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

some demos were optimized for gravis sound board if that's what you mean.

What I mean is: the visuals are different depending on how you adjust the knobs or levers or etc., whether they're tangible or virtual. A live performance.

some demos did, though the kind of explicit visual control you're looking for was pretty rare. one simple way to vary the graphics in a more oblique way would be to use your keystrokes as a seed number for whatever procedural graphic routines might run.

Found object art, too. Duchamp signing a toilet, cracking groups signing a pirated game.

but was duchamp l33t?

He DDOS'd the Mona Lisa

So often when someone wants to challenge the idea of what a game is, the solution is: meandering around in some landscape, no points or score or levels. Virtual reality, Second Life, Proteus ... it's a very TED conference mode of game abstraction. But to me the real essence of video gaming is in rule sets, and the nuances of gameplay.

i agree that it isn't v inventive. in general i don't think 'simulations' of any kind are; i think what's distinctive & interesting/exciting about computer games is the ability to interact w/ an enormously complicated system, tracking all those variables, almost infinite permutations, being able to play around w/ that stuff. dwarf fortress is the best example i can think of a game that impresses me in that sense, it feels pure to me.

video games aren't art.

that's not a knock. they just belong to a different category. i don't think they even engage the same parts of your brain as art, at all.

I agree w you if we're going to say art stopped in the 50's, but if you look at performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, sensationalism, post-modern art, video art, environmental art, appropriation, etc. etc. everything that has happened since abstract expressionism and before that even then it almost seems like more of a disservice towards art to say that video games are one thing that it can never be.

Though I think I understand where you are coming from. Playing a game at the top of your skill - usually a game you have played many times before, in your past - is very much like throwing a pitch in baseball, or bowling a strike. It engages that part of the brain where you are in THE ZONE, where you sense things before your brain should physically detect them, where you and the game are one. Not much art that you find in galleries (if any?) does this. Then again you can probably find people that say baseball is art.

The problem with video games is that they are so much more complex then classical Fine Art and even conceptual PoMo Art. Here are some of the dimensions you could possibly discuss with just about any given game, just coming up with these off the top of my head:

- 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

-glitches

-foley/sound effects/music composition

there's artistic STUFF in video games, but that doesn't make them an art form

i mean, there's nice wallpaper in a train compartment, that doesnt make rail travel an art

i don't say that to denigrate video games or shut them out of a pantheon, i just think that art is not the right way to think about them, and that doing so actually precludes interesting investigation of what they actually are

How many decades do you think it'll take not for games to be considered art, but for us to have evolved language and understanding to actually describe what games do?

s1ocks, all those are arguments that were levied at film for the first thirty or so years too

Is Scrabble art? Pinochle? Charades? The Super Bowl?

scrabble is an inert rule set that allows for puzzle play. Pinochle is the same but less puzzle play and more probability wagers. Charades, if done right, can be artistic as it incorporates acting/dance/mime. Athletic displays (done well) are always artistic; it's one of the main reasons i watch sports.

or more to the point, some games come closer to art than others depending on the skill, intent and execution of both the gamer and the gamemaker.

Hideo Kojima argues iirc that video games can never be inherently artistic because of the necessity of functionality and playability.

Dude has obviously never mixed a record, served a meal, framed a painting, produced a work of theatre, etc.

explains the fucking cutscenes

I disagree w you s1ocki though, my opinion is that the games that are the most "artistic" are the ones that don't take their artistic elements from film (Journey) or books (RPGs) or music (Rez) or choreography (shmups) but the ones that are computational exercises like Tetris and Galaga and Pac-Man. You might call them gamey

interactive art is hardly an original idea? walking through a serra or a smithson is the prescribed way to appreciate it.

saints row > a blue man group show

s1ocks, all those are arguments that were levied at film for the first thirty or so years too

films arent art either

but slock dogg otm

s1ocks, all those are arguments that were levied at film for the first thirty or so years too

― i didn't even give much of a fuck that you were mod (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, June 11, 2013 11:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

examples?

