What was the question again? Games and Art?

[Daniel Golding]

What was the question again? Games and art? by Daniel

PALGN Feature: The battle over the cultural status of games is changing.

[View Article]

[NegativeZero]

Ironically, Will Wright is a member of the camp that believes that games are toys and entertainment, and not art.

[Aftershock]

Great read. somewhat out of the blue, but welcome nonetheless.
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[Lord Haart]

Nice article.

Personally, I feel games should be art, but most are not deserving of that status, subjective as the title of "art" may be. While art is more about perception, I still feel that games miss the opportunity to convey meaningful themes and issues in the majority of cases.

I hate using movies as an analogy, but games are currently more the equivalent of "Dude Where's My Car" and "300" then anything else. Funny, gory and entertaining, sometimes even with basic themes of patriotism etc. But ultimately they rarely exploit their capacity to make people <i>think</i>.

We should not hold games up to other media such as paintings and movies - they have the potential, as an <i>interactive</i> medium, to convey much more meaning and inspire far more thought than the media which are currently considered to be forms of art.

Games like Haze, which I admire greatly for breaking the 4th wall in a very strong way, are just the tip of the iceberg. Will Wright's Spore has the chance to be another game which really does bring the name of gaming up another level, by giving players an experience that makes them really think about how as humans we came to be (evolution, etc).

[The Brett]

The huge cost of making games, as is the case with movies, means that creating a piece of "art" is always going to be about balancing capitalism with creativity. Money will always be a motivating factor in most games produced, even Okami. That's why I don't think that movies or games can either ever truly be considered pure art, because they are too expensive to make. Movies can get closer because cost is often an incredibly important factor in obtaining that artistic vision- Lord of the Rings comes to mind as an example. Games, on the other hand, are inherently artificial and as such, the actual way of obtaining a game that is considered "art" is not so easy. I don't feel Okami is art, neither do I feel Shadow of the Colossus is art. Killer 7 is closer due to its interpretive nature as a package, whereas I feel games like Okami and SotC are just "pretty." Prettiness does not equate to art, in my opinion.

I don't think we've yet come to understand how to make a game "art." I think a major restriction on that fact is a lack of variety in terms of input methods. It's still too linear in design, too restrictive in terms of imagination for the player.

[Daniel Golding]

Brett, I agree with a lot of your points, but I disagree on the issue of consumerism. Just because something is expected to make money doesn't mean it inherently cannot be art. To me, in fact, the greatest art is that which works within the mainstream to create meaning. In that sense, it isn't just art which has created itself a niche, where only an informed and art-literate audience view it. That is almost a pointless exercise, in my view, as the only ones who will consume it will have often already thought about the issues contained within.

The best art is that which can speak to the mainstream, those for whom the ideas presented within are new. Anyway, I think what we are talking about here is a sort of inherent segregation of art: as obviously a cultural product can be called 'art' whether it is speaking to mainstream or niche groups. It's a question of 'high art' here, and I guess to a certain extent I find that sort of discussion unhelpful, and slightly irrelevant.
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[Lord Haart]

I agree to extent with both sets of ideas raised; art must appeal to the masses, but this does not mean that Big Brother is art.

I think we can all agree that the real question isn't "is this art", but rather "does this make me think, and re-evaluate my environment and myself". Games have the ability to do that more than movies, books or paintings, as they are interactive. But thus far, few games have lived up to the task. AoE2 is one of the few games that changed the way I thought, it brought some post-colonialist themes across in a way my (then) young mind could grasp, and I grew more tolerant and understanding of other cultures as a result.

But now it's time to go further. Microsoft holds an "Imagine Cup" challenge yearly, and one of the new categories is creating a computer game. The theme is sustainability and the environment. I'm not trying to sell MS here, just thought that it's worth using as an example of what kind of initiatives I feel have the potential to uplift games to the artistic level.

[Daniel Golding]

[Lord Haart]

Yes, I see your point, and agree. Currently, games have a limited number of gameplay paths.

However, we are moving into the realms of Emergent Gameplay, where even the authors don't always know what will occur. Spore for instance has no "goal" or "end" (afaik). The game is there to be played, and each player will take something different from the game - but rather than the player interacting with the game, the game can interact with the player. A movie or novel can indeed do this, but given that narratives have a single plotline (with a handful of exceptions - eg choose-your-own-adventure books), a game potentially has an infinitely greater scope.

