Games as art. Again.

Nailed.

I wrote you an e-mail, Ian, but if you like I can put it here and get some discussion going.

Wrong argument. Of course video games are art. So is Chutes And Ladders. They're graphic art. But they're not, and never will be, narrative art, which is what 'video games as art' people are trying to claim in a back door way.

Okay, then I'll get into it...

I've thought about this for a long time. In art, the only message that is intended to be conveyed is the author/artist/filmmakers. We can draw nothing new that the filmmakers did not intend for us to draw. This is good for the artist, because it makes their work much more timeless, as people keep "discovering" new things about the art over the years, and it's good for the person because they have a paradigm shift in their understanding of how the art, and the world in general, works.

I believe this qualifies in video games as well. Are games truly interactive? Because in the end, you still are presented with the game-maker's message. Even "open-ended" games are hardly that. But instead of dealing with the face value of what you are seeing/reading/hearing, you are probing, constantly probing, to get to the realization and the intended message of the game-makers. There are rewards in this art, as you successfully navigate through it, and get that extra piece of information that makes the message clearer. Have games reached the potential of this new mode of communicating art? Not remotely. They are still locked into plots that are as simple as children's books.

Video games are not art, not yet, but that's not due to the medium, which is capable of great art, in my opinion. I don't think the potential has been reached yet.

A guy standing on stage and farting for six hours is art, so the gates are wide open when it comes to definitions, but the fact is that video games do not elicit an emotional response beyond excitement, fun and frustration. There are people who have cried or been deeply moved by video games, but I find these people to be suspect in the extreme and probably moved to tears by The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. I think this whole argument is moot because no one has even remotely attempted to make a video game that's anything but a time wasting fun thing.

I also find people who need to rationalize their hobbies as 'art' to be sort of baffling - I spent a lot of this past weekend playing THE GODFATHER game, but I have no need to explain that time away with anything loftier than it was something to do with myself.

BS. The death of the author is a valid and important way to analyze art, but it isn't the only way, and to remove the author fully is reductionism of the worst kind and, I think, a false egalitarianism that makes everything art and so devalues art beyond any meaning.

Devin, do you think a video game by its nature cannot elicit a genuine emotional response? At least something more than excitement, anyway.

I think that what we define as a video game will never elicit an emotional response. There may be next generation interactive experiences that will, but sitting on your couch mashing the X button will never be an emotional experience for anyone but the most developmentally immature.

Many have tried, you just don't think anybody has been successful at it.

When you look at something like flOw, it is designed to make you waste time, but that shouldn't be used to dismiss any other ambitions the game has.

Here's the thing: are games art? Is playing Monopoly an artistic experience? Or playing Dodgeball? I am not talking about watching people play them or the inspiration one draws from playing them or something, I mean the actual playing of them. I don't think games are art. You can make art from games and you can make games from art, but I think they're essentially different things.

And I think that the interaction between author and audience is more theoretical in real art than it is in video games. The interaction is 'I present my ideas and feelings, you interpret and absorb them', not 'Hit X, hit Y, shake the controller and move the pixels on screen.' Your definitions have turned my refrigerator, a designed device with which I interact, into a work of art beyond the design arts. I just don't think my fridge is art, much as I don't think Halo is art.

Not to be a pussy about this argument, but I can see both points here. Maybe the proper question isn't "Are video games art?" but "Are video games useful?"

This is kind of a bullshit comparison. By that logic, a painter isn't creating art, because he's just dragging a wet stick across a sheet of paper. The tools and the method are just that. The result is what matters, and in this case, pressing X can mean a whole multitude of things depending on the game's context, just like a single brushstroke can.

I'll take a poke at that Marriage game, but I can't think of a video game that required real introspection, or even elicited it. In fact I regularly take actions in video games that are totally unrelated to any aspect of me or my personality and are only taken because they are dictated by the extremely limited set of options offered. Even what I think of as the best video game ever made, GTA: San Andreas, is enjoyable on a pulpy, impersonal level and not because it any way reflects upon me or who I am. People keep saying Shadow of the Colussus is the game that has all the meaning, but I've played it and it's at best just a critique of the form and has no bearing or relevance on my life. In fact, I think that the overwhelming majority of games and gamers are aimed at whatever would be the exact opposite of introspection.

So who's the artist, you or the video game designer? Because you're using comparisons that make no sense. The better comparison is to a sport - who's most important, the rulemaker or the player? The groundskeeper or the player?

Essentially what you're saying is that the crayon drawing you made isn't art but the crayolas you used are.

Can someone explain to me why games can't be simple, narrative art? Why can't a closed-ended game that tells a complete story, like an old-school rpg, be considered like any other piece of fiction? Because I have to press a bunch buttons between the story bits?

