next »

[0rel]

Obviously if I see a cat, then suddenly all human observers are wiped out by a terrible catastrophe, the cat continues to exist, but to say that it continues to be called 'a cat,' or to be in the category we denote with 'cat' without anyone to call it such starts to become a somewhat bizarre argument.

yes, human language doesn't exist without any humans.. obviously.

To an extent, what you're suggesting relates back to Platonic ideals. Plato resolved questions about categorical reasoning by assuming that there existed objective ideals of every single object, which is great reasoning if you prefer the kind of philosophy you just make up at home, but not so great if we live in the real world where things are made of matter, because obviously the 'ideal' has to be separate from any 'instance.' It was supposed to exist on some philosophical plane divorced from everyday matter, and, since such a plane cannot be demonstrated, we probably have to assume it is fictional.

i didn't talk about the idea of a 'cat'... i meant more simple that we just give things names. in the case of that cat, i just meant, that giving it a name doesn't affect it's physical existence at all.. in contrary to art.

@categories:
similar things share common names. they make up a category. but i don't think that ideas or even more fictional ideal platonic objects preexist real matter. language doesn't create reality... i see language more as an other organ in our body. the language_processor is part of human realitity, yes, but not the origin of realitiy itself. - physical realitiy comes first! not the symbols. names and categories are just constructs which are valid within the limited brain_domain. and in particular, natural language is just an unprecise evolutional simplification, a shared brain tool... in fact, (almost) all real things are unique, even on a micro level, so there is no such thing like a category in realitiy. all cats are unique! a category is just an abstracted entity inside brain_domain. equality is an abstraction...

We can observe now that a lot of our categorical thinking relates back to language acquisition. This is best uncovered by examining those tricky borderline cases. Let's go back to our 'questionably a cat' mutant cat. How do we determine whether or not it is a cat?

whether something belongs to certain category depends on it's similaritity to the referred mental model in brain_domain (-> interesting link to the 'uncanny valley' topic). - if that mutant cat would have three eyes for example, it would still be cat, because it shares all attributes with a normal cat. only it's eye-varibale is stretched in that case, so, all humans who know what a cat is, will still recognise the mutant as a cat mutant. it's a special sub category of 'cat'. - even the standard model of 'cat', like all other models/categories too, must include some type of valid variability (varibales with a valid range of possible values), because there exists no perfect cat. every individual is different. the fur can have different patterns and color, the voice can differ etc. when i recognise an animal as a mutant cat, my inner model must be mutable too. i just want to say, that i think, that perception always >imitates< reality in some way when the "language_processor" is activated, otherwise there would be no comprehension. - on the other side, heat doesn't need a word to be understood. heat is just what it is, the sensation of what we call 'heat', but when i see a cat or even more tiger, my languge-sense tells me something about what could happen, about what this thing could be, what i see. without language i still see a tiger, but i just see it as moving color signals. i don't KNOW that these particular heap of colors is dangerous for me and could cause harm.
but i still think there is something like a see-without-think-state, but i almost forgot about it... language as a tool is usful, but it is very dominating and opressing as well. it's even unprecise and very limited and i don't think that natural language is a very good language at all. mathematics and programming languages are good counter examples, wich exploit the abilities of our "language_processer" much better and reach much further than natural language ever could - because it is a traditional artifact with all defects of a backward compatible api. it's useful in practical situations, but still very limiting (this thread is wonderful example for that...). but at the end i think that all forms of language are limiting, even the most advanced ones, wich would be able to imitate the perceived realitiy very accuratly. language is about symbols inside the brain (ignoring "objective languages" like in computer programming), and transformations of these symbols, thus it will never find REAL truth, the truth about the outside. truth belongs to pre-lanuage_domain imHo. no philospoher will ever find an end inside brain_domain. to the contrary... it gets hazier and hazier the more you try to find an solution (in contrary to concrete realitity, i hope it gets clearer and clearer, yes, i hope so ). similarly, this thread tries to find out something about "art and games", but because natural language is that unprecise, we can't speak about more complicated things in a tight way... like me, atm.

