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Are Video Games an Art?

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Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Rulke on Sat Mar 24, 2012 9:22 pm

There is some sense of this being recognized, but with people like Roger Ebert saying no, it's obvious many don't think the same. On the other hand Smithsonian got an expedition on Video Game history, and many gamers are thrilled about this. But can one legally class games as art, and if you say they can be, can you provide any evidence to claim. This one is quite controversial, so basically, no flaming and respect one another.
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby ViceVersus on Sun Mar 25, 2012 9:51 am

Oh, God. This is .. such a huge debate. Like, I've sat through two years of classes on the issue. Could you perhaps stick to a specific facet about it? A certain type of video game? On a website like this I don't think you're going to find many people arguing that video games are not art; it'd be like trying to do a persuasive paper on the negative health effects of smoking. The audience for the other side just isn't there.

It may be more prudent to, as I said, focus on a specific issue under the massive umbrella? There are different bills traveling through Congress right now that would moderate what can or cannot be put into games, what is or is not considered obscene, that sort of thing.

Hope this helps! Sorry.
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby spirit_is_shining on Sun Mar 25, 2012 10:40 am

It's so obvoius that videogames are an art! So many artists collab together just so that the music, scenes, and characters go in sync. It's basically a huge art project.
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby ViceVersus on Sun Mar 25, 2012 11:31 am

Game Art itself is a huge endeavor. Like, the actual assets that artists take time to pore over. See? This topic is just so huge, and we're all generally going to be in agreement on it anyways.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Patcharoo on Tue Mar 27, 2012 7:38 pm

Of course not.

Video games are a sport.
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Lukisod on Mon Apr 02, 2012 5:47 pm

Art as a medium to capture the senses and provoke thought, defines video games nicely.
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Flamingo on Fri Apr 06, 2012 4:11 am

Honestly in my opinion a Video Game can be. I've played some games that where so gorgeous I swear it looked like the real thing D: Sometimes I find my breath taken away as the sheer beauty behind some of the scenery that can be found in some game's, you often find yourself just standing there...staring off into the distance. Sad not everyone see's Video Games in such a manner....

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Shi-chan on Fri Apr 06, 2012 7:18 am

Videogames can be an art. Some are not, and some are. I've seen this discussion a couple of times now, and one game that almost always gets mentioned sooner or later is Okami. It didn't sell very well, and the studio behind it went out of business right after they released it, but that doesn't change that this game is art. At least I think so. :3

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby LordSaladin on Fri Apr 06, 2012 1:48 pm

Video games taken as a singular, complete entity are very difficult to classify beyond the fact that they are games - an interactive form of entertainment.

The content of games - their storyline, levels of violence, etc - isn't really relevant to whether they can be considered art or not. So when you take that away from the equation, games could fall under two distinct categories: Science and art.

To first address the question at hand here, the art aspect of games comes from the graphics and the music. A great deal of time and effort is put into creating wonderful worlds and characters, whether it is a roleplaying game or a shoot 'em up. 'Traditional' artists spend a long time conceptualising the different elements of the world, the look of the buildings, the plants, the weapons, vehicles, special effects and characters (both PCs and NPCs) in the game. Very often these conceptual designs are of a very high standard, perhaps even enough to be worthy to take space on the walls of art galleries. Then these drawings are transferred to (nowadays) 3D renders and brought to life.

A game's score is also often painstakingly considered and composed. In fact, Hollywood composers have been known to create the music for games (for example, in the Metal Gear Solid franchise - Harry Gregson-Williams). Music is undoubtedly considered an art form (though not quite to the point of galleries specifically for music).

However, in terms of the science, it definitely crosses over to the graphical side of things. Bringing the conceptual drawings of a world to life involves a lot of science/maths - making everything fit together is very difficult. For example, let's use light. Be it natural or artificial light in the world of the game, it needs to seem as we experience light in real life: shadows, flickerings, light sources. A lot of these things take a whole load of calculations and simulations to get right. How far will the light of a single bulb go in a mile-long underground tunnel? How will fog affect how that light looks? If outside of the light, how much of a flash will firing a handgun create? For how long? These things are all equally important, and take a lot of scientific knowledge to accurately recreate in a virtual environment. Of course, much of this is a automatically rendered nowadays by different software, so the graphic designers themselves might not know about all the science, but someone had to.

