Games as art. Again. - Page 2

the 'game elements' are just a device of the gaming experience, not the alpha and omega. you wouldn't read a brilliant story written by a writer with a 8th grade vocabulary, either. you may sit through a great script directed by a shit director, but only because the film is 2 hours long and you'll never have to revisit is again.

if the story of those games were as awful as you claim, no one would play them either. i don't think they rival the best films ever made, i think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

you could level those exact criticisms at many movies released today, but i don't think you are casting doubt onto the medium's validity as artform by doing so.

There's a distinction that comes to my mind whenever these threads show up. I think people are focussing on Narrative art in videogames, and debating whether the medium of videogames lends itself or not to portray narrative texts that are "Art". At least that's what I can surmise from the thread, though I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. But this seems to me to be a kind of facile argument. No matter how many addeed hurdles the videogame format adds to the portrayal of narrative art, if you look at a VG as a portrayal of a written "story", and allow (as you must) that written pieces can be art, then it more or less follows that videogames who do this are pieces of art, much like books are.

However, I don't think that's the central question. It the same argument as having a simple puzzle game but buying paintings of a respected artist (maybe even original works, from an established painter) to serve as backgrounds to the puzzles, and asking if the result is a work of visual art.

The real question here is if games IN THEMSELVES can be an art form independent of their narrative or visual qualities. If you can derive meaning, or at least emotional experiences, from the act of playing a game, not of reading a game's story or looking at the mona lisa in the background of a graphical adventure. Someone used flOw as an example, and I think that's a more interesting discussion than the one we're having now. I've played the game, and when I accumulated enough time with it to abstract myself from the conscious act of playing it (moving the mouse, etc) it was a surprising experience. Maybe not for everybody, but I was surely entranced for a lot longer than the minimalistic gameplay would suggest.

I think this is why Devin seems to be arguing at cross purposes with the people that keep saying "But I cried when Aeris died, you meanie! That's high art, I'm most definetely not an emotionally stunted nerd!"

Any thoughts on this from the actually intelligent people in this discussion?

Oh, and
Entire generations of Final Fantasy fans prove you wrong on this one, I'm afraid.

even if you get this answered, how is that relevent?

If there has ever been an example of a game that produced a very real, very emotional response from the player, it's Max Payne 2. Seriously, the story is like Infernal Affairs meets Reds. Even though it takes place in a fantasy world where a person can make himself move faster than those around him at will, it's also a very real story about love and hope and loss and how people deal with those things. The themes in this game, as well as it's predecessor, are intensely powerful and relatable, and as a result, not allowing it the label of art is extremely shortsighted.

This is massively incorrect. You need to expand your literary and cinematic horizons if you don't think that first person narratives from the point of view of young or intellectually stunted narrators aren't just plentiful but often amazing. And cinema is filled with people who don't go for the polished aesthetic of the major leagues, people like John Cassavetes, whose very roughness of style is part of the point.

Killer 7. Sure, there's an ending, but.....well.....it ain't an ending.

C'mon. People play Tetris, and its compelling story of you catching the pieces of the Berlin Wall as they fall in different shapes, celebrating the fall of communism- wait, that's not what the game is at all.

Story and gameplay are definitely exclusive. And gameplay trumps story everytime.

About fucking time.

This is what I was trying to get at by comparing games to sports, which I think is a much more valid comparison. Actually, video games probably come closest to professional wrestling.

Let's look again at Max Payne 2. It's hard to say that the story would be nearly as effective if you weren't in the head of the protagonist the entire game. But that closenes to the character allows the player to develop a better understanding of what's going on in his head (it's very much a psychological story). Also, the difference between this game and it's predecessor is that here the overarching mystery about the mysterious government Principals and the crazy Russian arms dealer is secondary to the emotional journey Max and Mona Sax experience during the course of the game. Viewed fromt he outside in, say, a movie version, it would be easier for that journey to fall to the wayside.

i implied something i didn't mean. i didn't mean 'a young writer' or 'a young director', i meant a bad writer or a bad director. bad as in relation to your assertion that no one would play the game if it weren't for good gameplay. if something is broken in a game, it's no different than if something is broken in a movie. or maybe it is, but only because a film requires less of an investment.

I will actually argue this is what makes games fail as narrative art. Second person is probably the LEAST used narrative format in literature and film, and that's because it's actually distancing from the story - you're hyperaware of hwo it's not really you. Watching or reading someone else going through things allows empathetic identification - you are imaging what it's like for them, which allows you to internalize what's going on and to get lost in the story. When you're making decisions for the character, you're trapped inside a world of false rules and limits, and the inherent fakeness of the whole thing becomes apparent.