Never in our acquisition of the term 'cat' do we (or can we, because such a thing cannot be shown to exist) appeal to an extrinsic quality of 'catness.' Our language is a loose and fuzzy thing produced as a function of our own reason and social factors. To assume an extrinsic quality of 'catness' is just that: to assume or manufacture.

what did you mean there exactly? ( - did you mean that something like an idea of 'catness' exists even before that one has seen a real cat in realitiy? that the child's mind has huge set of possible models inside (possible realities, vivid phantasy), which undergoes kind of natural selection? if so, i agree....)
(i'm sorry, my english is quite poor... i have even to look up words when i post something... i may misunderstand you and be misunderstood too sometimes... (but i try to improve it now, to not vex you guys too much :/))

The part that can be difficult is that this in no way invalidates human reasoning or communication. Obviously we can still have a perfectly understandable conversation about cats. The only problems arise in these borderline cases, which is where we tie directly back in to the "Are games art?" question. If we were raised in a social environment where art games were presented in museums alongside famous paintings, there would be very little question they were art. I mean, no one asks whether The Starry Night is art, not because it compares well to a Platonic ideal of art but simply because we've grown up being told Van Gogh was a famous painter who created art.

art is whatever you MAKE/call art, imho. a subjective declartion is part of art, unlike to the methods of scientific disciplines. if you want to see something as art, there will be art! in contrary to that, science tries to declare things in a rigid way, and attemps to find true definitions of general laws which applies to everything, everywhere, all the time. reproducible proofs with the final goal to find abstract universalitiy. truth in science wants to exist without observers, it wants to be objective. -- but art seems to be all the more the other way around... (thanks to rinkuhero!) - not general, but particular. not objective, but subjective. not eternal, but in the moment.

We acquire knowledge of the word 'art' contextually, so that we then go out and say things like, "If such and such is art and such and such is art, then art must mean anything created by humans which is emotionally evocative." or even just "Art must mean a painting or a song or a book or a movie." So the disagreement on whether a game is art does not relate to an ideal category of 'art' but simply to our own socially informed, personal definitions. Asking 'is x art?' is a fruitless argument since you are trying to create or enforce an objective standard for something which is anything but objective. It's great to discuss the issue bearing this in mind: I think we can learn a lot from doing so, but otherwise these discussions just fall into this "Games are art!", "No they aren't!" argument, which is both meaningless and unresolvable.

the category 'art' - assuming there is such a thing in brain_domain (i'm not sure, beside that obvious context-category) - would be huge. it includes everything! every activity, the whole body-mind-society-nature-relationship. art deals with perception, cultural tradition, conventions, language, with active thinking, feelings, me-you-we and them, how we make up categories, connect categories, how the brain works - but not in a fixed theoretical manner! it's purley practical... there is no THING called art, art is a state of mind. something you DO. - when you watch a movie, read a book, which touches you in some way, YOU make the art happen. if you wouldn't understand the symbols, the grammer-rules of the language, or if you have no similar entities within your brain_domain to which the author attempts to refer to, it won't work at all. art can "work", yes, like programs do. ok, similarly... you are the active interpreter, which provides a (fuzzy) library of words, memory, and methods to handel and process the inputs. it's something very active. you watch your inner interpreter when it analyses the data, you get emotions, interact with them... or did you make them? or did it the book? or its author?

i'm still not sure about all this... probably it's a language problem. but it's surly worth the discussion... (my current gut feel: probably games are even not that complicated at all. because art seems to be interactive all the time...)

(disclaimber: please don't take all these bold statements not all too serious, it's just my homebrew midnight weisenheimer dump... )

[falsion]

I think games can be art but I don't think they should be thought as art. I think that is the wrong way to look at games. Actually, I don't think games should even try to be art. I think the only thing that a game really needs is to be fun.

Too many people these days forget that simple fact and focus on things that are not important in a game.


I don't care if your game has some of the best graphics or even unique art direction in the world either. That is all meaningless when your game isn't fun and doesn't have good gameplay (I'm looking at you, Eternity's Child).

Look at Too Human for example. I read a forum post where one of the developers of the game bashed everyone who was giving it a bad rating, saying that it is a work of art and people don't understand it. That the story and symbolism in the game was a work of art far beyond anyone's comprehension. That's good and all. But even if it can be considered work of art, is the game fun? Is it a good game? Apparently not.


