next »

[Spirit Galleon]

Recently, I saw instances of this mentality coming back via twitter, which was a very peculiar thing to see as I thought people were finally over this and had found other avenues to persue the fart-sniffing attitudes that many became exhausted by. But this set of tweets made me remember things, if only in a hazy fog of old-head brain.


         I Honestly never got the idea of "Games can be art" crowd that slung the weirdest and generally 'unplayable but interactive' concepts around back during the late 2000s and on into the 2010s of indie games and TIGsource. Though, often I find myself thinking of The Graveyard as the ultimate culmination of such obnoxious ideas, as it is something that felt bizarre to charge money for in the first place. It also felt like these things often had no real message or meaningful thought in them, or generally were rather barebones in other ways. The recent Day of the Devs stream reminded me that these kinds of vapid creations are still being made, often by people who can't get out of the Game Jam mentality or think what they're doing is somehow... profound?

         This is not to say that I dislike anything that can't be classified as such. Far from it. I often cite Dear Esther, Pools, Interior Worlds, and What Remains of Edith Finch as incredible examples of creating interactive stories. My age is also making me more interested in calmer experiences and "vibes", and those are wonderful experiences for that. Signalis also hooked me in very hard, despite initially I didn't really think it would be for me. It just often felt that the experiences touted as A Big Deal were in stark contrast, which I think is why Gone Home and Life is Strange often get ridiculed, aside from the "gamer" crowd that tends to complain about everything for the past 12 years.

         I find the overall mentality and idea of saying "Games need to be higher class" to be incredibly childish, if I'm honest? You can honestly classify games best as toys, and toys inherently are artistic drives and designs meant to be interacted with. We've long since moved past the idea of toys, model kits, figures, et al being exclusively for kids, much the way animation continuously finds new avenues and expressions that don't expressly target 10-year olds. The only people still with this mentality are those with incredibly narrow world-views usually, or just grew up without them and don't "get" it.

        And yet somehow, this keeps coming back around, as though games don't already contain art or can't be artistic as a whole, or can't have interesting writing, story concepts, etc. The mentality that things also shouldn't find inspirations within the medium itself is somehow... wrong? is another thing that's off-putting about the mentality. Having other inspirations is very important, yes, but to get a wider public to notice your passion project, being able to make comparisons to the medium is important. This lead to multiple indie devs responding to the topic on twitter with disdain, or posting images of their other inspirations to show how ridiculous the idea of the original tweet's intentions were.

        I'm not the only one that finds this ridiculous, right? What is the point of this mentality? what does it even accomplish? I would like to know other people's thoughts on this subject, as "games are toys and toys can be cool and mature" is what I ascribe to myself.

[michaelplzno]

Toys can be adult, I'm married, use toys all the time.

More seriously, in the last round of "discourse" on tig on this topic someone said, yes games are art but are they *good* art? That's personally where I am, what does it take to make good art? I don't think that some gatcha game with microtransactions is less an example of "art" than THE GRAVEYARD, (my personal hell of art games is "Dominique Pamplemousses" which was nominated in every category in a year I applied to the IGF and got bupkis. The poop mouse mocked me eternally.)

Candy bars are food, just like a steak dinner at a fancy restaurant is food. Also, a foam seafood flavored reduction with tartar sauce is technically food, but it sounds like something I would never eat. Asking "What is food?" is a naïve thing to ask but a good question for people who are new to the business. What is *good* food, what is a meal? Then you are getting to something... but the two dragons of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" rear their heads at that point.

I'm more of someone who wants an objective answer, though I'm told that is ... evil? That big T Truth is somehow the justification for nuking Japan? I don't know. I just saw a TV show that said that Beethoven was just communally subjective in praise: his art is not objectively good, he just has a lot of fans. But it's all semantics at this level.

[Spirit Galleon]

I don't think I ever saw Dominique Pamplemousses. I pulled up a long play and skimmed it, and I don't think I "get" whatever this is trying to do. It doesn't strike me as vapid, atleast.

       As for truth in art: Subjectivity and Objectivity are the bane of any conversation on art, as art itself functions more like religion with how everyone has different beliefs, ideals, concepts, etc around it. It's way too difficult to narrow down these things, especially when you start looking at things like "outsider art" created by those with zero prior knowledge or study in the mediums they create in. This makes it very difficult to compare it the way we understand food, as there are ways to find objective tastes in a region, things that are often unanimously agreed on for ingredient and base choices, and other things like that.

