Per said:
Eyenixon said:
The main thing being that gaming does nothing better than the other mediums. Which game's writing will match up to Joyce? Which game's art assets will match up to Monet or Leonardo Da Vinci? Which game has the cinematic style and story-telling ability of Tarkovsky or Buñuel, and does any game's soundtrack match up to Mozart or Tchaikovsky?
Here is a counter-question: If we could and did put Joyce, Tarkovskij and Mozart to work making a game, and they made a jolly good show of it, would the result be art? If not, then obviously the argument has been forcibly settled by definition. If yes, then the argument has equally obviously been ceded.
I find the position that games do not contain art to be puzzling and impossible. It would be inconceivable for more than a precious few stumbling games to be made by actual people without artistic ambitions slipping into any aspect available.
The answer to your question is "Who knows?" Perhaps Joyce can write well, but perhaps he would not have the faculty to produce art out of video games.
We have to first look at the commercialization of this medium and realize that the intent to create art is always battling the intent to sell well. You can say that Mozart's artwork was commissioned as well, but there's less of a challenge there, good music is often good music, whether or not it was constructed to be art, a sound, as it is, is far different from interacting with a videogame.
There are too many people appealing for gaming to not venture into the artistic zone, whether they voice that appeal or not, the sales numbers do. How many people will really play something in the experimental realm if it costs them $60?
Titles such as Heavy Rain push the boundary, but then when we look at Heavy Rain what do we get? Age old gaming conventions shoe-horned into a cinematic experience, they essentially took a film and shoved QTEs into it. The branching routes the story could possibly take? As said before, they are all largely static, it's simply a movie that can switch the tracks that the train is riding on.
There are indie-games that do attempt to be art, but that's another question, does art
become or is it made through active effort, in other words, pushing hard to conceive art? When I look at Braid, or I look at "games" such as The Path, I feel like - and please excuse the rudimentary nature of this statement - they were trying too hard. It simply feels like they were grasping for that elusive attribute that would deliver interactivity into art and missed, and when they miss their products come off as haughty and as some would put it, pretentious.
Art can be pretentious and haughty, but somehow those games just don't do it for me. The game I mentioned before, A Mind Forever Voyaging, has no such lofty goals, it was simply a text-based title that in its production turned into something that I could say resembles art, it just happened, and it doesn't seem like the author was reaching for anything,
it just happened being the key here.
How did he do that? In my opinion it was because he altered the player's role, altered the meaning of interactivity by adjusting the player's role to be an active participant in a simulated world with real experiences rather than a simulated world where you character simply deals with static situations. Now it may seem confusing, since A Mind Forever Voyaging is entirely static, as it was written, but the main point is that it doesn't feel that way, it doesn't feel like it was forced, it all feels natural, and a lot of games lack that natural feeling.
Who can say that the airport mission from Modern Warfare 2 didn't seem strained for emotional depth? I hate to say it, but a lot of games just "try too hard."
Autoduel76 said:
Eyenixon said:
The main thing being that gaming does nothing better than the other mediums. Which game's writing will match up to Joyce? Which game's art assets will match up to Monet or Leonardo Da Vinci? Which game has the cinematic style and story-telling ability of Tarkovsky or Buñuel, and does any game's soundtrack match up to Mozart or Tchaikovsky?
Even if that's true, its irrelevent to the point.
Just because a painting does not live up to Monet, doesn't preclude it from being art.
Quality of art, aside from being subjective, does not preclude something from being art.
That's like saying a hamburger from McDonald's isn't food, because its not up to the standards of a fillet mignon.
If the argument was that video games were not "quality art", well, again aside from being subjective, at least he'd have a leg to stand on.
Your points are all valid but I was going more along the lines of "What does it express that can't be done through these mediums?"
If you look at the art design in a video game, it's just that, art design, there may be art
within the video game, but does that really make it art?
The baseline about art is that it shouldn't be redundant, if you want to define art at all why maintain that the simple existence of an artistic asset within a greater product transforms the entire work into art? If we do that then the definition is far too general.
I don't want to get into the territory of defining art, because that's just a bullshit discussion that doesn't go anywhere. I think my point stands and is really the only point that can be discussed without dragging your feet around in endless circles, how does gaming define itself as art, if at all, and how does it do so in the face of other mediums?
We can all agree that gaming has to do something
unique that the other art forms cannot do. You cannot see a song, you cannot "watch" a painting as you'd watch a film, and similarly you cannot observe the writing in a book as you would a painting. What makes it easier for gaming is that the question of what would make it art is already there, interactivity, but which game has managed to make art out of interactivity? That I think, is the main question being asked here.
) possibly being a form of art on the basis of his own preconceptions and experiences, rather than acknowledging them as simply different creations to what he does perceive as art.
