Is Video Gaming Art

[Someone Depressing]

They're only now being judged on an academic level. For example, way back in 2006, a company that previously made an Animal Crossing style adventure game that nobody liked decided to make another shot: Rule of Rose. It was an artistic and beautiful game about the horrors of the child mentality, and the fact that the next generation will be a sick, twisted group of individuals without the guidance of loving adults, with a sub-plot about two young girls - both being victims of rape - developing a sexual relationship.

And yet people said it was "squandering, idiotic bullshit that merely panders to the lowest demographic", when it reality, if it were a movie or a folktale, it would be critically aclaimed. It wasn't even released in the UK... where, after 8PM, anything goes on television. Sex, gay sex, gambling, violence, drugs, literally.

It's not quite on its way, but it's getting there. [/overly long point]

edit: I noticed your type in the thread's title. No, gaming isn't an art. That's like saying, "calling people fags over a hyperspace abstract noun which also functions as a crossing point for all media and ideas in art". No. Games are art - everything from Job-based RPGs to visual novel eroges - but not an average XBOX Live using 13 year old wasting their weekend.

 

[Fox12]

Some video games are art/high art, but not all. Obviously COD isn't trying to be art, it's just trying to be fun. I think gamers know this, and it's a medium that's starting to be taken seriously. Unfortunately society, in general, doesn't consider it to be art. That will change as games become more accepted, and become more inclusive. What's wierd is that games can be art for different reasons. Journey is visual art, like a painting. You could also argue that it's trying to convey a subtle message about people through its multi-player experience. Silent Hill 2 is art because of its brilliant visual storytelling. That said, we're nowhere near having a video game Oscars night. The closest thing we have is this...


I don't really care what anyone else says though, in my opinion games have been art for a long time.

 

[Daverson]

I realize it's a typo, but "is video gaming art" is actually a very good question (as in, "can playing video games be an artform")

Obviously, stuff like "pacifist runs" and minecraft, where players are encouraged to act creatively come to mind...

 

[Vigormortis]

A few disjointed thoughts/responses:

Speaking of which, when films first began many blow-hards who were avid admirers of fine literature or theater insisted that films were rubbish and would never be considered true, high art.

Oh, it goes way beyond that. This whole discussion is reiterating arguments that have basically been made about literally every new artistic medium in history. Films and comic books (and now videogames) are just the most recent examples: I can remember a literature professor in college telling us about how, when the earliest *novels* were published, the intelligentsia insisted they could never be anything but cheap populist escapism, and would never approach the aesthetic heights of classical heroic verse.

Oh, I know. I know. Just about every new form of media art is met with staunch opposition. It's most often a long, tough struggle for such new mediums to gain their footing, find their niches, and gain wider appreciation.

I care because videogames are a fledgling artistic medium, and that's an inherently exciting thing to watch, and see where it goes. It's important because there is a real risk of that fledgling medium having its wings clipped through censorship by people who don't recognize its merits (c.f. the Hays Code and the Comics Code Authority, both of which, IMO, held films and comics back from reaching their full potential for some years).

Oh, they absolutely did. Censorship, by it's very nature, hinders artistic expression. Whether for good or ill.

Spoiler: Spoilered for length

In his foreward to Shell Shocked [http://www.amazon.com/Shell-Shocked-Turtles-Eddie-Frank/dp/1617808466], Howard Kaylan's recent autobiography, Penn Jillette describes going to see Frank Zappa, and being (initially) dismayed to see the two guys from The Turtles on stage in Zappa's band:

Boston 1971: The most important concert of my life and there were the Turtle guys onstage with the man who had taught me to love twentieth-century classical music and real literature.

Years later, brilliant voice actor Billy West would say, "There's one show business." I didn't have those words for it then, but Frank Zappa, Howard Kaylan, and Mark Volman taught me that there was only one showbiz that night in Boston.