I don't mean the author is young. Cassavetes wasn't young. Go read THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME, which is told from the POV of an autistic boy, but the author is not autistic or a young boy.

Bad art is bad art. That has nothing to do with this.

I once had the chance to talk with Victor Antonov, Art Director of Half-Life 2. He was responsible for the whole setting of City 17 in Eastern Europe, the blending of the Combine architecture with human architecture styles - to cut it short, he was the man who made Half-Life 2 so aesthetically pleasing.

We talked a little bit about how he tried to give every keylocation in the game all that you would expect from a movie with beautiful cinematography.
Good negative space, readability of the image, drama, perspective, every image a little history of it's own, reflecting the overall design and so on.
Of course this is immensely difficult in a FPS game, because the player decides what the camera sees. The view changes when you move your mouse.
And here comes the cool part:
At the end of our little talk I asked him if he would consider playing a game like Half-Life 2 just for it's artistic merits stupid, admiring the scenery in a wonderfully designed level, trying to get that perfect sunset, standing on a hill watching the capital or whatever.
He said that when a game not only has a good plot, but also perfect art design and really good gameplay, then you want to come back to it again and again. So you could focus on plot the first time you play through.
Then try to get your gameplay techiques maximized the next time.
Or you could just play it to soak in the beauty of the game art.
If you look at RE4 or the first Unreal, American McGee's Alice or even the newer Half-Life 2. These are games that have art direction that is way beyond the norm level and give you images that stay in your head. In the 3D era of games it is immensely difficult to revisit a game and not be dissappointed by the low graphical detail, but with good Art direction it doesn't matter, they are timeless (in dog years).

I think we humans constantly evolve and change and so does our appreciation of art. if you'd shown a cave painter a movie, or given Mozart a Queen CD they definitely would not have classified it as art. Our definitions must not be frozen in time, they should adapt to new forms of entertainment and games are the newest right now.

Spore, fl0w, these are the types of games I was referring to before.

These are not linear games consistent of weird button combinations, but experiences that are often personal and beautiful. To look at games like these and dismiss them as just useless time wasters is extremely simple minded.

yeah, my first post said that games are graphic arts, just like signs and motel room paintings. I don't know what you're arguing.

fl0w is the video game version of a lava lamp.

And you know, I've lost afternoons at the office playing fl0w, and I will say that it's TOTALLY a time waster. There's nothing deeper to it than wasting some time floating around. And since there's no 'point' to the thing, it's a completely endless time waster, whereas at least Solitaire has an end point between hands where I can go back to work. If I spent all Saturday playing fl0w I would feel really, really bad about myself.

what exactly does that have to do with what i was saying, then? i was talking about the people crafting the story. i was talking about a bad writer, not a good writer creating a narrator that is emotionally or intellectually stunted. it was in response to your claim that a game that is in some ways broken would not be played or at least not enjoyed, and the same is true of many kinds of art. that's all i said.

All I'm saying is that the young generations probably have more images and feelings about Resident Evil, Max Payne, Halo or Gears of War in their head than pictures of the Mona Lisa or Tarkovsky movies.

You can't put art on a "not-human" pedestal for all time. art is what humans with at least some form of intellect want to see, hear, experience, communicate or create.
Games are art. If you define movies as art, games are too. If movies are art for you in a way 98% of the movie going public doesn't experience or "get it" then that is elitist thinking right there.

so devin, the action of playing a game is not artistic, and because that action is what makes a video game a video game, video games aren't art?

When you look at a painting, what is your "end point " besides having to go to the bathroom in order to take a dump?

seems like a different discussion.

Is playing football art?

no less so than some forms of dance that i've seen.

but that comparison is false, because you're treating video games like there is nothing more than the action itself, pressing x, moving a joystick, etc.

I think a cave painter would have recognized a movie as analogous, if different, to his version of narrative art. It's a moving representation of what the cave painter does.

I also think Mozart would undoubtedly classify Queen as music - no question. In fact, the caveman might do the same.

However, the level of strategy, the restrictive number of outcomes, etc. involved in video game play makes it more analogous to chess, no matter how much story you build up behind it.

In thousands and thousands of years, the basic nature of music and narrative storytelling have not changed all that much (movies are a natural outgrowth of drama, which was an outgrowth of oral storytelling, etc.). In all of that time, game playing has existed as an entirely separate experience. Why do you suppose we, all of a sudden, feel the need to conflate the two? Even as recent as the 80s, were Dungeons and Dragons players arguing that some badass campaign that their DM designed deserved consideration as art?

