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

Yes I absolutely absolutely do!

100%! Actually!

i think you should read more books

[sorry]

I have been saying so all afternoon

http://www.mariowiki.com/images/e/ee/Pittrap.jpg

I think you should play more piano

Is Proteus art? Is it a game?

Readers of books are also not "interacting with them"

Uh, aside from the fact that's not true of any book, I also present you with:

http://kulturaonline.pl/resources/pictures/2008/11/09/13546/large/johnson1.jpg

a golden look-look book

Cheat codes:

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1170531820l/59482.jpg

can't wait for gaming's finnegans wake to release on xbone

i also think that reading a book/listening to a piece/playing a video game are the same experience performed in different ways actually. w/o getting super crit theory jerk the reader/listener/gamer is interpreting a pre-defined space - that dude i think he is tall and has brown hair, that lyric is applicable in this way, that musical line is evoking this feeling, that virtual space is accessible and unpackable etc

that please note, like i said above, doesnt mean any of them are per se art!

Most airports I've been in in the past 5 years now have at least one motion-sensitive piece of art in it, from digital screens with shapes you can manipulate and move around to lights that change based on the movements around them, so the argument that art by definition is something you can't interact with falls down completely for me.

i apologize in retrospect for using the word "unpackable" in any sentence ever but idk i think you get what i mean

My favorite Eno is Video Games for Airports.

xp ooh I think I brought that word to lunch sorry

I am not 100% certain I know what you mean by "that virtual space is accessible and unpackable"

if you meant "I can go over there and do something" then please come over here so I can unpack a punch for you

hah i didnt mean anything quite that simple (although hmm it kind of works too) but that i dont think that describing the reaction of a video game player starting or playing a game as "oh shit dog, im going to learn some structural rules today" is an accurate take. i think games come at people as malleable and interpretable spaces, just like deciding what a lyric or sequence of notes "means", or feeling like you know what a character looks like when you read about them in a book with a partial or non-description.

and hey, maybe that does take the form of "huh i wonder if i can jump to that ledge and what's up there" a lot of the time, and thats ok too.

do ya'll really want video games to be art or something? cuz you'll gonna massively regret it once you see the latest game involves sneaking vito acconci into various virtual spaces to masturbate undetected

you're

do ya'll really want video games to be art or something?

NO!

do ya'll really want video games to be art or something?

A lot of people do, but I don't think the people who post here are among them.

http://www.happyplaytime.com

several xposts, was in response to amon

big lol am0n

I think there will be general consensus on TV shows being works of art long before video games are considered art. Video games shouldn't necessarily TRY to be art. But it's fun to play devil's advocate.

To be honest, I haven't really made up my mind where I stand, aside from all the 'games aren't art' arguments are terrible and easily countered.

I'd say I lean towards the Ludwig/jjj side, except I'd add that the period of flux this element of language is undergoing is actually making the term not particularly fit-for-purpose.

But then it's not really a case of answering the question 'are video games art?', it's a case of defining the term 'art'.

pinball and roller coasters are still waiting for their nea grants.

I'd say roller coasters are definitely closer to art than games are

i guess they're harder to fit in the getty.

If they had some maybe I'd go

my rule - if there is no water slide, it's not really an art museum

what's that german museum with the skate park exterior?

I am going to hell for the thing I almost posted

haha oh no

and hey, maybe that does take the form of "huh i wonder if i can jump to that ledge and what's up there" a lot of the time, and thats ok too.

it's not ok with me pal

my rule - if there is no water slide, it's not really an art museum

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/125/411842915_9405a3bedd_z.jpg

close enough?

http://www.happyplaytime.com

― they are either militarists (ugh) or kangaroos (?) (DJP), Wednesday, June 12, 2013 5:13 PM

D:

lol ok i had finals and came home and am thus much chiller than i was this morning when i stormed out to the bus and when i came home (stnd) i found all these tabs open with typed-not-posted responses to various posts upthread. (only one worth keeping is that goole had said for a game the player and audience are the same person. unless you like watching other people play, which nobody does. and i'd put http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea.) anyway idk guys there's lots of interesting discussion in the difference between games and other kinds of things that people make for other people because there are definitely differences, and everybody is pretty much having that discussion upthread, but surely there are also differences between books and music and paintings? s1ocki said something about "narrative" and like painting abandoned narrative, right, and music abandoned narrative, unless you count the physical fact of the temporal narrative of you looking at the painting or listening to the music: but that's going to be present in everything we ever do (pre-godhood lol). narrative otherwise isn't a necessary part of art and it can be messed around with. s1ocki do you really think that in addition to the differences between other categories of art there's this whole other unbridgeable gulf between them and games because games are this totally new thing? i am not a scholar of this type (or any other oh god finals) but i am sure you could find people saying when the ahem montage was introduced that this brand new form of actual imposed collective dream was totally impossibly different from everything that had come before. and they would have been right! but it was still art because what's the point of focusing the conversation on this word when everyone is talking about more interesting stuff already anyway.

i dunno if it sounds like i want games to be art and btw i totally agree w s1ocki that game developers want them to be and that it's largely fucking games as a medium. i just think the word works better broader.

i don't think they're a new form though—chess and go have been around forever and no one's ever mistaken them for art.

A benefit of games being perceived as art is that they get criticized and appraised as such and hopefully increase the market for more thoughtful games, which i would appreciate. Enough with the murder simulators already.

And chess and go ARE appreciated as art in plenty of cultures... Or at least the gameplay notation is

chess and go don't have the richness of symbolism necessary to represent the world, to say something to me about my life. although yes you could see in a particular game the kind of abstract, pure aesthetic beauty mathematicians often talk about.

thoughtful games *rolls eyes and pantomimes jerking off*

a good artgame would be one where you play as s1ocki and u roast everyone in this thread alive with a flamethrwoer