Plus it's far more accessible to people who aren't great fans of conventional art.

Ultimately, art strives to change the way we percieve the world around us, and ourselves within it. While you can follow a movie or a book and pretend you are the main character, this entails a mental shift to temporarily take on that personality. In games, the personalities are so flexible - in a few years time, it's almost plausible that we will find RPGs where the main character really is you, no matter who you are.

[Daniel Golding]

Yes, that's a very interesting point. In a slightly stretched way, it's almost like fan-fiction, or mash-ups, or something like that. While the author produces the work, it can mutate into innumerable fan-created meanings. But in the case of something like Spore, it is inherently 'mutatable' ( ) instead of fan-fic, which happens usually in spite of the author.

However, while it's interesting to talk about the possibilities of games, it's a little too 'Nostradamus' for me. We can argue all day about what games can be, but we won't really be talking 'honestly', if you like, until we are talking about what games are. I find that a lot of debate on the intellectual merit of games focuses on possibilities to shy away from the fact that, by most standards, games now are not particularly great on the intellectual scale.
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[Mark]

I think the main issue with categorising videogames as art or not lies directly with what they are: games.

I was going to make a point about other games, but in the article it talks about the Chess issue, which is entirely true. Videogames are primary interactive products, and from that perspective it all makes sense in why people wouldn't call videogames art - they are just games that you play, regardless of how attractive they may look. Just like a boardgame. Regardless of how clever and attractive it is, you can't possibly call it 'art'.

So, I think if you break-down a videogame into sections such as story writing and visual appearance (like a movie) then there's your art. But videogames as a whole? I can't see them being art, honestly.

Interesting article though and I think this is my first article I've read from you . Wouldn't mind seeing PALGN doing more of these one-off type articles outside of the typical columns. But in saying that... roundtables!!!
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[ObsoletE]

warning: this post will jump around a bit. i don't know if there's an actual point to it, more it's really just a series of thoughts i had regarding the matter posted in a sort of verbal diarrhea manner. there is probably more than one contradiction in what i say.
if a film can be considered art, why then can't a game?

i don't know that i agree with either stance. i can see that art goes into making games and film, but are the end products necessarily art?

and if they are art, what realistic differentiation can be made between "Psycho" or David Lynch films as art, and (to use an earlier example) "Dude, Where's My Car?" or Adam Sandler films as non-art?
or, "Shadow of the Colossus" and "Crazy Frog Racer" or "Elf Bowling"?
the same creative processes are employed across the board, perhaps we just don't see the artistic merits of "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo".

i think the popularity issue raised is somewhat counter-intuitive though. the whole "Art-house" movement of films isn't really known for being popular with the masses, but rather stereotypically enjoyed by men with goatees and funny hats, and women with hairy armpits (or something).
so then doesn't the application of the "art" tag to games mean then that it's the games that people don't get that are, in fact, art?

ultimately, i think that there's the potential for some sort of interactive media to be art. but when i try imagine what kind of product it would be, i come up more with something like flOw or Geometry Wars rather than Zelda, Metroid, Bioshock, Half-life or Ico.
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[Lord Haart]

Some more random food for thought:

- Can in-game graphics be art?
- Are plot devices that create a narrative enough to be art?
- Is the player's freedom (to an extent varying according to the game) symbolic of the freedom to interpret art?
- Is "art" just a means of saying something, and do any games have something they try to say?
- Are there 'styles' within a game which mark it as part of it's creator's body of work? (John Woo, Sid Meier [sp?])

Ultimately I think the argument is moot, since the broad definition of "art" can apply to basically everything, from a monkey+paint+canvas to the mona lisa to cultivating a garden to sports;conversely, the 'narrow' definition of "art", as stated poetically by ObsolettE, is basically the body of work "stereotypically enjoyed by men with goatees and funny hats, and women with hairy armpits."

So perhaps the real question people are saying is - can games be transformed from mere entertainment which at best is simple fun, and at worst, the equivalent of a lobotomy, to something which culturally and mentally enriches us as humans?

[mayo]

Electroplankton.
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[Daniel Golding]

[Lord Haart]

[Chris-Leigh]