt to load partic formal structures w/ narrative elements and ethical hypotheses is disregarded bc the formal structure is pre-existing, but i mean if you agree that there are only really a small category of narrative structures and that movies perform as art in their deployment and orchestration of imagery, symbolism etc that subverts/augments/recontextualises etc these forms in order to make them appear new is one of the arguments that is repeatedly used for the continuing potential of painting for example.

http://italiangreyhounds.org/errata/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/clouds.jpg

I wonder if Ebert has ever heard of Cory Arcangel or Paul B. Davis, artists that have had pieces created with video games at Deitch Projects, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA.

or cao fei

This is ultimately a theological question: is nature art? If you believe in God, yes. If not, no.

re: cory arcangel, Super Mario Clouds is probably the worst game I've ever played!

I bet Yoko Ono would say otherwise.

Game is over, if you want it.

o man this thred o man roger ebert o humanity

yeah but the notion that "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging" is almost not worth engaging.

It makes me sad that people are trying to get Roger Ebert to look at Passage, which is the most boring b.s. ever.

here r some FACTS:

roger ebert is like 200 yrs old who cares wut he thinks of call of duty he probably fukken sux at it
plz no1 ever talk abt games (which r rad) in the same way they do garbage like paintings - it demeans them
braid is terrible
lol movies arent art either

Somebody make Ebert sit through this...
http://nintendorks.com/media/7/20091021-super-mario-bros-movie.jpg

kindof over u lamp

I think ebert did sit through that! RIP GENE SISKEL.

kindof over u lamp

haha forgot u were a painter. well sb is just a click away *shrug*

are ilx posts art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbEH66qiwrY

hope so or i just cut off my ear for nothing (xp)

Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?"

this list is so wrongheaded for his argument that it is hilarious.

also feel like cory arcangel and cao fei are completely outside the argument we r trying to make. or outside the realm of rebuttal. Both are artist that use video games to make something that in the end is not a video game, the part that constitutes the "art" is an intervention in the video game. it takes video games as its subject not ast its medium, which is abt as useful as saying that clocks r art thanks to felix gonzales torres or that toilets r bc of duchampt.

racking my brain the only person i could think of that is considered an artist that actually made video games as art objects is teresa duncan but i dont really know any thing abt her.

one thing that possibly makes video games art is that they are useless, that they are only useful as objects that are consumed. that is, they are entirely aesthetic objects, the functionality that ebert objects to is that they need to be won, and can be messed with, but games have fairly linear narratives, it is just that the way they unfold is different than for eg a movie where it plays out in front of u but a game has to be coaxed to its conclusion by whoever plays it.

that is literally the worst thing Ebert's ever written

yeah dunno y i thought i should like think abt this also i dont like video games so

the bushes are just coloured clouds
http://delffi.net/pelipurkki/Super-Mario-Bros--3.jpg

i dunno he basically says i dunno/who cares with a troll headline

the nonsense about Stravinsky not having any ideas is ther most punchable thing I've ever read that wasn't right-wing punditry

"but games have fairly linear narratives"
games having narratives at all is just as perverse as the arcangel/cao fei museum pieces.
c.f. zerowing.

One thing I think is strange is the tendency of the Games As Art crowd is to highlight games based on the narrative elements of the game, which usually are completely unrelated to the game itself. For example, the narration of Braid is so incidental that you can literally walk right by it. Cut scenes aren't a game, whether they're rendered in-game or otherwise.

by narrative i meant like structure i think, like in this version tetris has a narrative, dont really have a real word for what i mean

xp

considering that some games also tell stories, using "narrative" as a synonym for "gameplay" is hypermegaconfusing

the functionality that ebert objects to is that they need to be won, and can be messed with, but games have fairly linear narratives, it is just that the way they unfold is different than for eg a movie where it plays out in front of u but a game has to be coaxed to its conclusion by whoever plays it.