Paintings are non-narrative and not interactive. A video game that's called "Take a Walk Around the Louvre" would not be art but the paintings reproduced would be. But you don't go to the MOna Lisa and press a button to get the cut scene of what her smile means. Paintings and sculpture etc are meant to be pondered and considered - which is the kind of interactivity talked about at the beginning of the thread but not the kind that video games give us. Video games are applied arts, not fine arts.

This obsession with 'art' is, again, just a way of legitimizing a hobby. Nobody is pushing to make Scrabble an art and yet millions of Scrabble players are A-OK with that.

No, it's because you are playing a game with rules and structure. Dancers are not playing a game.

Nonsensically vague. I like to experience the eating of hamburgers. Are hamburgers art? I also like having sex. Is that art? I enjoy driving my car on a nice, summer day. Art?


Sez you.

So now we must define art by what the LCD/majority likes? That would be bad news for Stravinsky in 1913.

And I'm not sure what's wrong with elitism in a conversation about art. In defining such a vague concept, wouldn't it help to define the elite - the best - examples so that we know what art might aspire to?

i don't know what the 'rules and structure' statement has to do with anything and yet i can't really argue with it. i think the craftsmanship involved in some of the video games i've played in my life, independent of my personal response to the finished game itself, earn them the title of 'art'. but i think i can see what you're saying devin. at first it seems like an unnecessarily elitist attitude, but without consideration for how art is consumed almost anything could be termed art. and i do have a problem with that, i suppose.

So what? That shows lack of exposure, not that the games are something great.

You know, whenever a movie has a strong score, a moving orchestra, regardless of how good the movie is, in me it elicits an emotional response. And I know what I'm watching could be manipulative dreck, but the mix of the music, the film, and my personal experiences can make me tear up. That doesn't mean what I'm watching is any good. It just means my buttons have been pushed, and that, yeah, I'm kinda a pussy.

Games can be made very artfully, with beautiful graphics, music, even a decent story, but you are still dealing with something that has strict rules and procedures, and leaves very little open in terms of interpretation. If someone took that game's story and wrote a novel, produced a film, did something that allowed the audience/reader to interpret what they are seeing/reading. There is very little room to interpret in a game. What you see is quite literally what you get. So I can see that argument as well.

Craft is different from art. They're all arts, but craftwork is usually seen as different.

This is a bugged discussion because there is no baseline for what 'art' is and isn't.

I will argue that Video Games, 99% of the time, do not qualify as 'art' in the exact same way 99% of television doesn't qualify as art. American Idol is not art. The Wire, I would argue, is. Super Mario is not art. Shadow of the Colossus is.

Blanket statements, when dealing with a concept as nebulous as 'art', are incomplete.

Some of you are clearly missing the point here.

If a game has a good plot, or gorgeous graphics, or well-drawn characters, yes you can be affected by those things. But those things are not the game itself. Those are other art forms. The issue at hand (as the guy who created "The Marriage" said) is whether game design, the actual creation of game rules and game play, can be considered art.

When a graphics designer creates a beautiful cityscape, he's doing essentially what a painter does. When the game's script writer creates a great conversation, he's doing exactly what a screenwriter does. The focus of the debate here is on what games do that no other creative form does, and whether that element, in and of itself, can be considered art.

And if, as some of you have already rightly pointed out, this element of gaming is art, then so are other forms of gaming, including board games and sports.

You're making the use of the term "art" hinge on the quality or importance of the work. That's a false definition. Bad art is still art. Unimportant art is still art. Velvet paintings of clowns are just as much art as Van Gogh's Starry Night.

If we're talking solely about the interactive component, then you're probably correct. Game Design seems analogous to set lighting in theater. What actually happens on stage is where we debate what is and isn't art.

Nicely done.

I suppose you could make some sort of argument for certain videogames as art/game hybrids, but their game-ness will always be simultaneously what gives them value to their fans and what keeps them from fully becoming art (unless, as you said, we accept board games as art, as well). You almost have to downplay the game aspect to emphasize the art and doing so makes them increasingly more movie-like, less game-like.

Yeah, but you're not going to argue that American Idol is art, are you? Because that's not the intent there, that's not the execution. I'm not talking about quality, I'm talking about effect. The Wire is an artistic endeavor, and it succeeds. A Velvet Christ painting might be an artistic endeavor as well, but it will only succeed as art in it's effect. In that instance, kitsch value.