       Years ago I used to be alot more strict in the idea of something being wholely good or wholely bad, but now I find it's far more interesting to study games, movies, and art to find both things I like and dislike in whatever I play, watch, or look at. There's plenty of bad games that have neat art in them, and good games that look horrendous or amateurish. Sure, gacha games are often soulless husks, but they have a clear draw in their visual identities, else the big popular ones wouldn't be as successful as they are. There's one in particular based on Looney Tunes that has some incredible animations and models in it, far better than it has any right to be, for instance.
      It's kinda hard to find an undeniable fact with games for alot of the same reason. I'm obsessed with accuracy in recreation of graphics in older hardware as much as I am pushing the boundaries of those now arbitrary limits to make something that feels "advanced". Heavily anti-minimalist mindset, sure, but I'd never consider it a fact or How Things Should Be.

[michaelplzno]

So, I'll agree that the "what is art?" conversation is like a religious conversation. However, when you step back, even religion is definable, and all belief structures share common elements. (Even atheists believe things that might not be provable, and even mathematicians will tell you that all true things cannot be proven.)

Interestingly the concept of "good" itself has been redefined many times over the ages. In the days of the Greeks, it was good to seek pleasure. Then with Christianity "shame" was introduced to the equation and then good meant something a bit more like today. But the concept of goodness is often tied to religion. And for sure it is if we define good art as an expression of the soul.

People don't consider good art to simply be pleasurable art these days. I'm getting the impression that, as you are noticing, people are interested in stuff that has both good and bad parts and the art that catches on contemporarily is more complex. Art that is pleasurable is, perhaps, too easy for today's art consumer on the go. Musk declared that to use twitter one must be a masochist and so it is that today good has some pain baked right in.

With THE GRAVEYARD, a lot of art is politically good rather than simply good on its own (If something can be good in a vacuum). If you are connected to a scene and pander to its participants, you can get declared good simply by knowing the right people. The institution of art is cruel but powerful: if the curators become invested in a style, one way or another, then suddenly definitions tend to drift in a direction. Ironic that the graveyard is itself around the time of the death of a certain flavor of art that really didn't reach anyone in any meaningful way but was simply too powerful to be ignored at the time. When I was starting out, appeasing the curators was THE WAY(TM) and I was very grumpy about it, to this day, that good was simply decided by a group of robbed illuminati style curators. If you didn't make it in the scene, curated by the people who are powerful, what are you even doing with your art?

My definition of art, based on my father's aesthetics training that he passed down to me, is that art is the synthesis of logic and emotion, and thus good art really harmonizes the two opposing forces in question. This definition is not a popular view. Its individualist, in that the artist in question's emotional and mental state are highly valued, and its objective in that it is possible to look for the emotions and logic in a piece and analyze their combined qualities without needing the subjective lens of the audience's preferences. I personally think the reason objectivity in art is abhorred is that it makes it possible for someone who is not popular among the elite to be a good artist, giving away control from the "taste makers." As in, some defiant artist can object to being subjected to the rules that the high-level kings and queens pass down.

But as we discussed in the other thread of today, making high art, even just regular art, isn't really what makes people get out of bed in the morning to play a game or watch a show. The best stuff is usually just examples of craft where the people who made it aren't experiencing any kind of artistic expression and it's more like building a cabinet: it must open, it must stand up, it must have space inside, etc.

So, to your point, navel gazing about "WHAT IS AHHHHHHRT?" quickly veers away from "what does it mean to make something that reaches people?" even by my own definitions. By my measure, Tetris is a kind of art, but really, who cares? People don't talk about it like art, they just like playing it.

Edit to add flavor:

[Schoq]

Is there a broader context to those tweets? I can charitably read it more as
"too many indie(?) game developers are just trying to recreate cool games that already exist without understanding what makes them good (which would require a broader understanding of the arts than you can get from playing video games all day)"
rather than jumping to the interpretation
"the art form is stagnant because not enough developers are striving to create high art with a deep message [in reality, a shallow visual metaphor] like jason rohrer"

Isn't it analogous to the observation that if all you do in your free time is read comic books that probably won't make you a very good comic book artist or writer.

