no, but i think they can function in the smae way.
and if we're going into the auteur/collab parts of different artforms, there are plenty of game designers who's sensibility dominates the product:
1) Miyamoto2) Kojima3) Tim Schafer
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Tuesday, 27 December 2005 23:42 (eighteen years ago) link
Depends on what you mean by "moved", I guess -- the way most people mean it, it was Ocarina of Time. But "moved" (as in, emotionally struck) isn't generally what I want out of art anyways, and certainly isn't the litmus test for whether something is a piece of (effective) art or not.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 02:34 (eighteen years ago) link
Ouch! Considering the source, I'll tolerate the prickliness-- and I actually appreciate the fact that you're calling me out on this. Ebert reviews games often? (I ignored your ref to Cosmology of Kyoto when I "read" the thread last, so I skipped over the link.) I can't find the original Ebert NOTLD review, but a quick google of references to it forces me to admit that I might have been confusing an uninformed misconception of his review for fact there, even though I'm pretty sure I actually have read his original review of the movie somewhere (in one of his books, maybe).
Long, long way to go
Is there? How much more development does there have to be before video games are "perfected"? Aren't things like the arcade Asteroids and the original Super Mario Bros. already speaking with a fully-formed vocabulary, as technically crude as they might be? What else do they need to be aesthetic experiences on a par with the fine arts? Isn't the experience of playing them the text, and everything else the subtext? How overt does the "literary" content have to be in your opinion before video games can be art and not just bullshit? (And is The Manchurian Candidate really "literary" either? It's been a long while since I saw it last, but I thought it was more pop than visionary.)
Films can come close but the medium is really still too complex to allow for full articulation by a single person or even just two people.
So films aren't fully on the level of literature yet either? I think you might be wrong about how vital it is that one person generates all the work themselves-- aren't writers forced to sculpt the raw material of their first draft in much the same way as directors sculpt a finished product from the accidents of performance?
I think it's interesting to note that video games may have had their moment in the limelight from 1980-1996
Maybe-- maybe because by becoming more collaborative and big-budget, video games have moved away from the personal? I know lots of peoplehave claimed that the golden age of video games already passed once designers stopped programming their own games.
you CAN ask those kinds of questions about other art forms, you can't really ask them about videogames
You can't? Why not? This is what I was getting at with the "mythology" comment-- aren't there all sorts of implicit enculturation and value reinforcement involved in these fantasies of heroism and escape? I don't think there's any reason why people couldn't be teaching about the cultural dimension of video games right now. How much of the game do you need to experience in class to talk about it? Do you have to have students play through Final Fantasy VII in its entirety? I've had plenty of courses where only parts of long books were assigned-- sometimes it's the only way to do survey courses. Leave playing video games all day to the grad students, in that case. (I can imagine them now, stressing out because they haven't had time to do all of their assigned playing.)
This sort of forces video games to be culturally marginal
Interesting-- so video games were less culturally marginal in the days of the arcades because they could be experienced in full much more quickly? Yeah, the ephemerality thing is a handicap right now, but it was as much of a handicap in film before the technology developed-- lots of early movies were lost entirely due to storage problems, and there are probably lots of movies that are regarded as classics today that were marginalized and little seen for a long time because they weren't getting re-releases to movie houses-- modern "film buff" culture I don't think really started until movie catalogues started getting sold to television stations that need stuff to air (the omnipresence of the Universal monsters, 3 Stooges, Looney Tunes, and The Little Rascals as household names are all due to television showings, right? Same true for The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life?)
Also show me a videogame that's "controversial" for the ideas behind it instead of for the animated blood and fucking.
Eh... Was Naked Lunch controversial for the ideas behind it or because of the blood and fucking? Isn't Burroughs's willingness to be transgressive an outgrowth of the ideas though? Isn't the GTA debate over ideas-- churchy types seeing it as promoting some sort of implicit nihilism rather than as good, clean fun? I take your point about the lack of overt literary content in games to date, but I wonder how necessary it is for all games to be like Alpha Centauri or Planescape: Torment. I think that the material you're looking for already exists-- you could probably seriously analyze the ideas behind SMAC in the same way that you parody analyzed Halo.