It was all mixed together. It was a show that was smart and stupid, heavy and light, beautiful and more beautiful. They were doing a show with cheesy jokes, and it was also art. How could that be? It wasn't stuffy -- it was funny, entertaining, showbiz, vaudeville, and fun, and it still had content.

It was that moment, during that show in Boston, that the line between showbiz and art was erased for me. If Turtles could be Mothers, maybe a hick juggler could speak his heart in a magic show.

Incidentally, Penn Jillette also talked in one of his podcasts about a time his son tried to teach him Minecraft, and how this precisely paralleled his own youthful attempt to play Velvet Underground music for his mother.

And there's the rub. Much of art is generational. At times even regional or societal. Rare is the piece that transcends it's own era.

However, the act of creating art, of taking part in or appreciating art, is something that all generations share.

Yep. Judging the videogame medium based on watching videos of other people playing them would be like judging the artistic merits of film based on reading some IMDB synopses, without ever actually having seen one. It's missing something pretty central to the experience.

Exactly. And, this is one of the primary reasons I absolutely abhor watching LPs.[footnote]That and 99% of LPers out there are annoying and patently unfunny.[/footnote] If I wanted to watch a story I'd just watch a movie. At least there the writing is (likely) better and the dialog isn't being delivered by some wannabe web celebrity who thinks he's witty.

Coincidentally, your analogy for film is one I've always used in regards to this topic. I've always compared watching LPs to viewing a film by reading it's IMDB plot synopsis or having someone else watch the movie and later having them tell you about it.

Remember, too, that unless you're a fairly serious game aficionado, you've probably never even heard of something like Papers, Please or The Stanley Parable. The average non-gamer's awareness of videogames is pretty much limited to whichever ones are shown in TV commercials, which means their perception of the medium is rather skewed. Sort of like basing your opinion of film as a medium entirely on the trailers for big blockbuster extravaganzas.

This is not only true for video gaming but most other, more widely accepted, art forms.

Really, it stems from the ease with which a simpler bit of media can be advertised to a wider audience as opposed to relative difficulty of selling more complex, more niche-specific media.

The average film goer, for example, is much more likely to know what to expect going into a movie like Transformers as opposed to, say, a movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As a result, you're more likely to get more viewers into the former than you are the latter.

This is not to say the average viewer is stupid or unable to appreciate film beyond the pedestrian. Not at all. In fact, one could argue that simpler, more widely accepted art could...emphasis on could...be superior to more niche-friendly high art.

That, however, is a different discussion for a different day.

 

[kilenem]

Art is anything humans do that doesn't require them to continue living including eating sleeping, sex and defecating,

 

[Windcaler]

Depending on who you talk to games are already considered art. Last year the museum of modern art actually did a major exhibit for the "art of video games" thats moving around the united states. As far as the art world goes these people are far more experienced and much smarter then you or I when dealing with the context of art and yet they certainly consider games as art so who are we to tell them theyre wrong? They've spent their entire careers studying art in different periods of history as well as different styles of art.

Ignoring the professional's that say games are art lets think about what art has traditionally done. Traditionally art has attmepted to inspire emotion. Games do this. Art creates a unique experience for the one viewing it. Games do this. Finally art often comments on humanity and society and games do this too.

If artistic professionals say that games are art and tradition alone supports that games are art I fail to see how anyone can honestly say they arent art

 

[WoW Killer]

Of course they're art. They don't fit into any other category of thing. And yes, most of them are really bad from an artistic standpoint, but they're still art. I happen to be a big classical music fan, but even the most crass of popular music is still art to me. Music is an artform, so even bad music is art; it's bad art, but it's still art. You get certain people who say games could be art if they were just, y'know, better, but that's bollocks. Even a medium entirely made up of shit art is still art.