It's different with something such as a movie or book. Those things are not games. They can try to be as artistic or deep and philosophical as they want without having to worry about impacting gameplay, because there is none.

Bioshock, for example, once had a huge, deep, story but they condensed it into 3 simple objectives just because if they included everything they wanted, the game would be boring.

Imagine if they tried to make it the length of an actual novel and actually had you do things other than actually play the game. It would be nothing near the success that it is now.

Don't get me wrong though, I think a game can be artistic, it can be art. It's possible but I just don't think that is what it should be though. That's not what the priority of a game should be. Because too many times, games sacrifice being a "game" in the process and defeat the whole purpose of a "game," which is basically to have fun.

[Gnarf]

My take on this is that if games are art, then what makes games games must also be what makes games art. So then I don't believe that if "games can be a brilliant storytelling medium" that makes games art. Because I don't believe that games are about storytelling. I could possibly agree that if games really can be a brilliant storytelling medium, then some defined subset of games can be considered art because of that.

I believe that it's the gameplay that makes games games. The game mechanics and rules and goals. So if games are art, then those things are what makes them art. I wouldn't have a problem calling them art, because great game mechanics move me, the gameplay is the bit of gaming that I'm passionate about, and so on. Recharging health, special counters or whatever, sheepie saves, the Sphere Grid. Those are interesting things. I don't feel the same way about the world being invaded by FUKCING ALIENS (if Half Life's storytelling was a bit more brilliant, then maybe I'd remember if that was what it was about). In the end, though, I've no idea what definition of art to go by, so I dunno.

Re: What falsion said. I would say that if being art gets in the way of being a game, then it's more along the lines of games mimicking art than games being art. If you have to put in some element that makes the game worse in order to make it art, then games aren't art.

[Zest]

I hate to ask, but how exactly does one convert a novel's length (measured in pages or words) to a unit of time (minutes or hours). Sure, you can say that it will take you longer to finish Ayn Rand's The Fountain than, say, The Hungry Caterpillar, but much like games, it's nearly impossible to estimate the time a person will spend completing it. In this case, the length depends on the reader's pace and reading ability, as well as the amount of time devoted to actually completing the novel. Case in point: all of the people who were able to complete a Harry Potter book within 24 hours, where others took weeks to read the same book.

On a different note, games are criticized for the fact that they require the viewer to have a degree of skill in order to proceed and enjoy the product (hence the phrase 'player', rather than viewer or reader). If this is true, wouldn't books be in the same boat? We place a great emphasis on learning to read (and for good reason), and take great pains to introduce our children to reading more and more complex material- much like a well-designed game. Hell, I remember my elementary school using books with reading 'levels' printed on the front.

As a counterpoint, it is also true that novels themselves do not become progressively harder so that by the end of War and Peace you're reading in a combination of Mandarin, French, and Pig-Latin, but reading is indeed a skill we need in order to fully appreciate a good book. We also need skills in order to fully comprehend what we are reading- otherwise, they mean nothing. Knowing what a metaphor or a simile is important, as is being able to label the arc of the narrative, even if you never plan on writing your own novel.

In this same way, games can teach basic skills that we need in the real world. The most obvious is hand-eye co-ordination, but problem-solving has also been suggested as a skill learned through games.

As for my own thoughts, anything can be artistic if the person says they meant it to be art. Once that's done, then it comes down to whether it makes a genuine statement about the human experience or anything in particular- oh, and it needs to be entertaining. Not necessarily a barrel of laughs (Schindler's List comes to mind), but something emotionally touching and meaningful. Bioshock was a step in the right direction; from what I hear, so is Braid. Whether a game has a story or not isn't the issue; it's the intent of the creator. Although we all like to joke about Communistic messages in Super Mario Bros, do we really think that those were intended by the creators?

My other issue is that we need more people used to games. Just as cinema had to evolve its own 'code' (black and white means flashback, cuts transitioned scenes rather than just ending the movie, POV shots, etc.), games have been slowly evolving their own vocabulary of not only visual and aural cues, but mechanical cues. We don't need to be told that the left analog stick will control our character, or that pressing Start will pause our game; we just know. We grew up with these things, as the succeeding generations will be. As we get more people used to the mechanics we have established, we can spend less time trying to reinventing the wheel and more time trying to turn it into a Mercedes.

