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[Anthony Flack]

Mm, but I guess what I'm suggesting is, as fun and as popular as that might be, more conventional artforms are actually better at communicating the experience of "being" somebody else. So as much as I do admire Clarke, I think he might have been talking out his bum with this one.

[Dan MacDonald]

There's lots of ways games can be an artistic expression, game design itself is an art to some extent. Simply because there are no hard and fast rules that work all the time, if that was true it would be a trade or a craft. But with ever game comes new design challenges and there's artistry in resolving them. Even someone who designs a new casual games is practicing an art as they refine the design.

There are two experiences, the artistic experience of the creator in creating the game, and the artistic experience of the player in playing the game. It seems that this thread is advocating having games posses greater artistic experiences for their players.

To be totally honest, I'd be happy just being able to craft simple straightforward games to perfection and experience art by way of design then I would creating artistic interactive experiences for players.

[Chris Whitman]

Ah, but how much would it communicate to you, to "be" another person in this way? To experience what it is to be me - the feel of my desk, my pants, my shoes; the breeze from the window, the view of my room, the unholy heat radiating from my Macbook. Communicating sensations is easy, but what does it tell you about me?

It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if I say I know him a little better at the hundredth character counted off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth. For this apparent paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man  defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.

What we know of everyone is mostly a fiction anyway, just as much as what we construct of ourselves is largely a fiction. We anthropomorphise anything and everything we come into contact with, which includes ourselves, to an extent, because our incomprehensible biological complexity can only be understood when viewed through a humanising lense. So we say that someone is jealous or flippant, or that another person is an introvert or an extrovert, but it's only because of personal stories we have composed relating to what little information we have about actions that person has taken. Just because it's partially a fiction doesn't mean that human existence and human relationships are 'lies,' per se, just that fiction is part of a complex social mechanism we have evolved to be able to understand and deal with other humans without, for example, having to dissect their brains and have a bit of a poke around.

The point is, however, that books, theater, movies and video games don't really give us any more or less information than we give ourselves when we describe how people are. We know that Joanne is angry at Rick (say for the moment that these are people you know) because he got the date of their anniversary wrong, and we know that our unnamed protagonist in Shadow of the Colossus is willing to break what appears to be a massive taboo to bring back some dead girl, but what are all these people's favorite breakfast foods? It doesn't matter. It's not important to the story, in either case. So we can get the idea that Rick is kind of forgetful, and maybe uncaring or maybe a bit absentminded, depending on how we are predisposed to approach the situation, and that our unnamed protagonist has a love for his dead girlfriend which dwarfs every other concern, without knowing whether they prefer waffles or eggs and toast.

It is not important that fiction begin at breakfast and work its way up, just that it communicate to the reader or viewer as much of the fiction of yourself or your imagination as you are experiencing. The point is not to become more and more accurate, conveying the heat from your MacBook or the smell of frying bacon from the other room, but to become more and more sparse in your description, limiting the details to the components which tell the story. This is why modern games with their whiz-bang graphics and simulation of everything aren't really better. Better storytelling is a personal ability which needs to be developed, not something you can get a team of people to hammer out using differential equations, because Arthur C. Clarke was wrong: it's not important for people to become you, it's only important for people to know you as they might know a friend or an acquaintance or themselves. And it's not the events that are occurring to you right now which give you that definition so much as the memory of countless events that have occurred to you, and the stories we tell ourselves to frame the important parts of those memories. The fictions, the real one and the false one, are the same to us.

[Chris Whitman]

To be totally honest, I'd be happy just being able to craft simple straightforward games to perfection...

Can we all just applaud and leave it at that?

The art argument is silly, guys. It's entirely a semantic point. Ask yourselves this: if someone presented an incontrovertible, mathematical proof that games were or could be art, would that suddenly make them something they weren't already? Everyone involved in the argument is missing the point and, in fact, I think a lot of game developers in general are missing the point. When you make a game, one which you would like other people to play, you have a goal in mind. For the big guys, this goal is usually money, with which they can buy yachts and hookers and also blow to do off the hookers while they are sitting in their yachts. For the little guys, they usually want other people to play the game and get something out of it. So what should that something be?

Games are multifarious in their approach to communication. Encompassing the 'genres' we have limited ourselves to, there are meta-genres which dictate whether the game is intended to be a pleasing ten-minute diversion (solitaire), a party game which brings people together (Wii sports), or an emotional engagement (Shadow of the Colossus).  Everyone seems to be stumbling through the process of authorship, following templates of things they have seen other people do, without even thinking, "What exactly would I like to happen when people play my game?"

In writing, every author has their own style and their own choice of words: Faulkner employs slow moving continents of prose, sluggish with the heat and damp of the South, Cervantes is meandering, conversational, caricatural and often instructional. There is almost no similarity to be observed between the two, yet even if we refuse to discuss either of their oeuvres as 'art,' it is clear that their writing is moving in some sense. Reading it accomplishes something. Likewise, the goal of a video game should be a function. It should, in some way, create a transformation. The absolute worst reaction is one of indifference. After all, you can make someone indifferent with no effort at all, so why spend months authoring to have the same effect?

The rubric of art is unimportant, what we are really trying to do is to effect change. Like the author of a novel, we want to entertain and educate, to fulfill whatever drive it is that makes us want to do these things. So, seriously, cowboy up. Focus on whatever it is you want to do and then get that thing done.

[Alec]

I think the public acceptance of video games as art is important to the whole industry, and that's partly what that debate is about. Yeah, you can always view things however you want, but society's appetite and point of view does make a difference.

Right now it seems like the common perception of games is "murder simulators". Even from a lot of people that should know better. Yeah, there are a lot of violent games. Yes, some change has to come from the developers. But its not _just_ the developers. Its society as a whole moving towards a point where games can be discussed seriously as an artistic medium. And that'll just take time.

