Betterblog

I think this whole "debate" is really quite pointless.  I believe art is something intended to express an emotion or a concept.  So, basically, anything is art.

You can argue about "good" or "bad", sure.  But you're not allowed to say "This is not art".  In fact, no one is allowed to say that about any work.  No one is allowed to set themselves up as a gatekeeper as to what should or should not "be" art.

So what happens if someone actually makes a game that is more affecting than Casablanca?  Do they finally get to sit at the big artists' table?  Do they get the "This is Really Art" award?  Do they unlock an achievement?

Anyway...Should game developers try to make games that are emotionally moving, that convey deep ideas, that treat interesting themes in thought-provoking ways?  Yes.  Of course they should do that, of course they should try to advance the art and craft of game development.

But, you know, don't get so upset about it.

Bonus section: Name the source of this quote!
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

I've been thinking about this whole debate and I think part of the problem is that people - on both sides - are incredibly lazy about how they use "art". Sometimes people *jump from one definition to another in the middle of an argument*, which is usually where I stop listening to them.

Sometimes people talk about "art" in (to use your wording) the "trivial, non-exclusive, taxonomic" sense, in which "art" is a synonym for "product of creative activity" and all games (and all movies, and all books, and all paintings, and pretty much everything we use to distract ourselves from the inevitability of our own death) are art regardless of quality. Which strikes me as a worse-than-useless definition of "art" - it's so broad it's no longer meaningful, but the use of the word retains the baggage of the narrower definitions anyway.

Sometimes people use it in the elitist "this is worth serious attention, this is trivial nonsense" sense. In which case it does kind of boil down to "games I like are art, games I don't like aren't". I'm vaguely hostile to this idea, partially because a lot of the time you end up with things like "The Path", produced by designers so desperate to produce something worthy of Serious Attention they end up dispensing everything that makes games interesting and engaging to interact with in the first place (at least for me). I think nothing is less likely to produce a game worthy of serious attention than someone sitting down and saying "I'm going to produce a game worthy of Serious Attention" - just make the best game you can, and if it's worth anything its inner quality will show.

I almost question whether it's possible for us to make the call on which games have merit and which aren't. I'm currently reading "The Woman In White" by Wilkie Collins, which these days gets nice annotated Oxford World's Classics editions but when it was first published was a lurid "sensation novel" provoking conversation around Victorian water-coolers across the nation - maybe the only sensible definition of Great Art (in the "merits serious attention" sense) is based around timelessness - which works are returned to again and again across the centuries, and which are forgotten by all but a few academics?

In that case we've no hope of being able to identify which games are art because even the oldest games came out well within the average lifespan; give it a century or so, then maybe people will be able to judge better. Ultimately, I suspect the reason that not many games out there are worth serious attention is the same as the reason that most books are pulpy trash and most films are braindead nonsense: every generation produces a thin slice of joy riding atop a tidal wave of shit, and it's not always obvious what's gold and what's garbage until future generations can look back and have a bit of perspective on things.

Other thoughts: the Citizen Kane thing always makes my palms itch. Orson Welles didn't make cinematic history by trying to be more like a stage play, he did it by doing things in the medium which literally no other medium available to him could accommodate. A good proportion (but not all) of the people who declare that "Games (we approve of) Are Art!" use movie analogies and it drives me up the wall. Especially when it results in shit like Fahrenheit.

@Arthur

I don't have an issue with comparisons between games and film. Film is the closest medium to mainstream games in any number of important ways: the collaborative element, the similar disciplines involved, the mainstream / indie distinction, the the importance of p.o.v., the fact that it consists of moving images on a screen.

"give it a century or so, then maybe people will be able to judge better."

This position requires you to disqualify judgements about any work post 1910, which of course you don't want to do, but in any case it's a red herring. We make cultural judgements about new films, novels, poems, plays every year. We also make judgements about games every year. Games consistently compare poorly, and have since their inception. It's worth looking at why.

Fuzziness about preferred definition of art is also a red herring, you know. Pick any widely used standard of comparison (seriousness, emotional effect, institutional, aesthetic, sociological, communication). They nearly all allow that games can be art: they all entail a lukewarm response to the quality of art in games. hence Ebert's challenge, above.

"We make cultural judgements about new films, novels, poems, plays every year."

And I think that's a silly thing to do. You can't say "this is a major cultural Thing" when you're immersed in and experiencing that culture, you don't have any distance and you can't really make the call as to whether you personally will even remember the film/book/play in a couple of year's time, let alone whether anyone else will. It doesn't stop me doing it, but I kick myself whenever I catch myself doing it because it's a lousy instinct which doesn't serve anyone.

As far as games go, I honestly think the interactive element, as Ebert says, outweighs any similarities to film. To go back to the Kane example, stage plays were far and away the closest medium to movies (and lots of very early films are a bit like stage plays - a single, static camera watching the actors at work). But you don't make Kane by trying to make something that looks like a stage play.

The problem I see with a lot of attempts to make art games - and in particular the "interactive movie" trend - is that interactivity is seen as a problem. "The Path" has you basically walking around and looking at things; your only significant choice is whether to stick to the path (at which point the game says "fuck you, I know we said you were meant to stick to the path but we lied") or wander off into the forest and wander through what is essentially a predetermined series of events. Fahrenheit included thrilling sequences such as a part where you, the detective, must move a pile of evidence from one side of your desk to the other in order to solve the mystery. The designers flinch away from offering Grand Theft Auto style free roaming and nonlinearity because a) nonlinearity is hard and b) what's the point of crafting a beautiful, artistic story if the player won't co-operate and play through it?