[/rant]

[falsion]

Actually about what I meant about length. I was talking about how the developers of Bioshock chopped the long plot they originally had and condensed it all into a gameplay mechanic, a short and simple 3 part game objective. (1.) Escape Rapture 2.) Kill Ryan 3.) Kill final boss (name not given due to spoiler).

Ken Levine always talks about how short and "stupid" he had to make the plot for Bioshock in order for it to work as a game. That's all I was trying to point out really.

In Bioshock, the whole time it's just you experiencing the game through whats happening on screen, through the objectives they give you. Half Life also tends to do this as well (except without actually telling you what to do, there aren't really objectives but obvious things that you need to do in order to progress).

They could have instead tried to make it into a huge novel or movie type thing and have you sit through hours of cutscenes or scenes showing your character talking to other characters and just scenes where you aren't just killing (or searching for) anything. But that would have made it boring, especially with the sheer amount of plot they wanted to cover.

I wasn't talking about actual skill to complete a game. I was just pointing out how condensed/shortened and simplified a story has to be in order to work as a game and still be fun (and still have a sense of immersion/interactivity).

[Craig Stern]

I believe that it's the gameplay that makes games games. The game mechanics and rules and goals. So if games are art, then those things are what makes them art. I wouldn't have a problem calling them art, because great game mechanics move me, the gameplay is the bit of gaming that I'm passionate about, and so on.

People are moved by football--it's a game. I wouldn't in a million years call football "art" though. There are really only two emotions I get out of pure gameplay: enjoyment and frustration. Everything else comes from my experience of the game world, its characters, and the plot. In short, its storytelling elements. It's what makes a football game truly engaging: knowing the players and their history, providing a context for what is otherwise a rather abstract struggle to move a ball across a field. I won't say that this makes a football game art, but it definitely moves it closer.

That said, gameplay can definitely enhance or detract from the emotional impact of a game. For example, "grinding" in RPGs breaks the flow of the story and "lifts the veil." I become aware of my characters as combinations of numbers, of the plot as a linear construct that will wait, potentially, an infinite amount of time to progress. (One of the brilliant things about the Fallout games was that events transpired in the world with or without you.)

I'm not totally closed to the idea that playing a certain game, purely based on its gameplay, can be some sort of transcendent experience that qualifies (in my view) as art. I just have not yet played that game. For me, it's whether the experience of the story* does something, intentionally, to elevate my consciousness and affect me emotionally that counts.

*Note that I am using the word story not to mean merely "plot," but rather to communicate the experience of being immersed in a game world, learning about its characters, and sharing in their struggles.

[charon]

Every work of art creates a (fictional) reality that differs in some degree from our actual reality, then offers a (unavoidably reductive) viewport into that reality.

In painting and sculpting, that viewport is the frame or the volume of space.

In storytelling, that viewport is the linguistic selection (or filtration) of fictional facts.

In music, the viewport are actual sounds and relations between them that invoke the mental perception of that fictional reality. In music, the fictional reality is usually abstract, but it needs not be (remember Peter and the Wolf?).

In games, it is the screen.

There is no topological difference between a stylised painting of a man who shoots stylised buffalos with stylised arrows, and a stylised sprite of a space ship shooting stylised missiles at invading stylised aliens from the sky.

When things can be described using roughly equivalent words and grammatical structures, there is a high suspicion in the air that they might all belong to the same linguistic category...

[0rel]

I think games can be art but I don't think they should be thought as art. I think that is the wrong way to look at games. Actually, I don't think games should even try to be art. I think the only thing that a game really needs is to be fun.