i'm not arguing that games are a "low" or "debased" form, like saying "that comic book trash isn't art!" i'm saying that the way we experience them has nothing to do with the way we experience art except maybe tangentially (like when you take a second to admire a background during a load screen or wtv)

I agree that pure games are anti-art in that they facilitate expression instead of expressing things themselves
But this is also why I think demos get short shrift in the videogames as art conversation, because they are almost purely expressive

arent demos just video clips? are they interactive?

honestly the more interactive a thing gets, the less like art it is to me

they typically aren't very interactive but you do have a role to play as the audience that goes beyond watching a video clip

It seems v silly to look at things like LSD and ROM Check Fail and say straight-up "video games cannot be art at all, ever"

i've never seen those before but i might argue that they're not games!

oh come on dude

yeah, "interactive things are not art!" "those interactive art things are not games!", this is like some kind of logical whack-a-mole.

there's artistic STUFF in video games, but that doesn't make them an art form

There are artistic EXPERIENCES in videogames that might borrow the stuff of other media, but wouldn't be the same without the interactive element. Like flying a plane into a huge rosy dawn sun after successfully completing a GTA mission, and Crockett's Theme coming on the radio. That's one of my favourite memories! And I wouldn't have been half as moved if I'd just been watching it on a cinema screen.

i'm moved when i watch a sunset but i wouldnt call it art

and i like i said, i dont doubt that there are occasional art-like experiences/moments when playing video games but they're outliers, accidental

it's not interaction but the degree of control and expression you lease to a player that makes a game more of a game and less of an art
They are almost contradictory goals so it's not surprising that trying to meet in the middle will always be harder than going to the ends.

thats definitely part of what im saying

take cut-scenes... like basically, these aren't part of the game at all. they're mini-movies in between playing the actual game. i find that kind of tension irritating. i hate any moment i'm playing a game that i'm not in control of the player/avatar/whatever

i'm moved when i watch a sunset but i wouldnt call it art

a) it was a combination of things, not just the sunset; ii) would you call a painting of a sunset art?

I think as games get more complex - and as they learn to combine the artistic and interactive elements more successfully - these experiences get more common (and deliberate). As opposed to flamboyant goon tie I think the ludic elements are the least amenable to being called art, perhaps with the exception of self-referential meta-games like rom check fail. With all their graphical and musical complexity it's easy to dismiss modern games as just artistically piggybacking on other media, but the immersion and interaction they present is a new and unique form of experience.

i don't disagree! i just wouldn't call it art. i would call it gaming!

it's a bold new world out there! but that doesn't mean we need to keep pretending that games aren't something that they're not, just because "art" sounds better!

wait so are we also arguing that interactive art is not art?

"art" DOES sound better than "gaming", as describing that kind of experience, while gaming is already more closely associated with competition and gambling

interactive art is an uncomfortable, unwieldy phrase though

so are "graphic novels" but...

wait so are we also arguing that interactive art is not art?

― ed ASMR (Stevie D(eux)), Wednesday, June 12, 2013 12:02 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

some of it! and some of it is art.

(and most of it sucks, because interactivity and art don't work together)

Why are you reluctant to call it art? What definition of art are you going by that seems to exclude these things? Yeah yeah can o' worms; but I get from games the kind of didactic/empathetic/aesthetic experiences I get from other media and that I woollily think of as 'art'.

What about Nam June Paik's experiments with video and tape and stuff in the 70's?

Why are you reluctant to call it art? What definition of art are you going by that seems to exclude these things? Yeah yeah can o' worms; but I get from games the kind of didactic/empathetic/aesthetic experiences I get from other media and that I woollily think of as 'art'.

― nagl dude dude dude (ledge), Wednesday, June 12, 2013 12:18 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

well why WOULD you call it art? i get none of the same aesthetic experiences from a game than i do from basically any other kind of media or experience. video games can be really compelling but they occupy just a completely different space. all the "artful" stuff in video games is just decoration as far as im concerned.

and most of it sucks, because interactivity and art don't work together

omgggg

they don't! they're totally incompatible.