[michaelplzno]

"More interesting people will produce more interesting art" is a truism, right? The giga brains have the audacity to dare to be boring though. 

[Spirit Galleon]

Is there a broader context to those tweets? I can charitably read it more as
"too many indie(?) game developers are just trying to recreate cool games that already exist without understanding what makes them good (which would require a broader understanding of the arts than you can get from playing video games all day)"
rather than jumping to the interpretation
"the art form is stagnant because not enough developers are striving to create high art with a deep message [in reality, a shallow visual metaphor] like jason rohrer"

Isn't it analogous to the observation that if all you do in your free time is read comic books that probably won't make you a very good comic book artist or writer.

     I wish. their later responses all just came down to "game developers aren't well read, they need to stop being derivative". Everyone IS doing that, but when you do a Marketing Tweet about your game, you need to have analogous things to get people to want to play it. He only ever looked at Marketing Tweets, and got a hot take from that.
     Aka, typical twitter moment, but in a subject that usually doesn't get talked about.

People don't consider good art to simply be pleasurable art these days. I'm getting the impression that, as you are noticing, people are interested in stuff that has both good and bad parts and the art that catches on contemporarily is more complex. Art that is pleasurable is, perhaps, too easy for today's art consumer on the go. Musk declared that to use twitter one must be a masochist and so it is that today good has some pain baked right in.

With THE GRAVEYARD, a lot of art is politically good rather than simply good on its own (If something can be good in a vacuum). If you are connected to a scene and pander to its participants, you can get declared good simply by knowing the right people. The institution of art is cruel but powerful: if the curators become invested in a style, one way or another, then suddenly definitions tend to drift in a direction. Ironic that the graveyard is itself around the time of the death of a certain flavor of art that really didn't reach anyone in any meaningful way but was simply too powerful to be ignored at the time. When I was starting out, appeasing the curators was THE WAY(TM) and I was very grumpy about it, to this day, that good was simply decided by a group of robbed illuminati style curators. If you didn't make it in the scene, curated by the people who are powerful, what are you even doing with your art?

     This reminds me of the obnoxiousness I had to deal with in the local art association. I stopped going pretty much right after they brought in some guy to do a presentation that showed off his african safari vacation photos and said "it's actually quite civilized over there, we had wine and everything". Gross.

     A big part of art is definitely striking an emotional chord, but that emotional chord can be through giving the work "meaning", or by creating something that is so visually impactful that it has response from being "cool" or "pretty", whatever that might mean to people. The downside is often the "taste makers" hate the latter, acting like anything with direct market appeal cannot be considered art.
     I agree with your father's take most. Art has always been a very personal journey for me, but one built on "I can't sit still, I need to get better, oh I need to know how to do this too? okay I'm gonna learn that real fast" over and over until I know way more skillsets than I should. Which is... kind of unhealthy in it's own way, but it's been pretty valuable for getting hired to do basically whatever art people need me to do.

By my measure, Tetris is a kind of art, but really, who cares? People don't talk about it like art, they just like playing it.

Real tho

[michaelplzno]

     This reminds me of the obnoxiousness I had to deal with in the local art association. I stopped going pretty much right after they brought in some guy to do a presentation that showed off his african safari vacation photos and said "it's actually quite civilized over there, we had wine and everything". Gross.

This is an interesting bit about subjectivity and people's own biases. The postmodern movement, as I understand it, is all about embracing subjectivity and the death, or murder, of objectivity, but also there is a big movement to reject racism and sexism and all the other negative biases. So, there is a bit of a mixed message in that: on the one hand, art is subjective, so we like what we personally like based on our own feelings and nothing more. That it is impossible to escape from our own personal little lenses. On the other hand, it is wrong to discriminate against a group of people based on irrational feelings and personal biases. And we should spend constant effort fighting these urges to judge people based on superficialities.

I never got the explanation of why bias/subjectivity is good when judging art, but bad when judging people. But if our analysis of art is surface level, just like if our analysis of people is surface level, we are gonna have some real problems.

IMHO One must ask what art means beyond just one's own personal narrative if you want to know anything at all. Just like if you want to know a person you have to get more info than just their profile picture.



