Arcade Aesthetics

(immediate invitation to mutate thread tangential question: is it OK to use ILE as a research tool? do you try out your writing ideas here?)

Oi! Nick! Since you're posting again you might as well fetch this man the thread he is looking for.

Short answer - yeah. Stephen/Steven Poole's "Trigger Happy" is the book.

not to come off like the il* police, but i'm pretty sure there's another vg as art thread floatin about, so prolly a buncha good info on that to be gleaned.

jess' snap response: vg = art, obviously, if pop muzik = art, obv. just as much creative engineering goes into a gamecube title as britney spears, maybe more. (note: i am not being crass. i hold many vid games more dearly than a good chunk of "high art." or, if this ever sees the light of day, "why i value the creator/designer of mario/zelda more than any artist since ed kienholz died." [title pending approval.])

I know my place. Are Video Games Art?

It's just like old times.

Thanks, gentlemen. Now I remember where I swiped the idea in the first place.

Nick, where did you go anyway?

err - nowhere. personal things.

Saw this a while back, may be of some interest...kinda cool regardless:

http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/haddock/

Saw an article about it in Salon I believe...

There R some games (such as final fantasy/shenmue) that would try and convince you that they R high art. I R saying no a game is just a way to unwind. When you start adding stories which try and be "important" and meaningful, generally the end result is a film where you have to press the "a" button every so often and R having an absoloutley dreadful script.

having spending dangerous amounts of time on a speccy emulator recently, I R considering whether 8 bit games/music could be considered art.

s'like any medium innit. say fiction books. some have more artistic merit than others. some are better written than others. most are just passing entertainment. there's been a lot of talking up games as art, but it's largely PR fluff.

here's my theory: you're more likely to find art of merit where the audience/cash isn't big enough for marketing to kick in. not because better stuff is written, but because only the really good stuff is talked up, rather than the latest studio release. which sets me up for another plug for text-based games :-)

Text based games R being oxymoron

"3-D Ant Attack" certainly is art.