Video Games and Art (Video Games AS Art) (and so on)

i guess i would define interactivity as going beyond just you taking it in, but you reacting back and provoking a discrete response from the piece

i have had emotional responses with games, i'm embarrassed to admit. journey got me. the end of limbo got me. walking dead occasionally gets me. i don't know if that's the barrier to entry for art tho.

― i didn't even give much of a fuck that you were mod (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, June 12, 2013 12:40 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark

i'm gonna walk back and say i don't EVER get those responses, but to me they are outliers, incidental, and never the "point" of the session

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7k-WY8MHLis/T27ywf2EPKI/AAAAAAAABwk/IThYXHJkOdU/s800/randomaccess.jpg

"In this tape installation [...] the visitor can use the sound head, which has been detached from the tape recorder, to interactively run through the tapes glued to the wall, and constantly vary the sound sequence according to location and speed. This random access to the musical raw material enabled visitors to produce compositions of their own."

dude this is not "not art"

but to me they are outliers, incidental, and never the "point" of the session

If I can summarize my thoughts at the risk of repeating what other people have already said:

My problem with the "games as art" debate is that a lot of the dialogue revolves around pre-existing notions of "how art should be" and you've got people pointing out cutscenes or character development or sweet design choices as indications that games can contain some intrinsic artistic worth. I think it's bullshit, and I can see where Hideo Kojima and s1ocki are coming from, respectively. Nothing I've read in a game has been better than a book, and nothing I've seen in a game has been better than a movie, and nothing I've heard in a game has been better than an album, blah blah blah

But there is art in video games, there is already that sense of "connecting to the infinite" that you feel when you view the works of The Great Masters. In my experience it has been the experience of decoding the code, unpacking it into a level of playability-- the same way that your ears have been trained to decipher "this is the sound of a piano" "this is a major scale" "this is sonata-allegro form" "this is Mozart" "he was drunk when he wrote this".

In my experience these beautiful experiences of unpacking have been mostly found in text adventure games, interactive fiction and rogue-likes. Galaga and Tetris are the best examples, because they play the same every time, and it's about deciphering mathematical probabilities and revising your muscular response. You're not communicating with a friend via a set of rules, as you are with chess. You are interacting with a work of art, as designed by the "auteur" programmer, and deciphering it, as you would any work of art.

Re: "name a piece of IF", I challenge you to get any non-nerd to name any work by Bach

i'm gonna walk back and say i don't EVER get those responses, but to me they are outliers, incidental, and never the "point" of the session

I guess you have to play the right kind of games or be open to this kind of response so I daresay your experience is probably the common one. But if you do get emotional responses from conventionally 'non art' games like gta or red dead redemption I think it's doing a disservice to the game designers to call them incidental. These experiences will become more and more common imo.

Nothing I've read in a game has been better than a book, and nothing I've seen in a game has been better than a movie, and nothing I've heard in a game has been better than an album, blah blah blah

Is this eternally and necessarily true?

tbrr I think Samba de Amigo encapsulates the idea of a game as a piece of art

it seems a little weird to talk about "the point" as if it's a given. i may not sit down to play a game in search of an emotionally resonant experience, but neither do i do that 100% of the time with books, films, albums, etc. lots of artistic media can occupy an area somewhere between functionality and (let's say) catharsis, and it's constantly shifting (even within a single experience).

xp: (part of this is directly tied to how much I love "Samba de Janiero" though)

if theres no bob ross for video games can we even have this discussion

s1ocki's post about train compartments is really making me angry

@ ledge, not 100%, but maybe 99% no. It doesn't work most of the time, almost all of the time it doesn't work. I feel that game designers who try to be musicians/authors/directors are missing the point of what makes their games so beautiful

I would argue that there's a capacity for huge development in the fusion of choreography and cinematography with gaming. Choreography: 2D schmups, Starfox, Sin & Punishment, any game where models unfold before your eyes in geometric patterns. Cinematography: "Journey", obv.

You are interacting with a work of art, as designed by the "auteur" programmer, and deciphering it, as you would any work of art.

you aren't 'deciphering' it tho you're creating it. i mean you're actually playing it i guess but in the space we're in you're not reading the text you're writing it or however you want to phrase things to capture the distinction.

i'm trying to think of the best way to succinctly illustrate the difference btw the space in which the player of a game operates and the space in which a consumer of art does but for me that's the key. i think these spaces overlap that that are artful games and gamelike art projects but i dont think 'unpacking' works at all the same in the two.

Well, I do. Exploring the world of Ico = exploring the Dom cathedral = listening to Thomas Tallis = going to a concert = going to an opening. At a very base level though we might as well be arguing whether or not architecture should be considered art, seeing as it's the closest medium to game design

no it isnt

i think architecture compared to videogame landscaping has similar problems in that the goals of being a livable sustainable space and a piece of art are almost irreconcilable. (e.g. upkeep involved in that frank lloyd wright house that's always falling apart)

exploring ico shares more in common with playing a game of baseball than any of the things you mentioned

games are explorations of rules systems more than they are ideas/emotions/experiences or w/e. maybe that's a good way to phrase it - games are defined by the systems that govern them

I think that is an old fashioned notion of games that doesn't take into account the sense of immersion and depth of experience possible in modern games (and apparently so decried by goon tie). That's why the central question of the thread was never even posed before the advent of videogames.