And, of course, the main source of the 'science' behind games is the actual reason people play games - the fact it DOES something. If all a game had was a load of still 3D images, it'd be boring. All the logic behind whether that chest contains a million gil or a measly potion is done in programming code. In fact, the vast majority of what you see HAPPEN in a game is the result of a piece of code. Your character trips over a rock? Sure, the animation of the character falling wasn't made by a piece of programming code (it was probably recorded through motion capture), but a piece of code calculates that your character would fall and then loads the animation so you can see it. When your rocket launcher hits the squad of enemy soldiers and their body parts are sent flying in all directions, it's programming code that controls each piece, telling it which direction to fly off in, at what speed, and when to splatter against the wall when it hits it.

This does, of course, take a lot of knowledge about physics on the part of the programmer, and even though there are many engines out there that make the job easier, a basic understanding is still needed.

So, in conclusion, are video games art? As a sum of their parts, no. Unequivocally so. They are, instead, a complex coming together of computer algorithms that create an interactive world you can explore and kill stuff in (or whatever the game is about). Is game design an art form? Again, as a whole, no. The design of a game also includes how to interweave those algorithms and is probably where the majority of work goes. Is computer game art (sic) art? Of course. But computer game art is really only the conceptualisations, the rough sketches artists make for programmers and designers to base their creations on. Arguably the smallest part of a game, something that doesn't even directly find itself in the game.

As for galleries about the history of gaming - they aren't so much about games being an art form, but rather serve to show one facet of our technological advances. This could be shown just as effectively through a history of Microsoft Windows gallery, for example, but games are a much more interesting topic. Like seeing a gallery showing the progression of weaponry from spearheads made of chipped stone, to steel swords, to machine guns, it isn't really art, it's a history book.
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Black Gryphon on Sun Apr 22, 2012 5:07 am

An artistic platform, of course! Undeniably so. Storytelling mediums, provokers of thought, emotional responses, and so on, that's something games -can- be, without a doubt! [see previous posts by others 'ere]

Problem is, with the current publishing regulations, most of the stuff churned out by the industry is AAA pulp that of course uses artistic elements to spice it up, but remains, in the core, unartistic. Shooty shooty bangbang and so on. Or with retarded plots (Homefront, MW3, Mass Effect 3's last ten minutes).

See indie games for examples in how videogames are growing as a medium, now.

Or Metal Gear Solid. Everyone has to play it just to see how tropes are played with in a videogame medium.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Eyeris on Tue Apr 24, 2012 1:03 pm

The question must not be confused with weather a game is a 'good' game, or weather a game 'took much artisan skill to make' or weather artists worked on the project or not...

Art seeks to Enlighten.
Entertainment seeks to Entertain.

So far, Video-games seek to entertain. They are very good at it, they provoke minds and emotions and are very entertaining.

Some of them begin to seem like Art... and the potential is defiantly there.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby UVERazn on Fri Apr 27, 2012 2:58 am

I definitely do think video games should be considered art. Like people have mentioned before, the music, story, game art itself are all put in sync to create a masterpiece.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Susie Maddy Daison on Fri Apr 27, 2012 9:37 am

UVERazn wrote:I definitely do think video games should be considered art. Like people have mentioned before, the music, story, game art itself are all put in sync to create a masterpiece.