What do think is fun?
it's dumb question, i know, but i'm really asking me that...

fun is an important aspect of games, i agree, but there are several types of fun... i've recently read about some interesting studies which try to distinguish 4 types/poles of fun: hard fun, people fun, easy fun, serious fun. most people just mean "hard fun", when they talk about fun in games... hard fun is about challenge, an instinctive battle mode, where flow and concentration is very high. but fun is not only that. - i think good art in games could be much more "fun" than that always reapeating battle thing... years back i loved to fight as soldier in 'Contra' for example, but now i think it's rather dull, after replaying it yesterday... same thing, even in new games like hl2. that battle thing can be fun, in fact, most games build around it (including puzzles), but i don't see any new possiblilities there. hard fun == dull fun? - good art in games would be much deeper fun imo, and more worth the investigation on player's side. -> the turn-off-criterion: how does it feels like when you turn off or even finish the game? do you feel hollow, or victorious, dizzled, strong, energized, self-content, relaxed, touched? - in my experience, most 'hard fun'-games make me feel hollow afterwards. it may be fun inside the game, but afterwards, i just feel fuckedup, kind of media-sick, kind of wasting my time with crap. -- art has effects which go much further and can enrich the outside-game life in a postive way like book, in my opinion. which would be a surly good thing!
but i have to admit, that i really haven't found too many games yet which achieve that (Façade?)...

I believe that it's the gameplay that makes games games. The game mechanics and rules and goals. So if games are art, then those things are what makes them art.

that's an important point, for me too... games are containers for several other types of media (they can show off animations, paintings, music and tell a (~linear) story), so they can be equally powerful as these types of artistic media already are, they inherit some properties of them, and imitate old media in some way... but i agree that games are still fundamentally different than those, because the interactive gameplay is the center of games. so the questions comes up: how should interactivity work as an expressive, artistic tool? - there is not too much knowledge about that, i guess, just because it is something new. there are not too many good examples out there, which really demostrate the power of interaction as an expressive tool. but i believe that interative audio-visual realtime software, such as games, really can have very strong impact as art on a player when the developers don't try to focus only on perfect smooth hard-fun battles... the design for a game as art which tries to express something, using mainly the gameplay (-> realtime code) as a medium, shouldn't be done with focus on usability. - gameplay-mechanics in most games are just an interface to access the rule-space of the game in a predictable and intuitive way. for example, the steering of a race game must be smooth and responsive so that the player can beat the game in fair way. or the shooting in a fps must be precise, so that it doesn't get in the way between the player and game-space. -- illogical gameplay, unsteerable mechanics could be something to find new expressions maybe... and at the end the battle-context, the goal-orientaed nature of games, is the main problem imo, which narrows the expressive range of games considerably. - most of the time you experience the gameplay as "an interactive, >goal-oriented< activity", and not as just an interactive experience... so gameplay may be the wrong word here, it's more: "interactivity".

[0rel]

PS:
as an illustration, here, some links to some toys i've bookmarked somewhen...

they define no goals.
they are only about interactivity.

maybe this makes up some contrast to what we all know about goals and "hard fun" in the typical game experience.

http://sodaplay.com/
http://www.re-move.org/
http://yugop.com/
http://thisissand.com/


(unpolished, incomplete brain_dump: there's no big difference to games here. 'Super Mario' could be played as a toy/instrument as well, when the goals would be removed or ignored. - a huge cyclic platform park. you jump around make audio-visual stunts as an artistic performance... (this is just thought experiment, ok ). the player would be kind of a performer (jump'n'run), an interpreter (react to the piece/level-structure) and an editor (change the environment: destroy blocks) in one person. the game would interpret his actions as an active viewer-/player-software, as kind of a audio-visual instrument... - concept, level design, coding and assets would be the artistic contribution on developer's side, playing the game would the final place where the "art" would happen... it wouldn't matter who the author really would be. the developers or the designer or the player(s) or even the hardware manufacturers, because it would be a "collaborative" thing anyway...)

[Gnarf]

Well. I think that hard fun bit, the way they're goal-oriented, is an essential part of games. If I was to define games, I'd put goals and rules and game mechanics in the definition. So while I haven't really got any idea why something like Sodaplay would be more along the lines of art than something like Metal Slug, I think that if that's the case, then that might imply that games aren't art and some interactive toys (possibly with certain elements that are also found in games) may be.

People are moved by football--it's a game. I wouldn't in a million years call football "art" though. There are really only two emotions I get out of pure gameplay: enjoyment and frustration. Everything else comes from my experience of the game world, its characters, and the plot. In short, its storytelling elements. It's what makes a football game truly engaging: knowing the players and their history, providing a context for what is otherwise a rather abstract struggle to move a ball across a field. I won't say that this makes a football game art, but it definitely moves it closer.