Afaik

Is the Mona Lisa a game?

the idea that that kind of immersion is the sole province of video games will likely be this weird cul de sac in history as people who actually want to make art to that effect rather than games start making apps or something else entirely instead, like some google goggle gaggle.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7k-WY8MHLis/T27ywf2EPKI/AAAAAAAABwk/IThYXHJkOdU/s800/randomaccess.jpg

Or is this thing?

Xp I wouldn't say it's the sole province, but it seems to be the central one at the moment. I'd be all for non game immersive interactive art (but who's to say they wouldn't be games, hell it's all semantics anyway ¯\(°_o)/¯

Nothing I've read in a game has been better than a book, and nothing I've seen in a game has been better than a movie, and nothing I've heard in a game has been better than an album, blah blah blah

This is largely true; I've always been disappointed that video games I've played have never really reached the greatness-level of other art forms. Though, I must say, EarthBound comes very close in the text and music depts.

This is the 'video games are art they're just bad art' response, which strikes me as somewhat short sighted.

cf. sturgeon's law

i'd say games do reach that sense of greatness if you allow them to operate as games and let the players create the art (like a fischer-spassky match, or daigo vs whomever)

Philip Nunez described architecture as the creation of a "livable sustainable space" that requires "upkeep" and that is game design, no?

I mean, not across the board, but in any sort of game that features a virtual 2D or 3D environment, requires patching and porting, etc.

oh for god's sake everybody

people make stuff for other people to interact with, we can talk about the stuff itself or we could play a taxonomical parlor game that never ends

you aren't 'deciphering' it tho you're creating it.

welcome to art!

i wouldn't hamstring architecture to those constraints but what makes for good, livable houses often does not make for art, and likewise what makes for good, playable games won't jibe with art either. same problem with cuisine as art. having to taste good and be edible is kind of a downer if you want to make some kind of strychnine foam that evokes the memory of being poisoned by strychnine or something.

likewise what makes for entertaining and "readable" novels etc

ugh sorry i have to get on a bus i didn't mean to be aggressive and then immediately disappear but yknow i'll be around l8r

@ ledge and Stevie

I am only restating the "videogames make bad art" argument because while I believe it to be true, I also believe the statement to be worthless. Videogames should be assessed on different terms than "good plotting" or "character development" because they can, because they are games, not movies or books

I restated the argument too because I played MGS4 last night for about 30 minutes and I'm fucking pissed

man you guys are all lucky that ive drank away most of my philosophy cred because i just almost sent us down a deep wittgensteinian k-hole

since i would need to reread to provide any backup, ill go semi-unspecific - w. uses games as a perfect example of why accurately defining (wrt categorical imperative or whatever) is functionally an impossible task, its no surprise that trying to further define what would make those things art is prtty daunting as well.

the simple version would be that we recognize what is and isn't x by appealing to an internal constantly updated list of things that we see as x. so for some of us architecture or photography or films or video games are going to fail that appeal, for others they aren't.

i do think that rendering and mo-cap and cutscenes are a total dead end wrt this appeal tho, it's an attempt to take qualities of other art and apply them which is a dead failure. hence the resistance to photography in particular in early art history.

ludwig otm, jjjusten otm

i'm trying to think of the best way to succinctly illustrate the difference btw the space in which the player of a game operates and the space in which a consumer of art does but for me that's the key. i think these spaces overlap that that are artful games and gamelike art projects but i dont think 'unpacking' works at all the same in the two.

― Lamp, Wednesday, June 12, 2013 12:13 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

something like designer : composer :: player : musician, maybe?

something about working through the experience of the game as created according to the rules of its creation.

but the composer : musician relationship has a third element of the audience who is meant to be enjoying the experience of seeing the "designed object" (the composition iow) "gamed out" (played lol). for a game the player and audience are the same person. unless you like watching other people play, which nobody does.

xps yeah i find the definitional lassooing a really not very interesting avenue

difficult novels and paintings and movies do not have the quintessential constraints that houses, food, and games have as a fairly non-negotiable basis for their being (though movies are closer to games in requiring a lot of skill and capital, writing a novel requires literacy, so painting is probably going to win in a hierarchy of media most amenable to art)

for my own xp of games the best analogy is that i'm the reader tho. which probably explains some of my taste. i've never cared for goofy, abstract, endless or procedural games, or twitch-reflex challenge type games that reduce basically to a micro-athletics.

i like a little story, non-ludic and narrative elements (no this does not mean 'cutscenes' or even 'emotion'). i like to be shown something, i guess i'd put it.

lamp is mostly otm in this thread, i was just about to quote that same thing xxp

i would like to see an understanding of video games that takes them on their own terms rather than awkwardly shoe-horning them into a definition of "art" that doesn't really apply, or that just points to the nice decoration.

i like to be shown something, i guess i'd put it.

to go further, the 'art' of it not in the what-is-shown but how-it-is-shown.

Videogames should be assessed on different terms than "good plotting" or "character development" because they can

I suppose I'm down with this, but I think the idea that games will only ever make bad conventional art will seem increasingly outdated.

And yeah of course this is all a semantic argument. It's one of the better ones though, in that the discussion illuminates the subjects at hand instead of just being shouting about what words mean. Many xps.