Are games art? Well, Fallout 3 is getting there

Stop acting like there is any agreed upon definition of the word. Most people have a different opinion of what is art and what isn't because most people see different qualities as what is important about art.
There is no authority, majority, or means of empirically measuring what definition is more "right" than another when it comes to this word.
So it's relative.
And basically a meaningless word when it comes down to communicating with it.
 
bonustime said:
Stop acting like there is any agreed upon definition of the word. Most people have a different opinion of what is art and what isn't because most people see different qualities as what is important about art.
There is no authority, majority, or means of empirically measuring what definition is more "right" than another when it comes to this word.
So it's relative.
And basically a meaningless word when it comes down to communicating with it.
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So what you're saying is:

Art arting like there art any arted art definition of the art. Most art have a art opinion of what art art and art isn't because most art see art qualities as art is important about art.
 
Art is where you find it. You can bend a paperclip in the shape of a heart and call it art. You can have a picture of a dog's tail and call it art... So art is where you find it.
My personal definition? Art is something created by man that makes you feel.

So is Fallout art? Sure. It's made by humans for humans and has a soul of its own. End of discussion. Now don't ask me if it's good or bad art, because that's something that can't really be answered.
 
Games as a genre, imo, can be barely considered art. It's kind of the same with movies - they [films] were originally an art forms but then after mass-production started we got [movies] so that only a precious few these days can be considered "art". Pretty much same goes for the games.

On that, calling Fallout 3 or anything of the kind "art" is laughable yet disturbing. It's kind of like proclaiming the Diehard movies as "art". They're cool movies and fun to watch, but were not made with an artistic purpose. Something made for entertainment and something made as an attempt to create beauty are two different things and one cannot be two at the same time. With all honesty, even the original Fallouts or PS:T are not quite qualifying for "art". One could say "they are so good, they are almost like art", but probably not beyond that.

"Fallout 3 is really cool, you get to walk around a lot and you shoot stuff. Oh yeah, and you get that post-uh-poh-ka-lyptic, yeah, environment, so it's surely art". I guess certain gaming companies don't have a limit to their ego. They won't stop at commercial success, they wanna be artsy now. Or maybe they're doing it so that they can use the argument "you may not like it, but it's probably because you don't comprehend the art behind it" for fans who don't like their sequels =)

(wooh, I'm reaching tl;dr limits here)
 
When Infocom was around in the 1980s some of their games were so well written they were accepted by the sci-fi literary community. Steve Meretzky won a Hugo Award for A Mind Forever Voyaging (I believe). The medium created by Zork - now known as interactive fiction - is still alive and well, with people writing new original creations.

A relevant link would be: http://www.ifcomp.org/

My personal definition of art would include "Fallout 3" I guess. That doesn't say anything about its quality, though.

P.S. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, you play the role of an A.I. within a computer designed to simulate the long-term effects of policy decisions. You can implement a variety of policies and then travel forward in time to see what happens.
 
This discussion of whether video games are art was around for a long time now and to no avail...

Anyway, definition of art widened with the introduction of cinema as an art-form to include platforms containing multiple art-forms. Defining the value of a platform like this as art needs each art-form contained within to be considered individually. Only then we can reach the final verdict regarding the value of said platform as an art piece.

Video games are indeed such platforms and they're, unfortunately, already living their downfall for some time now due to the heavy commercialization. The peak of gaming as a multi-art platform was way back in 90's -not to do injustice to more beautiful games of 80's but they were more in the lines of interactive fiction- and writing about the topic "games as art", considering the quality of contemporary games feels like arguing whether "cinema is art" by looking at the latest blockbuster movie flicks.
 
Endless Void said:
Anyway, definition of art widened with the introduction of cinema as an art-form to include platforms containing multiple art-forms. Defining the value of a platform like this as art needs each art-form contained within to be considered individually.
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I disagree. There's no need to subdivide cinema into separate forms, just as there's no need to subdivide theatre into separate forms. Both can be subdivided, though, so I don't see why cinema would've changed anything.

