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

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

― i wanna be a gabbneb baby (Hungry4Ass), Thursday, June 13, 2013 10:17 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

this is exactly what i'm saying

you are actually doing games a huge disadvantage by trying to think of them as art imo

A benefit of games being perceived as art is that they get criticized and appraised as such

i don't understand your point really

a benefit of games being perceived as art is that people... perceive them as art?

wouldn't it be more interesting if there was more intelligent criticism/curation/theory/etc of games as games?

rather than more "crash bandicoot is the l'avventura of the playstation vita" nonsense?

games as art = media support for auteur games helps sell art titles, leading to more willingness to take risks by companies

games as commodities = more cod dogs

the movie analogy fits here.

i think he's saying the benefit would be games getting taken more seriously if they're seen as art rather than lowbrow-culture

the way media perceives things matters in their making. times coverage of games goes in art, not business and that's a new development.

or not... what are "art titles"??

i don't understand your point really

there are tangible and intangible benefits to having your work perceived as 'art' rather a game or a craft or w/e.

you think people will only buy auteur games if we pretend they're art?

"art titles" = "more thoughtful" = honestly, "better games" really

i guess i see the pragmatic logic there but it bothers me that we have to bullshit ourselves in the hopes that the ny times will take our favourite games seriously or wtv

we don't have to pretend!

to me that's just the inferiority complex at play

i mean, that's not an argument that games ARE art, you're arguing that they SHOULD BE art so that important people take them seriously. you're arguing from the conclusion there.

i don't give a fuck what people think about my gameplaying habits; i don't have some need to have my hobbies taken seriously any more than i need a hug from times critics to approve of me listening to taylor swift. i like what i like. but this stuff feels like art to me and impacts me in the same way other arts do.

"more thoughtful" "better games" according to ?? where does that get decided?

i'm arguing it's a benefit of games being perceived as art that that perception will lead to better games.
you keep asking "why does it matter", that's part of why it matters.

you are actually doing games a huge disadvantage by trying to think of them as art imo

I think that is entirely dependent upon your definition of "art"

This is one reason why I keep coming back to rhythm/non-narrative games like Tetris as clearer examples of videogames as art over narrative-driven things like the Bioshock series (with my big exception being Planescape: Torment); I feel that the game-as-art qualities don't arise from how pretty the graphics are or how involving the narrative is, but whether the game mechanics themselves evoke an emotional response, and in my experience that is much more likely to happen in a rhythm game partially due to the trance aspects inherent in the right type of repetitive movement. Similarly, games like the first few Tony Hawk games and Jet Set Radio approached art for me in how you could use your environment to chain together increasingly long series of complicated tricks as the game went on; that process has strong emotional resonance for me and evokes in me emotional responses similar to both singing and listening to music.

That's what I'm talking about when I talk about "games as art", not games that try to be as much like movies as possible.

most things that take more thought tend to be better? "better conceived" might be a better way to put it, sub in your own descriptive superlatives

i actually believe in a very broad category of art. i honestly think anything can be "art." like if i were to call me, sitting at this computer, typing this, a performance piece, then sure, it's art. if i call me looking at a sunset art, it's art.

but that doesn't mean that's ALL that it is, or that it's the most useful way of looking at, say, a sunset.

like, if you say that playing a rhythm game is an artistic experience, i'll totally get down with that. but i still don't think that video games, as a category, are an expressive art form, the same way that i don't think of sunsets, as a category, as an art form.

rather than more "crash bandicoot is the l'avventura of the playstation vita" nonsense?

― we're up all night to get (s1ocki), Thursday, June 13, 2013 12:17 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol

surely crash bandicoot is the hidden fortress of the vita

guys, guys. crash bandicoot is terrible.

okay so it's the expendables of the vita

There were plenty of art games and an audience for them before. I think there are less now because this sort of videogames as art discourse is gaining currency, and the kind of art games made now are of a narrow, academicky sort of genre that caters to that discussion, so to me it's had a chilling effect.

cool post DJP

That's what I'm talking about when I talk about "games as art", not games that try to be as much like movies as possible.

i kinda find it interesting that there are two directions the 'games-as-art' legitimization is going. stuff like the moma exhibition have prized non-narrative, mechanically inventive and often aesthetically pure games like tetris or cananbalt over other games. but in more middlebrow and populist spaces the argument for games artistry is often advanced by elaborate, deep-world games with narratives like bioshock or gta. i think the latter argument is the more pernicious because it emphasizes aspects of games that arent the best part of gaming but also because its the more beneficial to game developers. like its all well and good for some nerd to build an empire in dwarf fortress for the venice biennale but game devs/players wanna be taken seriously as like movies

canabalt has a weird narrative but I never got past whatever level it was to figure out what those robots in the back were doing

killing

destroying

charring

eviscerating with extreme prejudice

living their lives

speaking of which, it'd be pretty interesting, by which i mean horrifying, if 95% of all gallery exhibitions were wall-to-wall representations of brutal murders

games need to be taken seriously as books

in what way?

some of the "art" that i appreciate is "art within" a certain narrow frame of what games are or have been recently. idk if this makes them closer to a craft, as a definition. as in, something like furniture design or something. people have already made this point.

ie the choices that are made that make this marquee-title shooter or open-world quester distinct from others in their genre, how much wit and intelligence has been applied to what have become pretty narrow requirements to be that thing. how well is it doing at being what it is, kind of a thing

just playing the non-sequitur card

is it worth thinking of video games as something like pornography?

no matter how much you dress up porn or try and make it smart, it seems like people just want to elbow past it and get to the "good stuff"

DJP

the rhythm/trance aspect to non-narrative games is interesting, i def had that happen with dr. mario

is it worth thinking of video games as something like pornography?

mod communities would certainly be on board for this ;)

getting in the zone is more a property of game than art

tell that to a dancer

everything is art, fascist!

tell that to a dancer

― they are either militarists (ugh) or kangaroos (?) (DJP), Thursday, June 13, 2013 12:29 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks, i will!!

the dancing/sports connection has already been exhausted by that movie where that hockey player is redeemed by ballet

I wonder if there is an (unintentional? subconscious?) tendency to view art as the end result of an intentional expression of a specific craft, oftentimes without specific purpose, that puts the activity of videogaming outside of some people's parameters of what defines art.

Like for example, Shawn White stringing together a series of dazzling tricks in a snowboarding competition is in service of scoring enough points to win, whereas a dancer is performing dazzling choreography in service of expressing the choreography, making the former "not art" and the latter "art".

Or say, putting a refrigerator in a kitchen is a utilitarian design parameter but deciding to make that refrigerator a glass-doored pantry-style series of shelves over in the corner is an artistic decision.

So, following on from that mindset, the entire enterprise of videogames becomes abstracted from art because the process is too convoluted and (compared to other things that might be considered "art") too new for the average person experiencing them to identify the craft behind its making, plus the driving force behind the creation of the modern game privileges making money over expressing a mechanic? Kind of making up shit here obv.