They allow for the second-person narrative, which is kind of a bitch to employ through any other means without being gimmicky. If the story is well-written enough, it allows for something much more immersive than the fly-on-the-wall perspective of most books. For any medium that thrives on and yet struggles with bringing readers/viewers/players into the heads of the protagonists, this would be an important element.

On a basic level, even as subjective as art is, if the very definition of art almost wholly involves the catalyst of human creativity, how can video games be excluded from the roster, when they're born out of the creative process (albeit many times derivitively) with an "observance engine" that relies entirely on aesthetics?

Interesting. I made almost the exact same argument to my wife the other night about Death of the Author - in a nutshell, she thought Barthes' concept went too far and could only lead to application across the board, removing too much authority from the author (and, heck, maybe even Barthes saw it this way). I see it as just another critical option.

Anyway, since we're kind of talking around the postmodernist idea that reader and writer are both responsible for meaning to some degree in defining any text, maybe also consider the difference between Barthes' text of pleasure and text of bliss. To be super, super reductive, the text of pleasure reasserts given societal norms - it's comforting. It's sort of easy, and, if it's considered art at all, it's probably what most would consider low art. The text of bliss on the other hand is more self-aware; it unsettles and it leaves room for the reader to form his or her own connections, reach conclusions. I'd argue that the text of bliss always presents a higher level of interactivity on the part of the reader. I'm pretty sure Barthes acknowledges that no text is exclusively one or the other, but some are more blissful, some more pleasurable.

The reason I bring this up is that we have a few different kinds of interactions going on here. Despite the fact that video games may appear to present a higher level of interactivity than any book, it's just an illusion. The interpretive demands placed on a player are just not all that substantial. The same sorts of ambiguities aren't there, because the answers are basically all there in the programming. You just have to work on finding them. In this sense, they're comforting. There are higher interpretive and emotional demands put on someone reading (or viewing or listening to) a text of bliss.

So, yeah, maybe video game designers are artists, but they're more akin to crossword puzzle-makers or the guy who created Monopoly than filmmakers, writers, musicians, or visual artists. Call 'em what you want, but realize that doing so doesn't assume any sort of equivalency with these other types of artists.

Goddamn, I'm way outgunned here. DaveB's argument is hellaconvincing.

Interactivity isn't definied soley by physically manipulating a thing. I'm sure we've all had highly interactive experiences with a song, a painting, or a film where the interaction consists of experiencing the object, reflecting on the experience, and then experiencing not only the object but our own thoughts, (which have now changed as a result of the experience) about the object and what the object represents. The object itself doesn't change, but then, neither does the code on a video game disc--we just have a different experience of it.

The answer to the 'are games art' question seems trivial--they don't need to be art to have value.

But I think it's false to go down the 'emotional response' road. An object doesn't require an emotional response from a viewer to be art, so the lack of an emotional response to a game isn't an indication that games are not worthy of being called art.

Mind you, I'm doing some research on the topic right now, so a) I am very likely getting some of this wrong and b) it's kind of fresh in my mind at the moment - it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to go in this direction otherwise. But thanks for the compliment.

Kind of. But I think it goes beyond norms, in any societal sense of the term. Texts of bliss make us participate in forming meaning, not just in progressing a narrative. In doing so, we're made at least semi-conscious of the gaps, thus the responsibility is on us not to solve the mystery of those gaps (which I think is what you're doing in most video games), but to acknowledge that the mystery exists, and it's unanswerable (which further might lead to an acknowledgment of a de-centered universe, existentialism, the whole 20th century philosophical bag). Any personal theories that might come out of these gaps are fine - and probably unavoidable, but the important part is the acknowledgment of the gaps and the realization that you're being required to participate in the forming of meaning.

I'm probably combining the work of Barthes with that of other postmodern critics a little, BTW, but I think it all fits together.

I think the problem with this idea is that there are conclusions built into video games. The mysteries to be solved are illusory mysteries, because they do have answers - they just have to be sought, not created by the player. In some ways, I suppose this isn't all that different from a Sherlock Holmes mystery, since any participation of the reader in fulfilling the mystery is just as illusory. The mystery will be solved, whether the reader actively attempts to solve it before the conclusion or not. I'd have to think Barthes would put mystery novels further over on the text of pleasure side of the continuum, as well (although I'd still think there'd be more room for bliss in most works of written fiction than video games and perhaps even TV and movies, if only due to the fact that the written word tends to call for more obvious interpretive activity on the part of the reader - though I don't think this is across the board).