It's a contest, so more like a game, but why would people singing not be art?

I don't buy this argument. A Movie's script is what a screenwriter does, it's sets are what the crew builds, the art design is what the art designer designs . . . what do Movies do that, in and of itself, can be considered art? Theater does the same thing; do we say then than film is derivative from external artistic influences? Yeah, we can say that, but does that mean movies don't qualify as art?

What can a game do that no other creative form does, that can be considered an artistic achievement? I don't know, ICO is pretty singular in its interactive mechanics, and damned if you can tell me that isn't an artistic beautiful experience.

That type of singing might be considered by some to be a craft in that it's technically impressive, but somewhat uninspired - like basket-weaving. But the art vs. craft debate has very little to do with the game vs. art debate, so we should probably leave that alone.

This is an interesting question. If you admit singing as art, I don't see why you couldn't admit martial arts as . . . ummmm . . . art. So what about Virtua Fighter? Obviously, there's a difference between training your body to do one thing and training your mind to do another. But VF is highly regarded as a legitimate form of competition in Japan. So how is that different from singing?

Note, I'm not arguing that Virtua Fighter expertise is an 'art'. But I don't see the line between that and singing too clearly. They're both particular expressions of skill.

That's just it, though - we know the answer to the question Greg posed. What a game can do that other creative forms can't do is allow for competition - winning and losing. This is the single most essential property of a video game that makes it not a movie, but a game. And, traditionally, art has not been about enabling the viewer to "win" or "lose." If we're just going on precedent to come up with a working definition of art, this is a pretty good reason to not include gaming.

There may be some art involved in the design of games, just as there may be some art involved in designing a beautiful chess set - but the art is not the most essential quality. The art is not what makes a game a game.

To get back to the heart of the matter: is the narrative impact in Shadow of the Colossus predicated on the fact that it is you, the player, killing the Colossi? There comes a point in the game when you realize what you're doing might not be the right thing, that it actually is kind of shitty . . . this is actualized in a very specific battle. It's something that isn't possible in traditional forms of media.

So why wouldn't this be considered art?


EDIT: my argument here has nothing to do with winning and losing. It has to do with the fact that you are participating in the narrative; the narrative is taking you in a specific direction (while still open to interpretation); and that a significant level of your emotional response here is tied to the fact that it is you, the player, participating in the narrative.

That's a good point about movies, but actually pretty damning to video games. It means that gaming only comes closer to being art when it comes closer to doing what movies and stage productions do.

Nobody seems to be arguing that games from the beginnings of gaming are art. I haven't heard spirited defenses of Space Invaders or Lemmings as artistic achievements. The general consensus from the "games are art" crowd seems to be that they only deserve consideration as such at the point in their history where they started to ape the artistic elements of movies. When graphics became aesthetically pleasing, when writers created actual scripts, when voice acting became an issue, suddenly video games became art.

If video games only became considerable as art when they began to lift elements from other art forms, it kind of invalidates video games themselves as art. If video gaming itself is art, then Pong is art. You can't just draw a line in time and declare that all games made before a certain date don't count.

Yeah, you can. Is a man sneezing on film art? There's your line right there.

Okay, maybe we shouldn't leave this alone. I submit that singing in an American Idol competition, competing in a Virtua Fighter or martial arts exhibition, and kicking ass at Dance Dance Revolution are demonstrations of technical skill, far closer to craftsmanship than artistry.

BUT.

The lines between artistry and craftsmanship are very, very blurry sometimes. In these terms, I'm not sure where the line is between Carrie Underwood and Aretha Franklin or even the line between Mozart and an autistic kid who can play Mozart perfectly. Or if there are lines at all.

"I don't buy this argument. A Movie's script is what a screenwriter does, it's sets are what the crew builds, the art design is what the art designer designs . . . what do Movies do that, in and of itself, can be considered art? Theater does the same thing; do we say then than film is derivative from external artistic influences? Yeah, we can say that, but does that mean movies don't qualify as art?"

Come on, this is a movie site and we have to have this discussion? Editing makes film its own art and not just a synthesis of others.

As for martial arts... huh? Why would that be an art? Your definition of art seems to be so broad as to have zero meaning.

I call shenanigans on that one. To say that no novel, play or movie has managed something like that means that you haven't seen much good art. There are any number of good examples of protagonists forcing the audience to feel ambivalent toward a course of action. Just because you're the one pushing the buttons, it doesn't make it somehow a different story element.