Video games must be won and thus narrative is an essential part of that, yet narrative is also an essential part of film. Films also have to contend with formal restrictions of being 'won', ie. resolving the portrayed conflict, listing credits, etc. Unless we are talking non-objective film and in that case any hacked game/Clouds 2k should be up for consideration as well. Randomized Game Genie creations included.

A great deal of conceptual art/minimalism/formalism also requires interaction from the audience with the art object.

all art is in some way completed by the audience

otm. I don't see how "You have to play the game and win it" is a valid argument against it being art.

considering that some games also tell stories, using "narrative" as a synonym for "gameplay" is hypermegaconfusing

― HI DERE, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 8:02 PM (1 minute ago)

not really sure i meant it as an exact synonym for gameplay but i def think that there is a partic element in videogames that is somewhere between narrative and gameplay

'considering that some games also tell stories, using "narrative" as a synonym for "gameplay" is hypermegaconfusing'
"Video games must be won and thus narrative is an essential part of that"

Yes, I am hyper-mega-confused! please help unpack what is meant by narrative!

^^ yup, this is like dylanologists never talking about anything other than lyrics.

games offer the experience of controlling forms moving through space in time. nobody talks about this! they combine an auditory/visual experience with something akin to, i dunno, playing catch or dancing. the narratives (and i'd class the specifics of what is represented graphically as "narrative") may or may not be interesting or compelling or good, but that's not what's "happening" really, when you play.

many xps

i think ppl are confusing "mechanic" w/ "narrative"? and "video games must be won"? ummm like plax w/e you think of my posting u have to realize its p frustrating 4 ppl that spend a lot of time thinking abt games/making games when ppl who kinda clearly have no fukken clue start posting abt this stuff. its not like i post on painting threads

I would say gameplay (simulation of physics, 2d or 3d landscapes, etc) is part of the formal elements of the game. Though yes one could say Hitchcock tells stories through his camera angles and lighting.

The narrative is how the gamer controls the game using those formal parameters, how the game responds, and how the gamer responds back.

"gameplay (simulation of physics, 2d or 3d landscapes, etc)"

ok i am even more hypermega confused.
i have always read "gameplay" in terms of player interaction not as formal elements.

not really sure i meant it as an exact synonym for gameplay but i def think that there is a partic element in videogames that is somewhere between narrative and gameplay

Well, to go back to the Tetris example, what were you thinking of when you mentioned its narrative? My first thought was "bricks of different shapes fall; you rotate them to make lines that disappear before the stack reaches the top" which, you know, is the gameplay. I'm guessing you were thinking of something different?

Also, some games can't be "won"; Tetris is a good example of this; Bejeweled is another.

i think ppl are confusing "mechanic" w/ "narrative"? and "video games must be won"? ummm like plax w/e you think of my posting u have to realize its p frustrating 4 ppl that spend a lot of time thinking abt games/making games when ppl who kinda clearly have no fukken clue start posting abt this stuff. its not like i post on painting threads

― good luck harbl county usa (Lamp), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 8:06 PM (4 minutes ago)

kinda think this is a fn dumb att. 2 take when the argument is abt the place of video games in a broader cultural contx. have u ever heard of a multi-disc. roundtable?

I suppose I'm kind of conflating "gameplay" with "game mechanic"

Let's agree on a common vocabulary:

narrative = story
game mechanics = rules of game
gameplay = player's interaction with the game
kinaesthetics = motion-feedback part of gameplay

sound reasonable?

The narrative is how the gamer controls the game using those formal parameters, how the game responds, and how the gamer responds back.

no this is a lot closer to the games mechanic altho i mean in a loose sense i guess i see what your getting at (the mechanic is sort of the "story" of the way the game is played?)

@ plax enh i feel like games f(n) differently enough from movies or paintings or literature that having ppl knowledgeable about these things (but not games) commenting isnt really fruitful. this is mb parochial of me idk

I like Philip's list, but still think it is important to remember that gameplay is directly dependent on game mechanics, the 'formal elements'. You cannot make Mario jump w/o a programmer first deciding how high he will jump, the latency between pressing the button and the jump animation, your control in the direction of the jump pre- and post- button pressing, the resulting sound effects at the jump and at the landing, sprite hit detection, etc.