― Chris F. (servoret), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 04:36 (eighteen years ago) link
Yeah, I think you're right-- my point is that I think there has to be lots of "mythic" content in these things already, just as a result of the gameplay itself! I think that the position that you're in as a protagonist and the things you have to face as antagonists are telling a meaningful story already-- making video games potentially time-wasting bullshit and invigorating cultural experiences at the same time. And obviously, there's a spectrum of meaningfulness to be had-- but how much more do you need for video games to touch your soul? Aren't you part of the Nintendo generation? Is the problem a lack of "adult" works? (Has there been a video game Maus in this sense yet?)
― Chris F. (servoret), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 04:46 (eighteen years ago) link
Aren't we telling a story to ourselves as we live our lives? I'm the guy talking vapid bullshit, TOMBOT is the hero rising to squelch that, et cetera? Or is that vapid bullshit? I think kingfish knows what I'm getting at. Not just value judgements, but we're constantly forced to live in reifications just because of the way that we're constructed, as finite thinking beings that have to make sense of a very large and complex system-- "all seeing is a perspective seeing", etc. I don't think I'm abusing the word "myth" much in talking about the fact that we're forced to simplify and place value on things just to survive as human beings, and that we're enculturated into doing that. Aren't myths explanatory stories that speak to/give us an intuitive sense of the way things are?
― Chris F. (servoret), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 04:58 (eighteen years ago) link
Covered this already. I guess I disagree with your take on how authors in any medium produce work-- you're assigning them causal powers of creation that I don't think they actually have.
― Chris F. (servoret), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 05:02 (eighteen years ago) link
I wasn't utterly sober posting this… and I'll be more lucid on another thread tomorrow where I needn't worry about framing the argument re. Ebert. What I'm actually getting toward (incoherently) is a point about the locus of the narrative experience and the kind of obligatory Verfremdungseffekt current games (perhaps) enforce.
― remy (x Jeremy), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 06:15 (eighteen years ago) link
― Chris F. (servoret), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 08:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 15:29 (eighteen years ago) link
Grep for "Silent Protagonist" on this thread and read down from there, I discussed a little bit of the difference here and Dan chiming in with his own treatment of the "masking effect" confirmed my suspicions:
RPGs are better in 2D. Discuss!
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 15:50 (eighteen years ago) link
― Forksclovetofu (Forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 15:53 (eighteen years ago) link
I don't think so! And more to my point (and Nolan Bushnell's point, and Satoru Iwata's point) the inaccessibility of so many videogames would make such a game likely to just fall by the wayside, unnoticed by anybody but you, me, and maybe Tycho & Gabe. I mean Maus is weird and hard enough for people unfamiliar with comics to accept as worthwhile, if you had to learn a new set of hand motions and object relationships just to open the book and turn pages it would be even more marginalized than it is!
I don't think videogames aren't ART, I mean even noize music is art, but mature, they're not. I think the main problems all have technical underpinnings; the marketplace is immature, the generation gap is hard at work, and the conventions are all still highly unstable.
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 16:04 (eighteen years ago) link
What definition of "art" is this? The dialogue in Tetris is shit!
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 16:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 16:07 (eighteen years ago) link
I like the Penny Arcade argument: music is art, yes? Design? Graphic art? So you add a joystick and it's no longer art?
― Forksclovetofu (Forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 17:42 (eighteen years ago) link
An esquisitely carved chessboard with beautiful and ornate pieces is art, too, but CHESS, itself, is not. Chess is tradecraft. Playing chess is even more so. Battle Chess is no different; why can it as a whole be considered art when you would probably not say the same of regular old chess?
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 18:45 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 18:54 (eighteen years ago) link
So yes to both birds with one stone.
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 19:14 (eighteen years ago) link
Put in another way, what will demarcate the snooty high culture/low culture divide in games? It can't be just game genre, since you have Half Life 2, Halo, and Postal 2, all in the FPS category. I'm thinking it might fall into platform/"intended audience" lines, i.e. we already talk about "hardcore" or "serious" games. We decry Xbox/halo/madden-only gamers right now.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 19:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 19:58 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.it-he.org/u6/murderer.gifhttp://www.mbnet.fi/pelihalli/kuvat/uutiset/isot/garriott.jpg
― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:12 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:17 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:40 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:33 (eighteen years ago) link
I'm not arguing against that, I'm just asking whether that's all culture consists of.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:44 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:45 (eighteen years ago) link
But at any rate no, novels, theater, and cinema CAN'T do what Tetris or any other game can conceivably do, but on the other hand Tetris is to a great degree defined by its ruleset, and thus still no more mesmerizing than Mah-Jongg Solitaire or Su-Do-Ku, neither of which necessarily require a the "video" component, and neither of which people have asked Ebert if he thinks they are as cool as movies.