I think there are a lot of people that are both discussing that AND working on things. Its not mutually exclusive.

[Chris Whitman]

I wasn't suggesting they were mutually exclusive, simply that there's no point to the debate for people engaged in authoring games.

Critics will hem and haw. It's what they do. They're conservatives. Witness public reaction to the early impressionists. Renoir didn't set about writing essays imploring people to think better of his paintings, he just got together with Monet et al and organised showings. Their works showed the truth better than any essay ever could, and history judged them the victors.

I think people can, and will, recognize quality, given time and example. The debate is frustrating and takes time and energy over a word. The word won't change what the thing is, and you can't change the world's perception by convincing them to change the name -- that's just so much advertising.

Just my two bits.

[Alec]

Yeah, but I think what comes AFTER the debate is what's actually worth talking about:

how games work as an art form

What is it about the art form that works? What doesn't work? What do the artists that are making games doing differently? Similarly?

We have these conversations all the time, but usually its about mechanics. The tools that people use, the design docs, the blah blah blah.

Its not as often about trying to evoke a feeling or analyzing what effects a game has on people. What subtext there is to the game.

It seems like there's some attitude in the industry/community that considers that stuff to be pansy/gay/stupid/waste-of-time/not-making-money blah fuckity blah.

In some cases when people try to start such a conversation, it gets transformed into "GAMES AREN'T ART, SO SHUT THE FUCK UP".

So I think its still worth having the "IS IT AN ART" debate with jackasses, just because it occasionally digs up nuggets about how games DO work as an art form, and its part of the long road to eventual widespread acceptance and meaningful discussion when we're old and gray.

[E. Megas]

You ask me, I think it's concerning that so many people want videogames to be called "art" so badly.

You can do the greatest disservice to a thing by giving it a title. "Art" in particular bears a great deal of baggage and implicit responsibility; if one goes in labeling what's done here as such, people are going to make him/her/it owe up to it--which will never be successful to the desired degree, seeing as the term itself is subjective!

Fumito Ueda and Tetsuya Mizuguchi have avoided calling their own stuff "art" in interviews. They use the generic "entertainment" instead...Which is, really, more to the point. It's less descriptive, has fewer qualifications and is something that is well within their means to do.

Some boxes just aren't worth opening at this juncture. Like Ueda and Mizuguchi I vote that we keep our hands off of this one. If it is "Art," it shouldn't be our place to say as creators that it is, particularly with our own works. If we want that moniker so badly, we'll put in the effort so that title will be bestowed upon us one day. That "New Games Journalism" is almost to the point where they can judge things in that way. Let 'em, I say!

From what I can grok of the original article in any event, it's that "Art" (much like videogames) tends to have a niche audience when generally applied. It takes certain people at certain times and certain frames of mind to appreciate it. At this point in history, that frame of mind is (unfortunately) not much of one at all, at least among most gamers; way things look, that isn't going to change overnight either. You're going to have to change the audience if you want true artistic acceptance.

Nintendo's approach might work if it wasn't so general in scope. I fear it's going to take something a tad more drastic than that...

[E. Megas]

Oh yeah: sorry for the double post, but this...Probably deserves mention separately. Just realized that a guy I know wrote an article a few months back that may be of interest in this discussion. Might've been channeling bits of it by accident; apologies if I have!

Adding fuel to the fire (Vwoooosh!):

"Gaming's Missing Kane"

[GP Lackey]

Games are already being used as a medium in fine art, it's not like this and mainstream games don't exist simultaneously.

[E. Megas]

Games are already being used as a medium in fine art, it's not like this and mainstream games don't exist simultaneously.

Err, the original post's article discussed at length the case of an artist appearing in a non-artistic context, right? It seemed to me that this thread wanted to discuss overcoming that hurdle (i.e. the general acceptance of videogames as "art"):

It's a seemingly safe place for safe people who have no vision of now and tomorrow. The world is at a stand still when no one shifts sides, no one learns a new love of the art. As artists part of our job is to create. But why create if there is no one to appreciate? I don't think that question has an answer.

That's...Sort of what led me to believe that. Is that on the mark?

I'm sure not contesting the use of game elements in Fine Art; I've seen them used quite effectively in that capacity at SIGGRAPH and elsewhere. (I still maintain that it's shameful that one of the greatest standalone art kiosk games of all--Treasure's Stretch Panic--will probably never be seen in an art gallery. But that's beside the point!) Problem is that, in such an environment, the proper circumstances are already set up in order to provide legitimacy of an item as "art." Outside of the gallery (as that original article pointed out) the work has less credibility except to those who are in that niche, the ones who can appreciate "art" as "art."

That's how my screed (and Brendan Lee's, though he's a 'scoch more bitter) applies, there. Sorry if that isn't what you wanted, though! I'm stumbling into this subject as best I can! Feedback is appreciated!

[GP Lackey]

Ah, right, then ignore my apparently short-sighted statement.

Problem is that, in such an environment, the proper circumstances are already set up in order to provide legitimacy of an item as "art." Outside of the gallery (as that original article pointed out) the work has less credibility except to those who are in that niche, the ones who can appreciate "art" as "art."

It doesn't seem like there's anything else to talk about here without exploding into generalities.  Any medium has the same concern.

Thanks for the Brendan Lee article by the way, it's a good read.

[sabajt]

Just dropping in to say, reading through the first page of this topic has been very inspiring to me.  Though the thread is wrapped up in heated debate, it is inspiring because it demonstrates that above all, people are passionate about games, which is wonderful. 

[Cow]

I cried.

[C.A. Sinner]

derp