Theatre's been a conglomeration of multiple art-forms for thousands of years.
 
UniversalWolf said:
When Infocom was around in the 1980s some of their games were so well written they were accepted by the sci-fi literary community. Steve Meretzky won a Hugo Award for A Mind Forever Voyaging (I believe). The medium created by Zork - now known as interactive fiction - is still alive and well, with people writing new original creations.

A relevant link would be: http://www.ifcomp.org/

My personal definition of art would include "Fallout 3" I guess. That doesn't say anything about its quality, though.

P.S. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, you play the role of an A.I. within a computer designed to simulate the long-term effects of policy decisions. You can implement a variety of policies and then travel forward in time to see what happens.
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I've played most of the Infocom games (don't ask if I've finished them! :wink: ) but AMFV was too daunting. I tried it when I was a young dude and it seemed so brutally hard I never came back to it.
 
Per said:
The other way in which games might converge on art is through the beauty and detail of their imagined worlds, combined with the freedom they give the player to wander around in them.
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I don't understand why sandbox games would be considered more artsy than linear games. I don't recall ever reading a book that let me "wander around," or watching a movie that did. (And no, I don't think Choose Your Own Adventure Books count as sandbox. Picking between two or three paths isn't really wandering.) Sandbox games are great, when done well, but they're not any more artsy. Bioware games like KOTOR and Mass Effect, though they let you visit various planets in various orders, are still more linear than Bethesda games, but they have fantastic stories compared to any Bethesda game, and I'd call Mass Effect art long before I'd call Fallout 3 art (which isn't to say I'd call either one art, or that I wouldn't call either one art, because I don't feel like jumping into that discussion).
 
If anything, the sandbox games are less artsy in that sense, because they do not really focus on telling the story. Thus, I'd say they are more visual, why linear games are more "artsy" in terms of story-telling.
 
Well I don't think that a sandbox necessarily has to focus less on story to be honest, that just happens to be how it usually turns out.
 
Art is a conscious expression of imagination or skill that has some aesthetic, reflective or emotional values in it. Are games art? Of course they are. It may have been a valid question fifteen or twenty years ago ("Are Pac-Man and Space Invaders works of art?", they asked unsurely), but today I can only find it worthy of ridicule.

lost-odyssey-xbox-360-1.jpg
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Now on the other hand, there is "art" and there is Art. Is Fallout 3 good art? In my view, it's has just as many artistic values as Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wall of Oil Barrels, Malevich's Black Square or Duchamp's Fontaine... Er, take it as you will.
 
^ Well, I disagree. While concept art or work of the 3D designers can be classified as "fine art", and the work done by the composers or writers for games can be art as well, the game as a whole would generally lack artistic content - and a good-looking screenshot does not determine the artistic quality, just like a lick from a song does not determine how good it is overall. It's quite doubtful that the games can be considered art - I mean, I'm even often reluctant to call cinema as a whole an art, but rather decide on case-to-case basis. Just like I wouldn't consider pop-music that's 99% show business art (not in the music category anyway).

I see your point about modern art, but then again, it's not always taken seriously either. While some games as a whole could be considered art (take Sublustrum aka Outcry for example), adding "games" as a separate art genre is somewhat preposterous.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
^ Well, I disagree. While concept art or work of the 3D designers can be classified as "fine art", and the work done by the composers or writers for games can be art as well, the game as a whole would generally lack artistic content - and a good-looking screenshot does not determine the artistic quality, just like a lick from a song does not determine how good it is overall. It's quite doubtful that the games can be considered art - I mean, I'm even often reluctant to call cinema as a whole an art, but rather decide on case-to-case basis. Just like I wouldn't consider pop-music that's 99% show business art (not in the music category anyway).