I think if games are going to become art it's going to involve an embracing of interactivity rather than rejecting it. This will require designers to avoid thinking of themselves as "artists" and players as the "audience" and work on ways to make players active collaborators in the story. Maybe even dropping the idea of games as works of art - which implies that once the artist is done the art is "finished" - in favour of the idea of games as a set of tools for producing particular kinds of works of art - so the story the player produces through their interactions with the game is the work of art, and the tools the designers give the players prompt these works of art in particular directions.

The old Bladerunner adventure game kind of did this, in an odd way. The Voigt-Kampff machine was basically omniscient; the results were always right. If you ran the V-K machine and decided based on the (often somewhat ambiguous) responses it gave you that the person in question was human, then they were human; if you decided that they were replicants, they were replicants. This kind of meant that if you went into an interrogation having already decided that someone was a replicant, chances are the V-K machine would reflect your prejudices. (I think there were only a few characters who were invariably human/invariably replicants in that game - I can't remember whether the V-K machine was fixed for them or whether you didn't get a chance to V-K them at all.)

Imagine a game which really embraced that sort of thing by introducing mechanics which lets the player say "I think the story should go this way" or "I think this person should turn out to be a replicant" or "I think that for *once* my NPC mentor/employer should turn out to be a basically good guy who wasn't planning to betray me at all." That'd be something.

@Arthur
" a lousy instinct which doesn't serve anyone."

I don't follow your argument here. Are you saying you can't make contemporary cultural judgements? I think you've strayed into the wrong conversation then

"Kane...stage plays"

Films, including Kane, owe a tremendous debt to theatre. Welles started as a theatre director. Mankiewicz started as a playwright and theatre critic. They could innovate because they understood the limits and potentials of *both* forms. Cultural segregation isn't a route to innovation.

I agree with many of your points re: interactivity, but

(1) there is a basic distinction between engaged response and making something out of nothing, which you're conflating

(2) the meat of this is: why hasn't it happened so far? not: in the future, games could be...

"(2) the meat of this is: why hasn't it happened so far? not: in the future, games could be..."

Maybe it has and we haven't noticed...

"Are you saying you can't make contemporary cultural judgements? I think you've strayed into the wrong conversation then"

Pretty much. I can say "I like this, it's entertaining/thought-provoking" but I really don't think I (or anyone currently living) can say "This is going to be part of our cultural canon for generations to come".

My ability to get bothered about whether my chosen distractions from the grave are valid and serious and worthy or whether they're cheap tat has pretty much atrophied by this point. I just enjoy what I enjoy, Booker Prize winners and Planescape: Torment one week, Warhammer 40K tie-in novels and silly third-person crime simulators the next. So probably I should duck out of the conversation at this point.

Alexis:  I think the main reason that games are not treated as art, and have not gotten serious attention as "culture" because only a minority of the population consists of gamers, while most people see movies (at least once in a while).  Change that, and you've solved the problem.

Except, of course, I don't think gaming will ever become an activity regularly engaged in by the majority; it takes too much intelligence for that.

A really simple answer could be that us gamers are just too busy playing the amazingly artistic games to bother classifying them as 'art'. ;)

But oh, I don't know, I think I'd willingly hold up Okami to quite a few great paintings, or Psychonauts to a few movies, or Beyond Good & Evil to many a thriller novel. There's plenty of trash in the video game world, but there's just as much trash in the world of 'art' -- and what Ebert doesn't acknowledge is that most other art forms hold an advantage in being presented through relatively concentrated media.

Painting involves paint. Novels involve words. Poetry involves rhythm and flow. Video games involve words and voices and landscapes and characters and music and pacing and programming (which should be an art form all its own) and animation and -- <i>most importantly</i> -- input from the user. The only other media that comes close to video games terms of that kind of complexity is film, and it's short that aspect of interaction. This is important, because user interaction is vital to making a game a game, and you <i>cannot</i> ignore it if you want to make a meaningful argument as to whether games are art or not.

There's also the fact that games often take longer to experience and can be re-experienced with greater diversity than any other art form, and that they're the most likely to produce a 'finished' form that in reality continues to evolve. Not to mention you have to look at the requirements for creation -- yes, that Chinese brush painting is masterful, but did the artist have to create it out of pixels so that it would move in an elegant way if moving objects came into contact with it? If he did, would it have looked any better than a landscape in Okami?

Take all that into account and there is, quite literally, no way to compare video games to another art medium any more than you can compare Citizen Kane to Slaughterhouse Five or Guernica. You can try, but ultimately you're losing something in the process -- <i>especially</i> when you cross genres within the mediums. (Slaughterhouse Five would compare very differently to Star Wars, or the Princess Bride.)

I think that's where Ebert's going wrong. He isn't examining video games in and of themselves within their full intended context. You can't do that unless you <i>play</i> video games, and play a lot of them, the same way that you can't be a film critic if you only watch Hollywood blockbusters and everything you know about film history you learned from browsing the archives at IMDB.

That, in my opinion, renders Ebert's opinion null and void. He simply isn't qualified to determine whether video games are art or not art, and so I'm not giving his article any weight. There's just so many things that are wholly unique about games and how they function that Ebert hasn't addressed or acknowledged, and isn't likely to ever acknowledge. Whether video games are art is the kind of question that can only be answered by the gamers themselves.

I, for one, believe they are. And I hope all others who aspire to make, or have made, works of art from their games (as I believe Failbetter has) don't stop reaching for that distinction.

Pingback from topsy.com

Twitter Trackbacks for
        
        Blog post:  Five Years Away.
        [failbettergames.com]
        on Topsy.com

Pingback from technoskald.wordpress.com

Five Years Away « Technoskald