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[Pigbuster]

Citizen Kane is considered a masterpiece in cinema not necessarily because of the story - great stories are the specialty of literature, and that's something movies borrow. It is so well regarded because of how it's told. It constantly uses cinematic techniques to amplify every moment and emotion - Something only a film can do.

I'm sorry, but if art in film was totally disjoint from art in other fields, not only would the story be excluded, but also images, the domain of painting and other visual art, leaving the problem of communicating artistically solely to motion: the one thing that differentiates film from other visual arts. However, even still shots in film can be evocative. No one has come along and told directors they are unable to include still shots because they belong to photography.

I didn't actually mean to say that great works of film are totally supposed to seperate themselves from everything else.
Film is made up of other mediums like stories and photographs, and getting rid of those would make the film into more of an abstract experimentation piece. Those can be neat, but they weren't what I was trying to describe.

A masterpiece has to perform well on all fronts - craft and structure and the like. It's not going to be considered a great work of art if the story is crappy.
Works of art like Citizen Kane also challenged and experimented with the medium, and it showed how a story could be told through the medium of film. The movie was able to amplify the emotions behind the story, showing how film could be used as a powerful storytelling medium. That's why it's thought of so highly.

A work of art doesn't have to experiment like this to be a great work of art. I'm perfectly fine with scrolling through long lines of text or watching a 10-minute cut-scene in a game. Heck, I love them. There's nothing better than a well-made plot, in my opinion.
However, works of art that challenge their own medium can expand it and make the way for many more varieties of work.

If a game could show how video games could be used to effectively tell a story using techniques exclusive to the medium, then maybe the naysayers would take the medium seriously (There has to be a game out there that has already done this, though, so maybe I'm just dreaming...)

I'm not saying video games have to ditch all the other mediums and embrace their unique interactivity. I think video games are going to grow as a medium by embracing their foundation and exploring their own concepts and ideas.


I always seem to have trouble properly getting my point across when making long posts... especially when I develop new opinions immediately after hitting "post".

[Golds]

If a panel or discussion like this were to happen, to make it compelling, I think it it'd be a good idea to come up with a list of all the "big gun" arguments used  to prove that games/interactive mediums are not high art

The ones that immediately come to mind are:

1. Since the artist is not in control of precisely how the art is presented, the viewer can somehow distort or hack the piece into not being art anymore by interacting with it in unexpected ways.

2. Most contemporary games revolve around a survival mechanic, where your goal with the experience is to not die, and advance through the piece, collecting points, getting high scores, etc.  The survivalism theme makes the experience not high art, since its not present in classic forms of art.


3. ....?

I can think of pretty great arguments against both these points, but are there any other common points of contention?

[Alec]

Huh? Aren't there some classic works that deal with survival?

[Golds]

Alec, what I was trying to say was that accepted art forms don't usually involve specific goals for the viewer to pursue.

If you go see an opera, you're not actively trying to accomplish anything to "beat" it.  Unless you're trying to stay awake or something

[Alec]

But that's like saying Opera isn't art because it relies on hearing.

Games are going to have interaction on some level. Survival happens to be one breeding ground for interaction that provides a lot of interest.

Its kind of like saying "a lot of music is crap, because its written in A minor".

[Golds]

I already think both the points I listed are fallacies .

What I'd like to do is figure out as many strong opposing arguments as possible so that a rockstar defense could be mounted against each.

[Alec]

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.

[Golds]

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

I agree to an extent.  I doubt there will be much debate once our generation becomes the old blowhards of the future.

But Ebert seemed fairly receptive to the arguments I gave back in 2006.  And I think it could generate good discussion and a fun event that could at least get people thinking.

I keep bringing up the Impression, Sunrise parallel.  When Monet, Van Gogh, Chagall, et al were doing their stuff, they were totally blown off by the critics of the age, but now when you say "art", especially in the USA, it's almost de facto to think of Impressionism.

You can also look at the film industry, which first exploited the medium with pornographic nickelodeons.  I imagine it would have been pretty hard to convince someone at the time that motion pictures were art.  You can even look at what people said about the photographic medium when it first came around.  People are always going to blow off the new medium, but the fact remains that art is something  people do, and the medium is largely irrelevant.

And anyway, I doubt that Ebert is going to quit writing about it in the Answer Man, and people are going to continue to write stuff in because it's a hot topic.  It'd be nice to be able conduct a sound debate against the common arguments that keep marginializing the interactive digital format.

[Alec]

Yeah, but I don't necessarily mean Ebert. Somehow I imagine that Ebert is one of the more rational people against the notion out there.

[Golds]

Speaking of avante garde art installations,  Bill Viola is participating in IGF 2008 with The Night Journey.

Video.

[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.