I see your point about modern art, but then again, it's not always taken seriously either. While some games as a whole could be considered art (take Sublustrum aka Outcry for example), adding "games" as a separate art genre is somewhat preposterous.
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I would say that all art should be decided on a case by case basis. The history of art shows that when a new medium for art is discovered it almost always dismissed as garbage not worth discussing. It's taken over 100 years for cinema to reach this point of acceptablity. Television is still the idiot box to alot of people & computer games are way behind TV.

Adding Computer games as a separate genre would allow people to judge it more accurately. Do you judge the screen-shots from a game by the same standards as you do paintings?
 
I'm a bit busy to reply in full, so here's the short version: according by the most acceptable definition of the term "art", the medium of games is indisputably just as artistic as photography, literature, music, cinematography, sculpture, or any other known form of creative expression known to man. Yes, most games don't really look that artistic, but the same thing can be said about almost every single video, doodle, shape, scribble and tune that is out there. You really need to let go of that exact "case-to-case" kind of mentality and look at the capabilities of the medium from a wider perspective.
Are Games Art? (Here We Go Again...)
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070316/ochalla_01.shtml
Tim Schafer said:
Art is about creatively expressing thoughts or emotions that are hard or impossible to communicate through literal, verbal means. Can you use games to do that? Of course you can.

Games are art. If Marcel Duchamp can stick a urinal in a gallery and say it’s art, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say Okami is too.
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Santiago Siri said:
Games are not just art. They are the most revolutionary form of art mankind has ever known about.
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Denis Dyack said:
I feel video games are probably the most advanced form of art thus far in human history. Not only do video games encompass many of the traditional forms of art (text, sound, video, imagery), but they also uniquely tie these art forms together with interactivity. This allows the art form of video games to create something unique, beyond all other forms of media. Simply expressed, you can put a movie in a video game but you cannot put a video game in a movie. Video games are the ultimate form of art as we know it.
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Such discussions always remind me of Alfred Stieglitz, the man who spent years of his life establishing the "primitive, mechanical process of producing images" (also known as photography) as a recognized form of art.
 
yes or the people that seriously want to argue that "digitial" art (Photoshop for the most, but not only!) has less of a value or artistical skill compared to traditional art. Which is totally bogus.

The skills needed in digital media are the same basic skills needed as in traditional paintings, the knowledge about colours, how they work, shadings, shortening of forms and shapes and much more.

The difference is in details. But no serious with traditional media working artist will deny the skills of people in art that are working only with digital media like the computer or if you want even only a "camera"

The question about the skill of a person in art really starts with the question of how high his creative urges are. Not about what tools he is using. Artists use the tools not the tools the artist

(as why some can do even stuning things just in paint already)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2sPl_Z7ZU[/youtube]
 
It's all about intention in my opinion. I might take a shit today and flush down the toilet and call it disposal of my bodily wastes. But tomorrow I could do the same and call it art. No one has the right to say that what I did was not art.

I'm pretty sure the people at Beth think their games are works of art and therefore we don't have the right to discuss whether it's art or not.

We could of course talk about it's artistic merit through a comparative analysis of other similar works of art; mainly computer games, but also other textual and visual arts since a computer game encompasses many different aspects of the generally accepted fields of art.
 
Fade said:
I would say that all art should be decided on a case by case basis. The history of art shows that when a new medium for art is discovered it almost always dismissed as garbage not worth discussing. It's taken over 100 years for cinema to reach this point of acceptablity. Television is still the idiot box to alot of people & computer games are way behind TV.

Adding Computer games as a separate genre would allow people to judge it more accurately. Do you judge the screen-shots from a game by the same standards as you do paintings?
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Well, first and foremost I think that screenshots from a game alone are not enough to determine if it's art - it may be artistic, but does not make the whole game, let alone the genre art.

As for the judging standards - well, it seems you just propose we lower them for the specific new genre. I don't see why that should be the case, and it will certainly not have a positive impact.
 
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