These elements sounds nitpicky but change some of them and the gameplay will be completely different, resulting in a different aesthetic & psychological experiences of the game. Maybe you cannot change direction after a jump, or maybe one game has a less forgiving hit detection of landing when you are trying to leap to a small platform. Even a subtle change in game mechanics can change beautiful, smooth, intuitive gameplay into an awkward piece of crap.

kindof impossible to include games in the umbrella category 4 all those things w/o thinking abt those things and what they are and how games fit into the different justifications for their status as such

xp

You can appreciate a videogame as art for any of Philip's individual categories, yet a more elegant game would excel in multiple categories at once.

liek, what ur saying sounds really like some early feminist strategies for including women's art w/in mainstream canons, that is, by attempting to canonise it for the elements that make it distinct AS women's art. this was a losing project bc it just develops this parallel, ghettoised canon that nobody really cares that much abt. and you could say "well w/e we dont care abt ur phallocentric canon" in which case fair enough but why are you having this conv. in the 1st place.

feel like in this case you have to look at the ways in which each medium encroaches on each other and u can use that as a starting place to destabilise pre-existing assumptions abt both.

wth is even at stake in this discussion. some sort of perceived legitimacy?

I guess the problem is that what makes a game "art" is not necessarily what makes them fun. It can be, but not necessarily.

It's pretty likely that the most artistic games ever made won't be any fun to play at all.

I hope I haven't hyper-mega-confused you guys in trying to unmegaconfuse things.
those 4 terms are not categories of games, but descriptors of 4 distinct (though inter-related) aspects of games.

re: formal elements
to me, formal elements encompass more than game mechanics -- they also include graphics/sounds and other technological affordances and limitations of the platform for the game.

feel like there could be a legit parallel discussion about "are hollywood movies/trashy thriller novels/cheap pop hits 'art'?". games are definitely way over towards the entertainment side of the graph, but then so is most popular media. maybe art is something to do with communicating great truths and maybe games haven't really gone there yet but otoh fuck knows what great truths a lot of respectable modern art is trying to convey.

It seems like there's only so far you can push "It's graphic! It's visual! It's sensual!" because for critics like Ebert that is not enough to deem it art. Thus the deluge of ridiculously confusing (sorry) discussion about things that haven't yet been defined by consensus.

plax, i feel like you're saying that the only part of computer games which should be considered art are those elements which resemble other recognised artforms. which, to me, misses the point entirely - the most artful element of a game design is the ludic dimension... how it plays, how the way it plays changes over the course of the game, how the audience/players' senses are manipulated through the interaction. I'd argue this dimension is a form art, and its a dimension that yr traditional arts don't do with anywhere near the sophistication of even the most derivative games.

video games are fun and all but I've never found one that came even close to the level of emotional and intellectual engagement provided by other artforms (books, music, film, paintings, etc.)

so sure they may be art in a formal sense, but it's a shitty, weak artform

well i think its only really useful to think of art as a partic. category 1st. that is: there are certain things that are considered art and others that aren't, and the social construction of art is obv historically dependent. its a bit too much of a jump to start off w/ "where is the wordsworth of video games" because u haven't come up w/ a context first, a way in which VGs are understood as art in the first place. if you want to get hung up on q.s of legitimacy, then that is ur own baggage wrt the status of art and videogames.

video games are fun and all but I've never found one that came even close to the level of emotional and intellectual engagement provided by other artforms (books, music, film, paintings, etc.)

I have (Baldur's Gate II, Planescape: Torment, World of Warcraft)

The Secret of Monkey Island

and if you want to talk about "the Wordsworth of videogames", it's Shigeru Miyamoto

plax, i feel like you're saying that the only part of computer games which should be considered art are those elements which resemble other recognised artforms. which, to me, misses the point entirely - the most artful element of a game design is the ludic dimension... how it plays, how the way it plays changes over the course of the game, how the audience/players' senses are manipulated through the interaction. I'd argue this dimension is a form art, and its a dimension that yr traditional arts don't do with anywhere near the sophistication of even the most derivative games.