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:02 (eighteen years ago) link
i prefer the Picross/Paint-by-numbers thing.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:11 (eighteen years ago) link
http://img280.imageshack.us/img280/7663/leo34tp.gif
-- Casuistry (chri...)
This actually is my litmus test for art, which makes me wonder why I love video games as much as I do. Video games interest me, excite me, involve me, and occasionally addict me, but rarelydo they move me. But they have, and I think the medium has untapped potential to do more and be more. I would see a lot of games today as artistic, but only very, very rarely approaching something as lofty as art (particularly in the narrative/literary sense).
― Laura H. (laurah), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:23 (eighteen years ago) link
Part of it has to do with immersiveness, I guess, or how connected I feel with the game.
MGS was one that certainly made an effort, especially with the whole Sniper Wolf bit with the overly melodramatic/poetic death on a snow-covered battlefield.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:36 (eighteen years ago) link
D'oh! When I googled I got his Land of the Dead review and tried searching under Romero's name from there, with no success. Sadly, the place I've read it before probably is the actual Sun-Times site. Moving on...
I don't think videogames aren't ART, I mean even noize music is art, but mature, they're not.
Why should chess be different, then? Is the difference in the total presentation-- i.e., you can have lots of different instantiations of a chess set but only one Super Mario Bros., so successive SMB games are separate works of art? I dunno about your thing about conventions not being stabilized enough, because I think the truth of that varies depending on the genre of game. Eugene Jarvis developed Robotron on the back of Berserk, and isn't Robotron the epitome of 2-D 1 screen shooters? It isn't like Smash TV was really an improvement. Similarly, does Earthbound speak to/epitomize a certain tradition of Ultima-derived Japanese RPGs?
That's going to be the same for games.
Yeah-- I think this already shows in the way classic arcade games are revered, and Tim Rogers's Earthbound thing. There's a lot of half-forgotten garbagey games that have been produced that nobody really thinks of as "classic" despite their extreme age, like almost all of the Galaxian rip-offs that you can play through MAME. Galaxian is justly considered to be a classic, but those games aren't.
pomo/university litcrit bullshit
Yeah, I was actually conflating that with considering games as an art somewhat, wasn't I? Not that you can't hold up Missile Command as a classic product of the Cold War, but that's not really telling us anything about the game qua game.
very, very rarely approaching something as lofty as art
Are there "art" games and "craft" games, similar to the divide between "art" and "craft" in cinema?
― Chris F. (servoret), Thursday, 29 December 2005 01:03 (eighteen years ago) link
"Stories" in the sense of being mimetic technology, maybe. I was probably on too much of a Grant-Morrisonesque bender when I wrote that before.
― Chris F. (servoret), Thursday, 29 December 2005 01:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Thursday, 29 December 2005 01:49 (eighteen years ago) link
As do some games and in my case it is always the soundtrack that does it, not the story or visuals. For example the music in Zelda Windwaker is very delightfully moving in places. The music in Voodo Vince is really chill, unusual jazz that adds a lot to the mood of the game.
I really wish games would put more money against the music, it makes all the difference IMO.
― Trayce (trayce), Thursday, 29 December 2005 02:01 (eighteen years ago) link
Certain comments on this thread reminded me of this:
Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers
"(about dogme 95) I believe it's time for a similar debate in the game industry. We, too, have an arsenal of production techniques, and they're getting more spectacular all the time. Yet how many games on the store shelves can genuinely claim to be innovative? They may have innovative algorithms, but very few of them have innovative gameplay. How many first-person shooters, how many war games, how many run-and-jump video games do we really need? We're depending so much on the hardware that we're starting to ignore the bedrock foundation of our business: creativity, especially in devising not merely new games, but new kinds of games."
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 29 December 2005 05:23 (eighteen years ago) link
So I don't understand how anyone can have difficulty thinking of games as art (and often fully "mature" art!) unless they have never played a game or unless they have a weirdly limited view of what "real art" is (like, "art is something that didn't really happen that makes me cry", maybe).
My point being that while you CAN ask those kinds of questions about other art forms, you can't really ask them about videogames.