Hmm. This might depend on the ambiguities left by the author of the non-linear work. If we're talking about Choose Your Own Adventure books, I think we're pretty clearly in the realm of "text of pleasure." While there are multiple conclusions in those books, none tend to leave questions. Everything's neatly tied up. However, if we're talking about something like Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Kazars (which includes the full history of a people in three different sets of cross-referential dictionary definitions), there's tons of ambiguity. Not only is the reader responsible for the order in which the definitions are read, but he/she is responsible for figuring out why things are defined the way they are, which definitions are reliable, and, ultimately, for figuring out whether historical objectivity can even exist. Pavic doesn't tie things up with a single conclusion or multiple conclusions as some non-linear works (most narrative-oriented videogames included, I suspect) do.

I'm not sure about that, but I honestly haven't played that many video games in the past decade or so. I would suspect those that call for any real introspection are far more the exception than the rule, no?

Agreed. If a particular sunset moves me beyond anything I've ever read in a book, that doesn't make it art, and if The Scream doesn't grab me, that doesn't make it not art.

devin you're like the guy that says 'the movie didn't move me so it's not art'.

final fantasy 6 and 7 are compelling stories. the reason i wanted to finish the games was because of the characters involved. these games would be interesting as novels, films, or as two television series. of course video games CAN BE art.

Re-read. Devin acknowledges that they're art in his first post. We've moved on.

Dave, it seems to me that you're making a distinction between mysteries or questions that are part of the plot, and will be resolved with or without the audience's "participation" and mysteries of theme, which are the questions that resolution leaves us with. Would that be correct to say?

If it is, then wouldn't you consider that to be a function of the story itself and not the particular medium? Basically, if a story can effectively raise these questions in literary or cinematic form, what is it about the video game format that resists that effectiveness?

and in his second post he says a guy standing on a stage and farting is art. then he says some other stuff, too.

Sort of, though I don't know if I'd go so far as to call the latter "mysteries of theme." It's broader than that. It's sort of like Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (spoilers ahead, if they can really be said to be that). The mystery on the surface might have you believe that it's one of Barthes' texts of pleasure - it looks like something that's conforming a little to some conventions of the genre, we're getting some clues, maybe this thing might just resolve. But, instead, the mystery just gets deeper and deeper, the answers more and more slippery, and you're ultimately left with a hole. It's very much a text of bliss, but I don't know if unsolvability is actually the book's "theme." Maybe?

Yeah, it's definitely a function of the particular piece, not just a medium. I think a few things make video games more resistant to working on this level. Here are a couple that come to mind first for me:

A. The win/lose factor. When we play a game, we expect resolution more than when we look at a painting or read a book - we want to be rewarded for our efforts. What's the objective of any game? To win. This limits the possibilities for ambiguity to a great extent, because you've essentially only got two options: you win or you lose.

B. The anticipatory nature of video game designers. These guys have to plan for countless actions on the part of the player, but the fact that there's programming that will account for a myriad of player decisions doesn't change the fact that all questions in the game still have answers. There can be no central ambiguities. To use the example I gave above, I don't think Pynchon had some grand answer to his mysteries in mind and, even if he did, there'd be no way to know them. In a game, all possibilities do have to be accounted for by the designer(s); if they weren't, I assume the game would just sort of stop and fade to a black screen. That's a big difference in how their respective interactivities work.

At least in the narrative sense games like Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, System Shock 2 (and in a limited fashion the new Stalker) are pure art.
They manage to create an atmosphere (through plot decisions, art direction, characters) that is immensely involving.
Deus Ex for example had the most intriguing "movie" story I had experienced to that date. The game made you think about society and where it was headed. Of course there were traditional gameplay elements en masse, new stuff and old, revolutionary and standard. But the whole package was so perfect it was eerie.
(remember standing on Liberty Island the first time, looking across the bay towards Manhattan and the Twin Towers were missing, this was 2000 and they were missing because of a terror attack.)
You played a rookie government agent tasked to hunt down terrorists and over the course of the game discovered that the world you were in was everything but black and white, there were a handfull of world players involved and you had to choose at every corner which to serve or if you'd go your own way.

The music was perfect, the art of all the graphical assets, the feeling of the world...all this had to come together under the direction of a Lead Designer exactly the same way like a movie production.
I wouldn't go so far as to claim Deus Ex had the same level of relevance as let's say "Children Of Men" but you could feel the intentions and great artistry every minute.

That is pure brilliant narrative art. And it is way more complicated than writing the next Crichton novel or something.

Deus Ex seemed to be more of a standard "corrupt government takes control of cure to plague" kind of a story, with random bits of all sorts of conspiracy theory mixed in. IT's a fun story, but it doesn't connect emotionally at all because the characters aren't al that terrific.

It's definitely head and shoulders above most video game storylines, but if you seperated the plot on it's own, it wouldn't be anything particularly mind-blowing.