― tomofthenest, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 8:46 PM (2 minutes ago)

well i think when you have a category of things. in this case the category is art, then i think its kind of implicit that there is something that unites them, im not saying this is a coherent object or property, but when you wanna include something new, then it makes you reconfigure the system of relat. that holds the category together, so i think a consideration of what those relationships are and how video games might relate to them in a new formation is pretty much the kernel of the argument.

I'm not reading all this crap but I have no idea how someone could seriously argue that video games are not art. They may not be good art (most of the time), but they're definitely art.

wth is even at stake in this discussion. some sort of perceived legitimacy?

― Steve Sharta (cozen), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 3:34 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

afaic, no, but other people (ebert) are addressing this q for this reason.

if the purpose of criticism is to "open up" the thing in question (and i think it is, or ought to be), then this question is (should be) about coming up with some kind of critical apparatus for understanding games.

so really the question "are video games art" is p stupid an unanswerable, but the question "what occurs during valued game experiences" is imo

"is valuable, worth considering, etc, imo" i mean

If videogames are to be taken seriously as art then we will have to take the various videogame elements and relate them to their counterparts in art-world terminology.

we're never going to get to answer this question objectively, as there's clearly no definition of art that any of us would agree on. So, being subjective, I have been as awed by the gameplay in a handful of games as I have by the narrative in a handful of books and the colour&light in a handful of paintings.

nah this doesn't really work either bc like it or not art is a thing and not everything that is awesome is art so

"what occurs during valued game experiences" is imo

yeah this is a good question. have no idea what the answer is. even for games I enjoy.

kindof impossible to include games in the umbrella category 4 all those things w/o thinking abt those things and what they are and how games fit into the different justifications for their status as such

well my 1st impulse is to argue that games arent art & i hav no desire to include games w/ stuff ppl do consider "Art". but i guess even defining games against art we have to think abt "those things and what they are". id like to argue that games are subject and art is object that games are dialogue and art is narrative but this is p easy to pick apart in a lot of ways.

i dont know if have the tools to deconstruct the game/player relationship but i think its v v different from high art. as sum1 mentioned games are really closer to sports or rituals - is a really well played game of baseball art? it can be beautiful & fulfilling sure just like a well-designed level in mario can be - but these two things derive their meaning and their context from a type of dialogue thats much more interdependent that the one btw say author and reader?

so ur saying they arent?

nah this doesn't really work either bc like it or not art is a thing and not everything that is awesome is art so

― plax (ico), Wednesday, 21 April 2010 22:01 (21 seconds ago) Bookmark

see, this is where we disagree on what art is even. As a definition, "everything that is manmade and awesome" works for me.

I think you can rate this based on basic art theory components; line, shape, color, narrative, context, medium, performance, etc. A great deal of 20th century art theory could be easily applied to videogames.

I think most people agree art requires an artist.
I can be wowed by nature, but I don't believe there is an artist behind it, so I don't believe it is art.
In general, video games do not have an artist behind it -- they have people whose goals are not to produce art, but a game, so I don't believe they are art.
The games that do have artists behind them foist their artistic vision on it to the detriment of the game, so I agree they are art, but not very good games.

nah this doesn't really work either bc like it or not art is a thing and not everything that is awesome is art so

― plax (ico), Wednesday, 21 April 2010 22:01 (21 seconds ago) Bookmark

see, this is where we disagree on what art is even. As a definition, "everything that is manmade and awesome" works for me.