Andy was big on the postmodern front, and at its best as a movement, postmodernism was poking fun at how dumb art and its curators are. "Oh, if you want to make rules of composition, then this dumb thing follows all your rules, lol, put it in a museum." is the kind of postmodernism I love.

But once the rules are gone, there is chaos. And truth dies, and so does meaning, and so the contract between the artist and the audience is in tatters, or at best simply hidden from any scrutiny. Hence most of people's behavior on twitter. Hence literally every platform not explaining what the actual curatorial rules are for reaching customers. Hence the wasteland of warring tribal narratives. Hence lots of stuff I personally dislike, and I have a feeling a lot of people aren't fans of either.

And I will do anything to get out from under the "Tast Makers" of the world, so I get postmodernism's anger at the strict rules of more modern thinking. These new age, contemporary, taste makers are, in their mind, a wonderful benevolent force, the minds behind the scenes fighting for the little guy! Also, in their mind when something like Minecraft is so popular their grandkids are wearing a Minecraft t-shirt, they still won't acknowledge that there must be something powerful in Minecraft that speaks to the human soul.

To end on a realistic note: all the theory in the world won't make a piece of art. I like transparency, consistency, fairness, and truth. Not everyone is a fan of those lofty ideals for a lot of reasons, some of the objections are even good.

So let it be written:

 

[Spirit Galleon]

This is an interesting bit about subjectivity and people's own biases. The postmodern movement, as I understand it, is all about embracing subjectivity and the death, or murder, of objectivity, but also there is a big movement to reject racism and sexism and all the other negative biases. So, there is a bit of a mixed message in that: on the one hand, art is subjective, so we like what we personally like based on our own feelings and nothing more. That it is impossible to escape from our own personal little lenses. On the other hand, it is wrong to discriminate against a group of people based on irrational feelings and personal biases. And we should spend constant effort fighting these urges to judge people based on superficialities.

     I actually had wrote way, way more in regards to the art association and how it had been falling apart for decades. Shifting to a committee structure, obsession with a plot of land that hadn't made money in decades, how the only interesting people were an absolutely wild 92 year old man who had worked on the apollo rockets and a furry who was so good at oil painting and mask-making they couldn't ignore him, and the list goes on and on. But these things felt less conversational than getting to the nitty gritty of "old fuddy duddies made me not want to be there after I got way more notice and work away from them and stopped trying to be a real artist and became an effective artist"

To end on a realistic note: all the theory in the world won't make a piece of art. I like transparency, consistency, fairness, and truth. Not everyone is a fan of those lofty ideals for a lot of reasons, some of the objections are even good.

Honestly that's all that really matters. hiding behind words with art is boring unless they tie back to why the piece matters to the artist, not lofty, vague ideas like 'what does it mean to be human' or 'the duality of man' (generic examples I know, but I'm having a hard time thinking of more specific ones I've seen at the moment.)
I'll admit though, much like Warhol being incredibly spiteful towards his fans, I've also had instances of wanting to absolutely clown on/run circles around contemporaries in my field when their work has made me mad enough, which is definitely something that art is very, very good for depicting and expressing.

For instance, the specific piece I did in direct response to the art association all those years ago. A piece so chaotic that it was 4 seperate things in the span of 20 minutes before it became this.


E: I think this conversation has gotten very lofty and high-concept in it's own right. I don't really know how it ties back into games anymore.

[michaelplzno]

It was helpful to me to dump all this out there, even if these kinds of rants sometimes burn bridges, it is important to burn the right bridges.

I like your piece, the independent farm away from the lofty walled garden.





I make a lot of games that are simple and just examples of good craftmanship as far as games go. I say that is defiant and revenge and all, really if I could make something like Minecraft that everybody loves I would feel satisfied that I had settled the score. When your enemies' kids are wearing a tshirt for your game that is just 

[Sketchwhale]

The tweet in OP resonated with me, but I disagreed wiith the conclusion. I too lament when games only take inspiration from a very small selection of games. Yet games are varied enough that there are plenty of games, even big ones, that are rarely drawn from. My next game draws from a 00's flash game, Vagrant Story, Sin & Punishment, the X-Wing/Tie Fighter games, and an old Danish cop movie. Only one none-game inspiration in there, but literacy in games takes a lot of effort too.

