Games AREN'T Art

[OmniscientOstrich]

When you stop regurgitating Roger Ebert's argument, I might be willing to debate this, although the collective community seemed to have ammassed all of the flaws in your post.

 

[emeraldrafael]

So if a game is not goal oriented then its art?

Which is silly, because we have other art with direction.

It does seem to be the gist here, though. The "Games Aren't Art" argument has always struck me as similar to a line from a George Carlin routine, where he discounts gymnastics as a sport because it's "something Romanians are good at."

Except, being George Carlin, it was a joke.

This is like saying "Music isn't art because you can also dance to it."

...

I wasnt really saying I agree with that opinion, just according to the OP thats what they define as a game being able to be art.

 

[Thamous]

Why does it matter if they're art?
I feel like gamers as a whole are so dead set on getting their favorite passed time classified and accepted as an "art" so they can justify their enjoyment of it.
Why? Stop giving a shit what other people think and just enjoy what you enjoy.

I would like to think this viewpoint ceased to exist when all of the creative freedom of the medium in the entire United States hinged on video games being recognized for their artistic merit. Apparently not.

What does their artistic merit have to do with their creative freedom being protected? No when in the U.S. constitution does it say things are guaranteed protection if they are art. Games are guaranteed creative freedom based on the fact that it can't be taken away. Their protected for the same reason newspapers and protest are protected. Being art has nothing to do with this.
If games we officially and legally considered "art" in the U.S. nothing would change, people like Jack Thompson would still try and get them censured and limited and they would still fail as miserably as they have now at achieving their goal. All the attempts to have legal regulations put in place on video games have failed simply because their unconstitutional. They would fail equally as hard if they were "art".

 

[Thaius]

Why does it matter if they're art?
I feel like gamers as a whole are so dead set on getting their favorite passed time classified and accepted as an "art" so they can justify their enjoyment of it.
Why? Stop giving a shit what other people think and just enjoy what you enjoy.

I would like to think this viewpoint ceased to exist when all of the creative freedom of the medium in the entire United States hinged on video games being recognized for their artistic merit. Apparently not.

What does their artistic merit have to do with their creative freedom being protected? No when in the U.S. constitution does it say things are guaranteed protection if they are art. Games are guaranteed creative freedom based on the fact that it can't be taken away. Their protected for the same reason newspapers and protest are protected. Being art has nothing to do with this.
If games we officially and legally considered "art" in the U.S. nothing would change, people like Jack Thompson would still try and get them censured and limited and they would still fail as miserably as they have now at achieving their goal. All the attempts to have legal regulations put in place on video games have failed simply because their unconstitutional. They would fail equally as hard if they were "art".

Not quite.

Video games are either one of two things or a combination of both: toys and/or art. If they are toys, they simply don't fall under the first amendment as "creative speech." Toys that are oriented toward adults and inappropriate for children are hardly given creative freedom. Art, on the other hand, is, even if it can also be considered a toy. That's why, if you read anything regarding that court case, even the official transcripts, the entire discussion is based around artistic and creative merit, because if games were devoid of those things, they would deserve no protection.

These two things have two very different societal meanings. Fact is, despite the artistic merit video games have, many people do not benefit from it or even see it simply because they do not understand that mindset. They can go into a book and analyze it, gain meaning from it, and be inspired by it, but they can play a video game with the same potential and come away talking about nothing more than that awesome headshot they got. I once even talked to someone online who had never so much as considered that video games could be a storytelling medium, and their favorite game was Red Dead Redemption. This is the same kind of gross misunderstanding that killed Six Days in Fallujah; as long as video games are not culturally recognized as art, they will be able to do no cultural good as art.

I see that as important.

 

[Something Amyss]

I wasnt really saying I agree with that opinion, just according to the OP thats what they define as a game being able to be art.

I explicitly said that seemed to be the argument, not that you agreed with them.

 

[drummond13]

By your definition of art, they aren't.

By my definition of art, they are, though currently a rather avant garde branch of art.

Nobody's going to your mind about this because your definition is set. There's nothing wrong with this: we all have our own personal feelings on what "art" is. But there's absolutely no point in debating the matter because we're each holding games to a totally different interpretation of the word "art". I don't see how the concept of winning and losing suddenly makes games any less an art form than movies but hey, as I said, that's based on my definition not yours.

As much as I respect you respecting my opinion, the entire point of me opening up this thread is for you to try and convince me otherwise. A good definition will include all the commonly viewed paradigm examples of that category; No one would try to create a definition of science that didn't include biology or chemistry. I want you to tell me what makes video games such a paradigm example of art that not including them in my definition would be foolish.

Hmm. Okay. Well, I consider films art, even though many if not most of them are made for entertainment purposes. I consider games art for the same reason; they're experiences designed to evoke some form of response. If a game is purely about gameplay, with no story elements or message that it's trying to convey (like a multiplayer game, for example) then I feel the game stops being art and becomes craft. However, most games have some form of story or message behind them and storytelling is an art, at least in my opinion it is.

The fact that you can "win" or "lose" games doesn't nullify this inclusion in my definition of art at all, especially because these days it's almost impossible to "lose" a game. My fiancee always asks me if I'm "winning" when I'm playing a game. But what does winning even mean when the only penalty to losing is reloading a recent save? How many people out there have "lost" Mass Effect, for example? Or "lost" Braid?

That all being said, I would argue that most games are Bad art, with little attention paid to the time-honored techniques of character building and storytelling that make the art successful. Only a few moments have really evoked a response in me on the level of other mediums. These few include the game Braid, the final "mission" of the marine in Modern Warfare 1, and the first hour and a half of Bioshock. All of these brought up the same feelings of wonder and thought provoking discussions afterwards that I have gotten from truly great movies or books or other formats of the art of storytelling. Just because there's only a few examples of truly GREAT art in the medium of videogames doesn't mean it isn't an art form. It just means it isn't an art form that has nearly reached its true potential yet.