― tomofthenest, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:04 PM (5 seconds ago)

that's why i don't think we're "looking for a definition that we can all agree on" i think its only useful to look at the set of socially constructed assumptions that provide the limits of the category of the things we designate as art

I think you can rate this based on basic art theory components; line, shape, color, narrative, context, medium, performance, etc.

how do line and shape relate to musical art? why assume videogame art won't have its own categories?

i dont know if have the tools to deconstruct the game/player relationship but i think its v v different from high art. as sum1 mentioned games are really closer to sports or rituals - is a really well played game of baseball art? it can be beautiful & fulfilling sure just like a well-designed level in mario can be - but these two things derive their meaning and their context from a type of dialogue thats much more interdependent that the one btw say author and reader?

― good luck harbl county usa (Lamp), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 4:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah, my argt is that it's the kinetic experience, or "the experience of controlling forms moving through space in time" like i said a while ago.

there is also something about the experience of change (ie the ongoing process or result of movement-in-space-and-time -- films and other narratives offer change obv but in games you are responsible for the exactness of that change (within what is offered by the game)

I think most people agree art requires an artist.
I can be wowed by nature, but I don't believe there is an artist behind it, so I don't believe it is art.
In general, video games do not have an artist behind it -- they have people whose goals are not to produce art, but a game, so I don't believe they are art.
The games that do have artists behind them foist their artistic vision on it to the detriment of the game, so I agree they are art, but not very good games.

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:05 PM (36 seconds ago)

problem w/ something like this is that it is kindof a static version of what art is now. like there is a friction b/w that definition and things that we include under it. that is, the ppl who did the cave paintings which ARE art, would not have been considered artists at the time, and our contemporaneous construction of the artist might not yet have been expanded to include video game designers but that does not mean it wont, and i guess what im interested in is: what are the conditions that might allow us to understand the ways in which (x) might be included under a pre-existing category, and how might that affect and reorganise the internal structure of that category.

Cozen otm, I find it really confusing what's at stake here?

how do line and shape relate to musical art? why assume videogame art won't have its own categories?

i propose: headshot spatter rendition, anime/furrie interpretation, multiplayer hour played to # of 12 year olds calling you a faggot ratio

xxp yah plax ive always argued the con position in the "are games art?" thing. my problem is that ebert et al dismiss games as not being art bcuz they dont think their good at doing what "art" does i.e. tell stories w/ emotional resonance, provide psychological insights, "communicate" ideas abt our world &c

and so the argument becomes abt whether games can do these things and if so how well and it sets up these comparisons that games are destined to lose. fully-realized characters dont make a good game "character" doesnt even really have anything to do w/ what makes games "good", "fun", "important". the entire intent of a game is just different - a game is about choices & the "value" in a game comes from how meaningful those choices become to the player. books, high art, films, all of them they derive their meaning and value from other things imo

(I mean - okay, there is an irony that *ART* games, yr Passages and etc, are the games most at home in a traditional art context and also the ones a non-gamer is least likely to play, whereas the 'art' elements of Super Mario Galaxy 2 are a tissue of jump physics and buried reference that'd be pretty opaque? But, like, everyone growing up now who is interested in art is aware of both surely.)

how do line and shape relate to musical art? why assume videogame art won't have its own categories?

Videogame art will definitely have its own categories, and will transform the way we look at previously conceived art categories. But to have it taken seriously by art theory world as art, it would be wise to work from the inside out, show how it's like classical art. Otherwise we're pretty much just going from subjective personal definitions of what is art.

Line/shape, I guess you could say are reflected in musical patterns, or in wave shapes created by musical instruments, or in the visual representation of the music.

is a really well played game of baseball art? it can be beautiful & fulfilling sure just like a well-designed level in mario can be - but these two things derive their meaning and their context from a type of dialogue thats much more interdependent that the one btw say author and reader?

but otoh jazz interpretation is seen as art...

But to have it taken seriously by art theory world as art, it would be wise to work from the inside out, show how it's like classical art.

why bother?

techne v. episteme imo. but i think the discussion is worthless in the first place b/c i don't live my life out of a paradigm of what is/isn't art. the category is meaningless to me, esp in comparison to categories like: is this worthwhile? do i enjoy this? do i have a meaningful experience out of this? does it speak to me personally? and you can then go and say any of the above questions are really the TRUE question of whether something is art but that seems like a waste of time to me. i don't look at beautiful paintings because they're art, i look at them because they make me feel a certain way and produce a certain reaction in my body/brain. ditto film, music, video games.