Or you shoot prostitutes and drive over cops. Either way, it's fun, and whether it's 'art' or not is pretty irrelevant.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Deusonos on Sat May 12, 2012 3:23 pm

I do think that video games are art and here's why. Let me ask you this, do you consider other mediums as an art? Would you consider a movie or a song as art? If so, I think video games should go in there as well. There have been movies that provide gripping stories and epic scenery, and there have been songs that we could listen to all day. If that counts as art, I believe that video games could be counted amongst them. Even though games are meant to entertain, much like other mediums, they are also a form of expression. Take a game like Flower, Journey, or Bioshock. I think games like those could count as art because they are an expression of people's creativity. Art is an expression, and I think that video games, as a form of expression, should count as art.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Aoiro -Hitomi on Sat May 12, 2012 7:28 pm

Honestly with games such as persona 3 or Heavy Rain, With the deeply involving stories, I can't see why people would say its not an art but something like film is. Gaming can tell just as good a story if not better than a movie. Especially with things like horror where the Aim of the Art is too scare the viewer, With something like silent hill I would be much more engrossed in the story and therefore then something frightening happens I am much more Scared. And when watching an seeing something actiony I have never been so excited as with the Metal Gear series, Towards the end of that game series I was physically shouting at the screen with sadness, anticipation, and over all excitement. And to me Art is something that can tell a story and also give you a certain emotion, And Gaming has always succeeded with that so there for Yes. Video Games are Art!
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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby crazygumbomb on Mon May 14, 2012 7:52 pm

Video games are a form of art just like any other painting or book. While a big part of building conventional video games is number crunching just to get the game to work, the art style and story line can both be considered a art form.Just look at a game like bioshock for example.At first it may seem like your run of the mill horror fps, it actually has a uber-somber story line thats both deep and well written (never mind the lackluster sequel).

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Rulke on Wed May 16, 2012 4:15 pm

Since there doesn't seem to be anything more to debate, I'll point to an update on Roger Ebert said, he actually sticks to this opinion, here's the post in full.

Video Games can never be an art

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken.

I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It's only 15 minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.

She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.

Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may be closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.

She then says speech began as a form of warning, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, speech probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even now filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France should only be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Branch Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a great game, but as potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, She defends the game not as a record of what happened at Waco, but "as how we feel happened in our culture and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in contrast award the game a Fail in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing it as art.

Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

We come to Example 3, "Flower" (above). A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?

These three are just a small selection of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into artistic expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Braid" has had a "great market impact," she says, and "was the top-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclaim."

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-up gamers" hope for games that reach higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already being made) "are being rewarded by audiences by high sales figures." The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.

The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Susie Maddy Daison on Wed May 16, 2012 7:31 pm

@Rulke:

Even though I like Ebert, I stopped reading that about halfway through because it was long and I got bored. I do want to respond to this, however:

Roger Ebert wrote:One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This is bullshit. A painting can have rules, objectives, and an outcome: you use a set of apparatuses to create a recognizable and pleasing image to the human brain, one that an intended effect on the viewer and an effect regardless. Of course, you can subvert or disregard these guidelines... just like you can with video-games.

What is winning a game, if not getting to the end of it? I'd argue that normal video-game design follows the convention of linear storytelling -- beginning, middle, end -- just like normal books, movies, etc. Saying that the sole factor that distinguishes between video-games and 'real art' is the goal of winning is stupid, especially when you follow that up with saying that video-games that don't have winning aren't 'really' video-games; basically what he's saying is that video-games aren't their own medium unless they follow his arbitrary requirements, and if they do, then they aren't an artistic medium. And how does winning something detract from experiencing it?

Plus, I doubt ol' Roger has played many video games, not to mention the more avant-garde ones, so I get the feeling he's talking out of his ass here.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby dealing with it on Wed May 16, 2012 10:55 pm

Ebert, hands greasy from buttered popcorn and teeth sticky with soda pop, slowly lowers a disapproving thumb. Thousands of artists quit their jobs as video game designers and the industry of painting Roger Ebert's jowls is born.

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Re: Are Video Games an Art?

Tips: 0.00 INK Postby Susie Maddy Daison on Wed May 16, 2012 11:19 pm

dealing with it wrote:Ebert, hands greasy from buttered popcorn and teeth sticky with soda pop, slowly lowers a disapproving thumb. Thousands of artists quit their jobs as video game designers and the industry of painting Roger Ebert's jowls is born.

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Susie Maddy Daison
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