So it's better than trash fiction. I don't see that as a particularly compelling argument.

And frankly, what you described is standard conspiracy sci fi. There's nothing transcendent or special about that - it's all riffs on shit Philip K Dick did decades ago. But not even half as interesting or well done as anything Dick did.

What 99% of narrative video games come down to, by the way, is exactly what THE GODFATHER video game is - it's a storyline that cannot be diverged from, only meandered from. Nothing you do in the game will change anything in the story beyond some binary aspects (win/lose, get girl/don't get girl). They're the equivalent of reading a barely competent book and having an old fashioned arcade game smashed between the chapters. And by the way, THE GODFATHER is one of the best movies of all time, one of the best examples of film as art, film as not just narrative but also something that speaks to the audience about universal themes and concepts of family, justice and free will, and it still makes for shitty cut scenes in a video game.

As for interactive fiction, it'll never happen. It's a novelty. We've been able to do interactive fiction in a very real way for quite some time now, and no one is interested. Here's part of the problem: Nobody wants an insular experience with art. Nobody wants to read the book in a way that's utterly unique to them. They want the basic structure and to be able to interpret it as they like, but they want to be able to discuss the basics with others. A truly interactive fiction would be one that's unique to the individual experiencer, not just some choose your own adventure dressed up, and I think that would be less satisfying to humans as social beings.

all i'm saying is that he's calling it something else because he doesn't respond to it like some people do. 'people who respond emotionally to video games are immature'. so where does that line of thinking end? you cried in this movie or reading this novella and i didn't, so according to me it doesn't count...

'it's not narrative art', those are his words, not mine. 'no one has attempted to make a game that's more than just a time wasting fun thing', again his words. anyone who is schooled at all in recent gaming history knows that is flat-out wrong.

not narrative art? so i guess playing through a game almost solely because of character and plot, playing through a game FOR the narrative, to see what happens and how it unfolds... what, that doesn't count? i'm 'suspect' because of that? it 'doesn't ellicit an emotional response?' give me a break, that's just ridiculous. final fantasy 7, metal gear solid, resident evil 4, don't get me wrong, they didn't make me cry... but neither did children of men, pan's labyrinth, or the departed.

If you would print it out sequentially on a piece of paper, of course not.
But the cool thing was that you felt, like you could discover a greater world at every corner. There was a mission in abandoned New York where you COULD stumble upon a secret research lab by the Majestic circle deep underground in the subway system. You would then learn more about that particular organisation and be able to unravel further mysteries about your asignment.

The plot in a linear form itself would've been X-Files: The Movie material or at best something like ID4 or whatever, but the way you could play it was phenomenal.

i don't understand what diverging from the storyline of a video game has to do with anything.

I've played those games, and the only one that gives a response beyond the basics is RE4, and that's just tension and jump scares. If you were moved by Metal Gear Solid in any way beyond wanting to throw your controller through the TV set, I don't know what to tell you. It's a rotten story with awful characters and laughable dialogue. FFVII... unreal in how cheesy it is. When that girl dies it's hysterical, the same kind of overblown soap opera level faux emotion that seems to grab all the otaku. It's about ten levels removed from any emotional reality at all.

And nobody plays through a game for the narrative. If the actual game elements suck, nobody cares about the story. The aesthetics of video games holds playability above any other aspect. If you're going to spend 30 hours on a game, it has to be rewarding, and the modern gaming definition of rewarding involves fun gameplay.

The story and how you percieve it, doesn't lie in the ending, it's the way you play and make your way in the game that is the narrative.
Endings with elaborate outro sequences are just another way of saying "Game Over". Deus Ex for example had 3 completely different endings, coupled with all kinds of possibilities how characters could survive, die or live on.
This is of course not nearly enough diversity to give the game itself justice, but games are about the experience during play, not the twist you get from the outro.
What you mean are the typical pieces of narrative that always stay the same and drive your typical plot "level1, 2, 3" forward. Good games are those that use that backbone structure to not let the player get lost and give the player the means necessary to create his on world with the way he plays.

Games have had the ability to allow for conclusions that go beyond "binary" bits for quite some time. That almost sounds like somebody is confusing the term "binary" with "computers".

Games have had the ability to make their users experience paths and events that go beyond what a designer/programmer specified. Again, nothing new.

Not all games are win/lose. Is it really necessary to enumerate them?

Let's updated the discussion past the Pong era guys.

Hey I'm a fan of the Metal Gear series, but goodness gracious, the plot and dialog of those "stories" is nothing to brag about.

I'd love to hear about narrative games that don't have pre-set endings and allow you to go beyond what the programmers intended. And don't give me Elder Scrolls, where the game world sustains beyond the end of the narrative story, because there's nothing happening in that game world any more once the story is over.