" ppl who did the cave paintings which ARE art, would not have been considered artists at the time"

There are obviously primitive people who conducted science, though they probably didn't have same concept of scientist as we do.
I have no problem calling Dr. Caveman a scientist, just as I have no problem calling that weird ullillillia video game guy an artist, though he probably doesn't think of himself that way.

In other words, there are non-controversial ways in which we can call certain video games art -- it's just that video games do not lend themselves to being both art-products and "good" in any traditional sense.

xp sounds like my "awesome stuff" definition above

do you guys think nature is art?
it's surely awesome, and some of it is manmade to an extent (but mostly beavers)

i mean i guess personally for me whats at stake is, related to how i kindof always think of genre in art as working w/ a kind of conceptual base or that each medium has a kind of founding myth for (eg. oil painting as a solution to the problem of painting light becomes related to the representation of the inner light of christ) i guess its in my interest to think of how art might be able to gobble up the pre-existing myths of computer games as systems of art-making bc, hey its another box of tricks really.

yeah the problem here is kind of a damned if you do/damned if you dont thing - its pretty easy for people to conflate "not art" w/emotionally unresonant and shallow which is imo wrong, but if you argue for the art thing a bunch of inapplicable standards are brought to bear. lamp hugely otm re: the whole character thing, this is the thing i see non game types use as point number one and it just completely misses the basic conceit of how video games work.

bunch of xposts

i mean we could just go with the old "what? these arent comics, these are graphic novels" approach, but fuck that

xp nature certainly can be awesome, and inspire a similar reaction. but I wouldn't think of it as art, not unless I believed in the Creator.

plax ok I see where you're coming from now.

techne v. episteme imo. but i think the discussion is worthless in the first place b/c i don't live my life out of a paradigm of what is/isn't art. the category is meaningless to me, esp in comparison to categories like: is this worthwhile? do i enjoy this? do i have a meaningful experience out of this? does it speak to me personally? and you can then go and say any of the above questions are really the TRUE question of whether something is art but that seems like a waste of time to me. i don't look at beautiful paintings because they're art, i look at them because they make me feel a certain way and produce a certain reaction in my body/brain. ditto film, music, video games.

― Mordy, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:15 PM (4 minutes ago)

this is great and good for you, but their is a wider world where our definitions of these things have implications in how we form institutions around for eg. art as a category and how those institutions reflect/reinforce and construct our culture.

why bother?

You've got a point. But once we ignore the world of official art theory we kind of have to start from scratch, defining all these things that outside of that world have different subjective definitions for every single person. It's why this thread is so confusing.

books, high art, films, all of them they derive their meaning and value from other things imo

I agree with Mordy in terms of "who gives a toss whether something is Art or not", but I wd argue that most fields of the Arts started out with a criticism that tried to measure their value in terms of another art form - Movies as Theatre for example - and only gradually developed an aesthetics that cd judge them in their own terms. This is happening gradually with games too: people can legitimately talk about them as Art if they want to cos I don't think any of the definitions of what makes something Art apply across all fields of culture, but the criticism is only gonna get valid when critics examine games as games and not as bastardised movies or books or something.

also curious to see if (assuming my parallel btw comics/graphic novels stands) once there is an acceptance of video games as residing within the confines of art we'll see the same sort of retrovisioning that they do with like golden age comics these days.

well considering the relative newness of art history compared to art then i would say, yes 100%

I suspect it'll be more like the model of Art establishment gradually accepting Pop Music as Art, i.e. allowing old farts to say tremendously rong things about the rong games.

look, guys, when Barthes or whoever was writing about film, photography, any new technology/artistic category and developing them, they weren't making an impassioned case to be taken seriously. they were developing ways of thinking about this stuff in interesting ways. but i've never read a worthwhile, "Is X art" criticism ever anywhere. ico is wrong about how institutions are formed. and there are people writing interesting stuff about video games without tons of anxiety about whether it's art.