One thing I will say, is that games are more than just containers for other art forms. Of course sprites and 3D models used for games can be considered art just the same as sprites and 3D models created for a purely artistic purpose would be art. Music written for films is still music from a musical perspective; the purpose behind the composition doesn't matter (if it did, you'd have to rule out the majority of J.S. Bach's works, which were written predominantly as backings to Church services). So obviously the assets involved in making a game can be viewed individually as art. But I think a game needs to be seen as a meta event beyond its assets. It's the interaction and decision making within the assets that makes gaming a unique art form. And, I'll go out on a limb here, that makes it all the more powerful and important as an art form.

 

[Racecarlock]

Okay, just going to ask this now. Is anyone here going to campaign for certain genres or wacky themes to be entirely eliminated from gaming as a whole in order to make it more "High Artistic"? If not, I'm probably wasting my time looking at this.

 

[Ruzinus]

Video gaming?

Like, the act of playing a video game?

I find that you have accidentally raised a far more interesting question than the long solved issue you meant to raise.

 

[Therumancer]

Do you think that video games are now considered art? With modern gaming technology and better and better graphics will games like Portal and Journey be considered an art form like painting or drawing?

To put it bluntly, anything can be considered "art" which is part of the problem and one of the big reasons why you see occasional battles over government provided artistic grants and the like, including a lot of people who want to formalize what should be allowed to be accepted as art in the civilized world. As things stand now though someone can literally paint an American flag on the bottom of a jug, urinate into it, and then drop in a cross, and call it "performance art", as can someone basically pooping into their own hand and flinging it at a canvas and then leaving it to harden... I mean it gets pretty ridiculous how far things go.

Strictly speaking *all* video games can thus be called art since it's been more or less accepted as simply being a medium.

Now, on a personal level I'm one of those who believes that we do need to see some fairly strict guidelines on what's considered art, and then work out exceptions from there on out. Largely so we can keep the poo flingers and such out of it, as much as some might want to justify it.

I do think the medium of video gaming is capable of being used artistically, but I personally do not think we've seen any worthy artwork come of it, and we may never. Of course opinions are going to vary on that. The key word here being "worthy".

At the end of the day, pretty much all attempts at creating artwork through video games have generally been along the same thing, themes of grimdark depression, angst, and surrealism. Even the most well received works of this sort strike me as being little but a retread of the same old garbage goths and emos spew a coffee houses, and of the same basic quality. I've seen it all before, heard it all before, and frankly it's been done much better. The only real unique thing about it, is that it's being done through a video game. If most of this stuff had been done in another format I doubt you could have found a gallery or publisher who would have touched it.

So far I have yet to see anything with sentiments I do not think could have been communicated any other way, and honestly almost all of it seems to be heavily based in the "dark" artistic culture of the moment and as such runs together with pretty much everyone else doing the same thing.

Take a game like "Journey" however that's pretty much about lonliness and isolation, and passing other anonymous travelers doing the same. That sounds pretty profound, until you consider that these are sentiments poets and such
have been beating to death for centuries, and are among those that continue to be further lashed to the bone almost every time a black clad kid puts down his overpriced latte and takes the mic.

Most of the "artistic acceptance" seems to ironically come from people who have largely been raised to think that is what art is, so when they see someone aping grimdark angst and surrealism they immediately thing "oooh, that's art".

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a lot of this stuff in of itself, but overexposure has made me increasingly selective.

To be honest I think a real "art" game is going to be one that flies in the face of current traditions, and doesn't focus on the ever popular soul wallow of depression and angst. Something that doesn't just mirror pretty much what every other person who wants to consider themselves an artist right now is churning out. Presumably something that manages to be incredibly catchy, upbeat, and optimistic, without seeming quite as sappy as it actually is. What's more part of this is going to be how long something endures, and frankly even the crude attempts of games as art we're seeing now are fairly recent. Honestly it remains to be seen if anything will have endured in a few decades, that is going to be the truest test.

What I think is irrelevant though, technically the way things can be defined, something like the old ET game for the Atari 2600 can be seen as high art if someone wants to consider it such.... so you know.... the answer to the question is "yes, games are art, but then again everything is art if someone wants to call it that".