Maybe you're right. And as I've already said, I don't know what definition of art to go with. I don't really have a problem with games not being art. Although I would like it if games were generally considered to be art, because it would be one way of taking games serious. One way that isn't only taking games serious as commerce.

That said, becoming aware of an interesting mechanic, figuring it out, mastering it. Failing, figuring out what you're doing wrong, accomplishing something. Etc. I guess they can all be lumped into the categories "frustration" and "enjoyment", but I'd like to think they don't all result in the exact same two same feelings. And, well, I don't think experiencing one game mechanic makes you feel the same way as a completely different one. And so on. I dunno, it just seems to me that you could just as well say that music only comes down to two feelings: Enjoying the music and not enjoying it.

[Craig Stern]

I dunno, it just seems to me that you could just as well say that music only comes down to two feelings: Enjoying the music and not enjoying it.

I don't think that's a great analogy, and here's why. Music can make you feel emotions fully apart from whether you enjoy the music. You've heard sad songs before that you liked, yes? Music has the potential to affect your mind in ways that are enjoyable even if the precise emotions they evoke are not ones of happiness. By contrast, if a game mechanic makes me sad, it is either A) because I am frustrated, or B) because it is being used in conjunction with some "story" element to represent something sad. Game mechanics, on their own, simply cannot invoke the range of emotions that music or narrative art forms can.

[charon]

Well game mechanics can't make you sad. When speaking of music, you might compare 'game mechanics' to 'rules of the structure of the composition', because the structure of a composition does not make you sad either, yet the structure defines the flow and emotional build up, so that a particular tune or interval may evoke such emotions in the listener.

Similar with game mechanics - they are not here to make you sad or happy, they are here to provide the fictional reality that the game depicts with things like complexity and internal consistency, which in turn make this fiction convincing enough for you to feel sad when, ie, one of the main character dies, or something dramatic happens to them, or simply the general tone, atmosphere or setting of the game can be dark, depressive and gloomy...

It's just that most games don't do that - they don't try to make you sad. But then again games are a very young medium. When cinematography was invented, the majority of all movies were comedies, not dramas, simply because the initial specifics of the medium made it more suitable for it (rapid movement, lack of spoken dialogue). It's similar with games, but it's likely going to change as the medium will either evolve or eventually die off.

[Gnarf]

I dunno, it just seems to me that you could just as well say that music only comes down to two feelings: Enjoying the music and not enjoying it.

I don't think that's a great analogy, and here's why. Music can make you feel emotions fully apart from whether you enjoy the music. You've heard sad songs before that you liked, yes? Music has the potential to affect your mind in ways that are enjoyable even if the precise emotions they evoke are not ones of happiness. By contrast, if a game mechanic makes me sad, it is either A) because I am frustrated, or B) because it is being used in conjunction with some "story" element to represent something sad. Game mechanics, on their own, simply cannot invoke the range of emotions that music or narrative art forms can.

I don't think it is a great analogy either, but for a different reason. Frustration can be a good part of the game, a part of what you're enjoying, and that doesn't really compare to not enjoying music.

Either way, music makes people sad? I could agree that music can evoke emotions, but sadness? No, not in the same way a movie or a book can, not without story elements to go with it or by association. Not any more than a game mechanic can. I'd certainly agree that game mechanics can't invoke the same emotions as narrative art forms, but as far as invoking emotions is concerned I'd argue games are closer to music than music is to narrative art forms.

[0rel]

just give increpare's Lady Boy Love Collection a try...

tracked art features:

* illogical gameplay (biocollect)
* sad music (password, panda)
* gameplay as an expressive tool (lady million, sick panda, biocollect)
* human themes (flesh / lady boy love / bio animal sky / life/ goals / rules<->restriction...)
* metaphors (one-way 1d life)
* minimalism, abstraction (big b/w pixels)
* glitchy machine nostalgia
* ...

i just played it before. it's interesting, but not really as a game, cause you can't win there...

(increpare, thanks for the solid arguments!)

[Craig Stern]

Either way, music makes people sad? I could agree that music can evoke emotions, but sadness?

Of course. You've heard Barber's Adagio for String, Op. 11 before, haven't you? Nirvana, "Something in the Way"? DJ Shadow, "Rabbit in Your headlights"? I could go on.