"i don't live my life out of a paradigm of what is/isn't art."

I don't think the social constructions of what art is are completely arbitrary -- they spring from a biological/evolutionary habit of attempting to guess the intentions of other people -- a useful survival skill -- so I think often you are in fact evaluating art differently from non-art. If something speaks to you, that means there is a supposed author conveying an intention -- in your mind, it is art. If something is merely awesome without speaking to you, then it is not art, and there is a difference between those two kinds of experiences.

Now I would love to read a blog by an established art critic who reviews videogames based on aesthetic properties alone.

"Matthew Smith: the Bob Dylan of Interactive Video Art"

Martin Amis' Space Invaders book was ... interesting

Not sure something needs to "speak to me" for me to consider it art, tbh.

"Matthew Smith: the Bob Dylan of Interactive Video Art"

― and ya thought that shit played out in ILX (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 21 April 2010 22:34 (10 seconds ago) Bookmark

syd barrett, no?

Nah that'd be Minter, surely?

nah, Minter's more like Jerry Garcia

I guess I feel like: Do we need to prove that photography is art before creating useful categories of thinking about it like studium and punctum? The former category is unrelated to the latter one. It might lend legitimacy in certain sectors (w/r/t funding, institutional recognition), but that legitimacy seems to come a lot from the categories of thinking more than the legitimacy being asserted. Show me the value in studying video games and eventually maybe people will call it art, but it's going about things backward demanding that it be considered art and then only after creating the value + the discourse. My 2cents on the issue.

Btw: I love video games. Of all kinds. Also non-video games, like board games.

Not sure something needs to "speak to me" for me to consider it art, tbh.

Yeah me too. This is a big problem, the only definitions of Art that seem remotely plausible are vague enough to encompass anything up to and including plumbing. But then, y'know, Art was invented in the 1790s and died some time at the beginning of the 20th century so it's no big surprise.

l'art pour l'art!

'Not sure something needs to "speak to me" for me to consider it art, tbh'

Like what? Is there anything you prize as art that doesn't speak to you at all?
The things I allow to be art that don't speak to me I concede are art because they speak to someone else, presumably.

art history is a relatively new field, largely credited to winkelmann in the 18th century, that is the tools that we have developed and use to appraise what is and isn't art are relatively new and exist after some categories obv (painting, sculpture, theatre) but def. not others (video, conceptual art, installation) a huge part of those recent additions inclusion in that category was because they were instigated as a way to chafe against the margins of what is and isn't art, that is, an enormous part of postmodernism is the expansion and questioning of what art is, so to say that there has been no interesting ""Is X art" criticism" is kindof disregarding of vast swathes of what is currently considered art, and the processes by which it came to be considered so.

the reason barthes doesn't have these conversations is because he is not an art historian, that is, he is not interested in considering the way in which art operated as a set of considerations and codes in itself. that is, he is interesting for talking about these things, but that does not mean he is interested in understanding the terms by which we define these things within their fields etc, in other words image music text/ camera lucida for eg are in some way abt collapsing the idea of art as a construction, which is interesting and awes but that is not what we are doing here.

and yes our definitions of what art is do inform our institution that centre around art, because every time you show something within a gallery for eg you are in some way reinforcing or contesting the ways in which the status of art is conferred on that object (altho this is just one example of among countless)

my gut instinct is to look at VG through the lens of lit crit rather than art history tbh

probably because i know fuck all about art history, but still

we should (and are) develop video game crit with an eye towards all kinds of crit to figure out interesting ways of thinking about things. like, i'd love to see theatre critics talk about gaming as performance/acting (nb, i'm a performance studies MA, so this would interest me personally)

The best video game articles I've read were more on the behavioral economics side or at least mushy pop psychology.