Those really aren't the sorts of questions you should be asking art. I mean this:
IS THE "HALO" SERIES AN ALLEGORY FOR AMERICA'S PERSECUTION COMPLEX IN THE LATE 20th AND EARLY 21st CENTURIES? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER AND DISCUSS THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MASTER CHIEF.
That's the kind of question you ask propaganda, not art.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 29 December 2005 11:01 (eighteen years ago) link
Anyway an aesthetic attention can be held with video games, in a museum, watching dew on freshly cut grass etc
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 29 December 2005 14:44 (eighteen years ago) link
I suspect he spends more time thinking that they're "cool" than actually playing them. And "memetic", not "mimetic", WTF.
I think there's a lot of talking around in circles here
I was watching an interview with an actor tonight that was one of the extras to the Youth of the Beast DVD, and he drew a sharp distinction between contrasting "art" films to "entertainment" films as genres, and films made with artistry to "ordinary" ones. I think that pretty much sums it up.
Yeah, exactly. I think this is part of what I was trying to say before-- the experience of play has an aesthetic sense of its own, especially when it comes to things like control responsiveness. SMB has a feel to it that distinguishes it from other games in my mind.
― Chris F. (servoret), Friday, 30 December 2005 05:56 (eighteen years ago) link
SMB has a feel to it that distinguishes it from other games in my mind.
Chris F, I think the important thing is to find a way to codify the spearation between the tradecraft of making the gameplay "excellent" and expressing something.
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 16:27 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 16:30 (eighteen years ago) link
For example, I wondering if we differentiate between just the "art elements," e.g. like in FFVII, the pretty backgrounds(art as visual art), the dialogue(written narrative), Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack, etc. I mean, each of this bits have an art form about themselves(visual, music, etc), but it seems that a games art language would address the blending of these elements into a final experience. It's this aspect that makes me think a game art language would most resemble film, since film also combines similar into a (real-time?) experience. Am I making sense here?
We should develop a term for this language; is "gamecrit" too trite?
Somebody get Nabisco over here.
Also, Tom, i agree with you on the separation of gameplay & the rest of it when looking for what a game says, etc.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 30 December 2005 17:03 (eighteen years ago) link
I was thinking yesterday, though, that the whole question that was raised to Ebert and the response is just the kind of thing that only happens to media that are still "upstarts" in the world, like comics and movies in the past, and rock and roll, and techno, and yada yada. Comparatively no genre or medium holds a candle to anything you hold it up against, because the rules are set by the established form. I'm not so much interested in justifying the inconsistently xlated text strings of FF:Tactics as being on par with The Bard as I am with trying to figure out where we can draw a line between "brilliant development" and "brilliant expression of not being a pipe" and how do we tell the difference.
Anyway why would you assume Nabisco has anything to say about this? He's an Xbox guy. They don't know anything about Art.
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 17:30 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 30 December 2005 17:45 (eighteen years ago) link
I believe that is an African proverb. Which to me seems complementary to the idea that all stories are myths.
I find a lot of what people have said on this thread interesting, but ultimately I don't understand the need to qualitatively compare mediums. Does it make them more or less enjoyable or "good" if we decide that the medium is inherently inferior? And does anyone really believe we can say something like that, especially given how new the medium of video games is and how little time it has been given to develop artistically compared to literature or even movies?
― Laura H. (laurah), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:20 (eighteen years ago) link
does the problem with mating criticism and games, and devising an "is this game ART?" divining rod, come down to the fact that games are participatory and experiential in a different way than any previous artform? unlike music (pre-headphone) and film (pre-dvd), which were communal experiences, games are generally solitary experiences; unlike viewing a painting (or the act of painting!), playing a game is participatory and dynamic. so the art-ness, to clunk a term, of a game has to be evaluated on some tricky balance of viewing (the graphics, the music) and participating (the difficulty, the overall "feel").
ie, it's like trying to paint and decide it you've created art yet at the same time.
bitcrit?
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:25 (eighteen years ago) link
:)
― gff, Saturday, 1 September 2007 21:57 (sixteen years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/PN3c5JS.jpg
― am0n, Wednesday, 12 June 2013 15:55 (ten years ago) link
God, I want to play that. I actually considered spending 300+ dollars just to play that game, but then I looked in my wallet.
― Rod Steel (musicfanatic), Wednesday, 12 June 2013 17:58 (ten years ago) link