[michaelplzno]

My games draw from all sorts of stuff: politics, Saturday morning cartoons, anime, Zen Buddhism, abstract art like the works of Piet Mondrian etc.

That stuff is like seasoning and makes the games easier for gamer blogs to write about but isn't what makes a game great.

Tetris is my favorite game, and it doesn't draw from anything other than pure math.

Also, drawing from interesting source material isn't what makes a work of art. Lots of the best artwork you see in a museum will have taken a big leap from other works and done its own thing.

Edit: "Dragon Egg"

[Golds]

We have another giant thread on this topic, if you want to read more of the TIGSource collective's thoughts on the matter.  

[Schoq]

and another and another, and another, if you look around

[Golds]

Here's another. My 2009 GDC talk on this exact issue.





I still believe the main thrust completely, that people who have been raised on video games, as they reach adulthood, will carry their affection and artistic interpretation with them, and there will be a big cultural shift. Games as prestige entertainment and High Art.

[michaelplzno]

It was a good talk, and nice that you didn't go too long. I get your "art is something people do" but also people ... well ... poop, mr shit game, so pooping is art, since it is for sure "something people do?!"

Cynical semantics aside...

More to my appreciation of what it means to be an artist, I've started pandering to the people the algorithm has paired me with. Most of them like retro computers, the c64, Amiga, to some extent Atari and old Apple computers. Most of them like Star Wars (which was also big when the computer movement started, I think, late 70s early 80s)

So we have


which was designed mostly to pander to the retro community. It has about 25 likes on Facebook which may be a record for art I've done. (This seems like a tiny number for my massive ego, but I guess I should be happy it's above my averages.) Also, it is sparking debate about who Darth Vader would side with in the retro computer space. Not to mention, someone came up to me at the coffee shop I was doodling in and told me about how he loved retro computers and was doing some kind of conference about them. By all objective measures, it is a smash.

And then this one which was called a rendering of "God-Knows-What" by one of my own blood relatives:


Generally, I try to argue that my weird self-expression is the highest Art and worthy of its own museum somewhere. I have a metric to judge art in an objective way that I have chosen just to make good art by my own measuring stick. Mostly if that rule, of my own design, for what art is were chosen by the powerful robed illuminati who decide what culture is I would be happy not only because I could make art that fits that movement, but also because I happen to like that kind of art.

Mr. Beast is going on about how he could get back to a million subscribers in 6 months if he started from scratch and didn't show his face. He probably could, I guess. The crap Mr. Beast makes is just more popular than my own personal flavor of videos. And Beast will do anything in his power to get the views, I'm sure he would do porn/adopt any political view/promote fake boner pills... anything to get an audience. I can't say I have that dedication to the art form of YouTube videos, or a need for popularity that subsumes my natural charming personality.

I'm also working on "Space Boss" which is a game about taking over everything. It seems to have more interest than any of the games I've made, except the one about becoming president of the USA.

I'm more interested in if power fantasies can be art rather than just the general question of if games can be art. Clearly a game about flowers wafting in the wind is art... it's so emotional, it makes you cry, it makes you feel like a flower...

The game about the soldier who steps on a flower as he marches to war... is that art too?

[michaelplzno]

The algorithm taketh away but the algorithm also givith sometimes:

[Spirit Galleon]

Games as prestige entertainment and High Art.

Look we already got Signalis what more could you want

[michaelplzno]

When it comes to the film world, horror movies tend to never win awards like the Oscars, which is the arbiter of what is art, of course.

In film, the most "artistic" art is a movie about the holocaust.





I think Brenda Romero decided to make a game about the holocaust to "prove she is a great game designer" which I thought was profoundly bad taste.

[Golds]

Ebert's main line of attack against "games as art" is their interactive dimension. He claims that since the player can do whatever they want, this ruins the creator's "vision" for the game, and, thus, renders them artless.

Of course, my retort to that is that, yes, games are interactive, and that is what makes them special. Instead of designing a rote, linear experience, the designer fashions the possibility space for the audience. What can the player do, and what are the consequences of the player's actions. If you look at a game like that, you can see just how wide open the medium is for creative, "High Art" experiences.