(Tetris appeals to boys because they destroy, Tetris appeals to girls because they like cleaning -- HAW!)

I'd certainly be interested in an architect's take on virtual environments and the way in which gamers interact with them

yeah all of this makes me think that the whole idea of trying to do up VG within one of the other critical schools is bound to fail - i mean theres a reason that there is art history and music theory and lit crit and film studies etc - which makes me question this whole overarching def of art thing in the first place.

not to get too wooly on all of this but the whole wittgenstein argument about how we define a "game" is pretty telling in how murky this whole thing is.

http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/civ.htm

first section of lol wikipedia scratches the surface of this, also some interesting things from Chris Crawford summed up in there

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

xpost

look, guys, when Barthes or whoever was writing about film, photography, any new technology/artistic category and developing them, they weren't making an impassioned case to be taken seriously. they were developing ways of thinking about this stuff in interesting ways.

wtf is this even? in like the late 70s when barthes was focussed on this stuff, photography was a long established art form? this is some str8 clueless garbage really.

i mean, it would be like going "is painting art?"

i mean camera lucida is from 1980, im pretty sure photography was looking pretty standard compared to video/performance/installation/conceptual art at that stage

It seems uncontroversial when plax says that art institutions are concerned w/ and defined by ideas about what art is, but if this is the only level at which definitions of art matter then I can't see its relevant to similar or semi-similar areas like computer games which are self-sufficient and have their own institutions. Not sure what practical change could happen in games if they are overall interpreted as being part of a wider tradition, or if it'd be positive.

Even w/ all the visual and narrative borrowing, a lot of computer games are still much closer to other games, Black Maria, Warhammer, whatever, and I'm not convinced there's any point trying to abstract an essence of computer games that weakens that grouping.

to say that there has been no interesting ""Is X art" criticism" is kindof disregarding of vast swathes of what is currently considered art, and the processes by which it came to be considered so.

I think we disregard metaphysical discussions behind human activities all the time, being able to appreciate something's place in any specific context or dialogue is not essential imo.

except that in the cases i mean, they explicitly take this criticism as their subject, kinda feel like this is entire legacy of dada/duchamp and it has been hugely influential for the last half of the 20th C at least, so i mean to pretend like it doesn't exist as a discussion is what im taking issue w.

I understand what yr saying, I just don't see the loss in no longer continuing to engage w/ this question or the point in trying to fit a new area into the framework of the debate.

"I can't see its relevant to similar or semi-similar areas like computer games which are self-sufficient and have their own institutions."

are you talking about new media academic types or game devs? because I don't think most game devs are consumed by artistic concerns as much as how they can ship the product without going insane.

I don't see the relevance of the question...? I don't think the majority of ppl are wrong in not giving a shit about attempts to bring games into an arena they are currently happily outside.

ok but then wtf r u asking?

I don't think the majority of ppl are wrong in not giving a shit about attempts to bring games into an arena they are currently happily outside.

Yeah but if you are an art critic (ie in Ebert's position) and you are discussing whether videogames are art, the least you can do is try and make an effort to bring games into that same arena, rather than criticizing them for the parts that lie 'happy outside'.

I'm in the camp of fans that think videogames ought to turn an indifferent eye to how they are perceived as art but I don't find the 'inside' culture as conducive to making great games either, and maybe those on the inside ought to think more critically about what they are doing instead of following blockbuster formulas, and if Ebert pointing that out makes them do it, good on him.

I am right now asking why plax cares about the thread title.

If you are a film critic trying to define a broader category under which computer games may or may not fall then you are about to waffle.

but their is a wider world where our definitions of these things have implications in how we form institutions around for eg. art as a category and how those institutions reflect/reinforce and construct our culture.

― plax (ico), Thursday, April 22, 2010 5:22 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I kind of take issue w/ this, plax can you explain more deeply

fwiw nabokov did publish a book of poems interspersed with chess puzzles, there is a kind of formal beauty about video games that we can all agree is there I hope

so many cans of worms...not gonna dip into this thread!