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?

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!