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

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

Shouldn't you be busy reading Dan Brown's Inferno?

sounds better than your post history, lol

anyway i mean yes there are art installations that use games so 'games are art' but its mostly used by nerds with an axe to grind who want their hobby validated and pump up BioShock as a transcendent emotional/thematic experience because they dont actually read books

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

― Lamp, Wednesday, June 12, 2013 1:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

otm

the unique gamey thing that makes games games are rules (or 'mechanics'). if there are no rules, its not a game. we can reject what an artist thinks his work is really about & supply our own meaning, but the only way to reject a game designer's rules is to not play his game. because the rules are the game. yes, a cgi cutscene is an artistic element in a game - a cut scene taken on its own should probably be thought of as art. but when you're watching one with the controller sitting on the coffee table, you're not gaming. thats why its useful to treat games like their own thing... cuz they are. there are line-blurring examples but they don't really challenge what a game means, in the same way that we don't really wonder if 4'33" means that all silences are songs. im not actually opposed to that POV at all, but if u adopt it u have to be cool with the words 'silence' and 'song' not being very useful anymore... same w/games and art imo

4'33" doesn't mean all silences are songs, it means all noise is music, just as duchamp's urinal means all objects are (or can be art). and yeah this is a productive way to think imo. fuck the academy.

- in-game character & environmental depiction/animation techniques
- title & ending screens/cutscenes/attract modes
- gamer control & interaction/instances of 'Friction' as Tim Rogers likes to say
- appropriation/recontextualization/references to other art forms
- programming prowess/console pushing/code efficiency
- box art/promotional ads/tv commercials
- international approaches towards censorship
- public reception/historical context
- legacy/add-ons/mods/hacks

you forgot:

- 2/3 of the way you discover that your character's real antagonists are hooded cultists who guard what they believe to be an ancient supernatural secret but which is actually an unusual bit of underexplained geoscience

SERIOUSLY DOES EVERY ADVENTURE GAME IN THE WORLD HAVE TO DO THIS (NB yes i am playing tomb raider right now)

categorisation isn't a science. what if it's more like a (pregnant pause) game?

just as duchamp's urinal means all objects are (or can be art)

heh well im talkin above my ass here but it sure seems to this simple country gamer that duchamp's urinal only 'works' when we don't accept that urinals are art

well in theory it's a trick that can only be pulled once but given that exhibiting an unmade bed can still produce a furore 80 years later it doesn't seem like the paradigm's been shifted that much.

ok i did not know this:

Sometime in the early 1930s, Duchamp reached the height of his ability, but realized that he had little chance of winning recognition in top-level chess. In the following years, his participation in chess tournaments declined, but he discovered correspondence chess and became a chess journalist, writing weekly newspaper columns. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success in the art world by selling their works to high-society collectors, Duchamp observed, "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."[37] On another occasion, Duchamp elaborated, "The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."[38]

who would've expected a knockout blow from duchamp in this thread

More of an anti-commercialization statement than a "games are art" statement, and anyway, chess and go are special cases. I don't think solitare is art

OK also, I said Exploring the world of Ico = exploring the Dom cathedral = listening to Thomas Tallis = going to a concert = going to an opening.

And Lamp said exploring ico shares more in common with playing a game of baseball than any of the things you mentioned (and I think that's preposterous because baseball involves the outdoors)

and then Lamp said 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

And I can't figure out how exploring the Dom, listening to Tallis, attending a concert or an art opening do not constitute the same "exploration of rules systems".

I wasn't just rattling off a list of artsy shit I was specifically mentioning art experiences that were explorations of spaces

'rules' in games doesnt refer to eg. the kind of rules at the cathedral telling u not to throw rocks at the stained glass

http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/12/13/rules-versus-mechanics/

Architecture requires some pretty strict rules in order for it not to be riddled with bugs (i.e. fall on your head)

uhh okay... nachos are a secret off-menu item at Chipotle... since we're bringing up shit that doesnt matter

I'm w emil.y
Also see "Palestrinian counterpoint", but I must admit I can't really stand behind everything I've said so far because I think I might be confusing creative and consumptive activities

The slotting of chess players as artists makes chess the canvas rather than the art.

I think that's preposterous because baseball involves the outdoors

What if I take my console outside on a sunny day? (I think this is an excellent demonstration that in all this talk of definitions, one person's crucial factor is another's triviality.)

Well now that video games are featured in real art galleries, I think it's safe to say that at least THOSE games are art.

Architecture requires some pretty strict rules in order for it not to be riddled with bugs (i.e. fall on your head)

― emil.y, Thursday, June 13, 2013 9:18 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

those arent required rules, theyre just suggested if you want to build something worth a shit. if u build a bridge out of dead cats and the first car that drives over it gets stuck and slowly sinks into the catmass, well, you still built a bridge. you're talking about the qualities that make architecture good (safe, functional), not what makes architecture architecture. you cant escape from the mechanics of Super Mario Brothers... except by not playing it. if you change them with a mod or something, then you've created a new game. the inescapable qualities are what makes games games

im not nec interested in narrowing what art can be, its more about digging things for what they are. lets say games are art (they arent), the fact that games are games is still way more interesting than however they might fit on the art continuum

But a lot of video games aren't games, or they are fake games, so they might as well go towards the art axis

@ ledge my to tongue was in cheek

haha ok! i don't know if it's the craziest opinion on this thread though.

Hungry4Ass, you're comparing a single game to a discipline there. This: if u build a bridge out of dead cats and the first car that drives over it gets stuck and slowly sinks into the catmass, well, you still built a bridge would be a reasonable comparison for something like "if you build a game out of half-assed code and it just barely manages to load before you run into some game-killing bug, well, you still built a game". But it is NOT a reasonable comparison to playing Super Mario Brothers.

I actually *would* be interested in narrowing the definition of art, as long as we added extra vocabulary to supplement some of what we try to express when talking about art.

Would you all agree that if it is exhibited in an Art Gallery, that it is Art?

this is Art:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ylkp_kmlYEk/UVoaXF5bD6I/AAAAAAAANzo/jyVlHooGDeE/s320/art+garfunke.jpg

the catbridge was an example to illustrate that you're raising points that have nothing to do with the discussion. mario is an example that holds true across all games re: the other, separate point i was making