can games be art?

Heh. Ebert does an impressive job of coming off as a douchebag with poor debate skills and weak philosophical underpinnings fighting a different douchebag with poor debate skills and weak philosophical underpinnings.

Also:Are video games art?

and:Video Games and Art (Video Games AS Art) (and so on)

Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

Setting aside ther special case of videogames, are games in general capable of satisfying artistic urges?

In chess, there have been a handful of legendary games that have been described as works of art. Then there's fantasy chess, where you play around with the rules before playing, then see what happens.

Contra Ebert, malleability or open-endedness is not the criterion - plenty of art was created malleable, for the performers to improvise with - especially in music, for hundreds of years.

All the same, looking back over the last 2000 years, say, can you think of any games systems that have been considered an artform? Games are predicated on the adherence to a set of basic rules. If you break the rules, you are penalised or ejected from the game in some way.

Artists are supposed to break rules - the ones that do create something new, some new cultural event. The ones that don't break any rules are ultimately considered slavish and imitative. An artist may not break all the rules, but we expect them to break some of them - and all the available rules are equally up for breaking, even if they don't break all of them. They may be penalised socially for breaking a rule, and art critics or the public may even accuse them of not really being artists - actually, this will happen - but, the fact remains that artists who do not break rules are not considered, in historical context, to be artists by subsequent generations - that never, ever happens. If they are remembered at all, they are not remembered as artists - they might be remembered as craftspeople or as mass producers opf someone else's art. The conventional meaning of an artist is hard to define, but it definitely involves rule breaking.

So a game becomes art if any of the rules may be broken in the course of the game without ejecting the player. Any examples? One that may approach this test is the misuse of The Sims to create bizarre outcomes - two brilliant examples are described on somethingawful.com. Yes, it's a videogame of course. It may be that videogames like the Sims or Second Life really do open the door to creativity of an artistic kind. Paradoxically, however, many would say they are not really games at all, in the conventional sense.

So a game becomes art if any of the rules may be broken in the course of the game without ejecting the player. Any examples? One that may approach this test is the misuse of The Sims to create bizarre outcomes - two brilliant examples are described on somethingawful.com. Yes, it's a videogame of course. It may be that videogames like the Sims or Second Life really do open the door to creativity of an artistic kind. Paradoxically, however, many would say they are not really games at all, in the conventional sense.

I'm not sure I agree with this, esp. the bold part. You're talking about the idea that the use of a game might constitute art. In this construct, the game isn't art in and of itself, rather it's an environment in which "artistic" interactions might occur - the game becomes a tool, like a paintbrush or a chisel, with which one might create something else.

Original question as I understand it has more to do with the viability of games themselves as stand-alone works of art.

Ebert's objection is bullshit on the face of it. Not all art insists on a single vantage from which it must be viewed. Fact is, all art requires some degree of interaction, engagement, interpretation from the perceiver/audience. It's arguable that greater art requires a greater degree of such. If we accept that architecture can be art, then we're accepting that there are works of art (buildings) that will be approached & explored differently by everyone who encounters them - buildings are a perfect example of "choose your own adventure" art. Same goes for complex installation pieces.

One substantial difference between video games of the sort Barker is touting and academic "fine art": video games do not (for the most part) conceive of themselves in purely formal terms. They may incorporate "artistic" elements, but I don't know of any commercial videogames that concern themselves solely with the formal/theoretical qualities of their own medium.

Okay, wait. I misread you moley. I dont' necessarily disagree with you, but you're opening an entirely different question.

As far as the "can our interaction with games be art?" question goes, I think the answer is an easy yes. It doesn't even require that we be able to break the rules without breaking the system. As long as we conceive of our playing in artistic terms and proceed from that conception in a meaningful, engaged and challenging manner, then the act of game play becmomes an art form.