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[Guert]

But its like arguing with someone in a different language.

I don't really see this discussion going anywhere until the old blowhards have died out.

I personaly believe that the discussion will be going nowhere until some deisgner pulls out a masterpiece. When I say masterpiece, I say a game that surpasses everything we know as of now. How? I have no idea but when it'll happen, we'll know, and the rest of the world will know.

Who's going to do it? I dunno, but if we don't get our butts in gear toward that result no one will. Less talk, more games. The rest will follow.

I know I'm not adding anything to the debate but I just wanted attention :D
Later!

[ChrisFranklin]

I don't think that'll ever happen.  I don't think there was ever (in any medium) a single magic bullet work that suddenly made people wake up one day and realize "Hey, X can be a medium of meaningful expression, too!"  It's not an overnight thing; it takes time and the effort to both create meaningful titles and engage in public discourse about the possibilities of the artform.

That said, I still question how much is to be gained from drudging up the old "are games art" debate in the public eye against someone who is pretty clearly not going to budge.  What we should be doing is asking "How do we make games better" or "in what ways should we create games as art" in a public forum.  These sort of talks and panels take place at GDC and other industry conventions every year, but it's not often the general public is confronted with the ideas our community largely takes for granted.

[Guert]

I think the same way as you do. It's just that my vision is that, if everyone gets out there and tries to make a silver bullet, we'll end up with several games that have artistic goals and we will slowly get credentials from tons of creations. And one day, one will come up with a great game that we will call masterpiece and everyone will accept it. But we need lots of games to pave the way. LOTS of games. So yeah, it takes time and efforts but we gotta do it, one step at a time.

Well, that's my thoughts...
Later!

[JP]

Every medium brings with it its own unique potentials and challenges, but no one looks at a film and finds it impressive just because it isn't a photograph in the same way that no one looks at a building and finds it impressive just because it isn't a painting.

This is a rather good articulation of this argument, which in other discussions I've seen just derail everything into Essentialists VS Pluralists, or however you want to slice it.

I think there's actually a much more pragmatic argument for "games should do what games do well" which is just that we look like immature idiots every single time we try to copy other media (read: cinema).

Seriously, when people look back on the mainstream game industry a few decades from now, they're going to see a bunch of executives and creatives with their fingers in their ears saying "La la la, we can do 'blockbuster gravitas' just as well as Bruckheimer, even though our actors look like weird mannequins and our scripts suck and our fictions are usually so poorly thought out and brittle that players actively undermine the themes and story just by playing the game."  Et cetera.  It's just not worth playing that game (pun intended).  Indies tend to understand this much better.

We should definitely strive to do scripts and characters better, and effort is equally well spent (and understand I'm arguing for all possible directions here, no single right way to go) striking out into the massive swathes of terra incognita that we know are there.  Chances are, when the public finally shows up at our door pointing to a group of games and saying "Holy crap, you guys went and made ART!" it'll be stuff from that territory.  Some NYT guy seems to agree.

Because face it, we can already ape other media semi-competently now and it's just digging us deeper into a cultural ghetto.  Guess what?  Movies are better movies than games.  Most existing story-driven games are, when you peel everything away, just "television with a hand crank" (no non-trivial interactivity) or "one good story and 1000 ways to ruin it" (interactivity that ultimately undermines the expressive thrust of the piece).

Part of figuring out what storytelling means in games involves making enough of a clean break with cinema to be able to transcend your influences.  All the really good game stories do this to some extent.  I'm probably preaching to the choir at this point.

All of this will work out fine if the designers who are really interested in story and cinema go off and chase their idea of awesomeness, and the really ludo-minded people chase theirs, and so on and so forth.  The way to "solve" this problem is diversity.  Part of why some (annoying, uninformed) people write off comics is because for a long time they held themselves to a single type of subject matter and style of storytelling.