CaitSeith said:
StatusNil said:
Kingjackl said:
I think it's sad that we've gone from "games are art" to "games are a product, fuck off with your fancy thinkin' talk". You'd think at least the Escapist community would accept that.
Well, speaking only for myself, my anti-intellectual insistence on games as a product rather than works of art is based on the analyses of the "culture industry" by the "Frankfurt School" Critical Theorists, especially Theodor Adorno. Briefly put, the authorship of anything beyond the simplest "indie" game is inescapably compromised by the need for mass appeal to fund the working of the capitalist mode of production required to create it. This means that the developer is not acting in the privileged role of the "autonomous artist", who would have the necessary freedom from economic constraints to authentically explore artistic problems.
Wouldn't the same apply to films? Yet, it doesn't seem uncommon to have high-budget films focused more in art than in mass appeal. Why?
The argument is complex, and requires a pretty solid grounding in philosophy and Marxism. Short answer, for someone like Cait, yes this would apply to films, as well.
However, CaitSeith's insistence on treating games as either a "product" or "works of art" is a false dichotomy, through the lens of the Frankfurt school, as Adorno would certainly have agreed. He wasn't trying to declassify them as works of art, he was trying to point out their lack of autonomy from capitalism. Mass culture wasn't the issue, is was that the culture was being imposed from above. He mentions this subject in the book he co-authored, Dialectic of Enlightenment...
"'Light' art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of free expression is under an illusion about society." (pg.135)
Adorno was famously difficult to comprehend, but roughly translated, this means that people aren't doing something wrong by consuming "low-brow" arwork, as it's being imposed upon them from above. People are still experiencing art, it's just that those experiences serve a particular , pedestrian, capitalistic function, as opposed to the "pure" and "free" experiences that art could motivate when it was autonomous, and presumably, working towards a negation of capitalism.
Indeed, such art - actually functioning - is fundamentally crucial to his arguments concerning mass propaganda.
It's important to keep in mind here, that Adorno, and other neo-Marxists were attempting to rationalize why the proletariat revolution had not occurred the way Marx predicted it, in the industrialized nations, and capitalism still reigned supreme. The "culture industry" was extended as a possible solution to this problem, as it called into question the humanity of the proletariat. In other words, everyone got brainwashed by culture, due in major part, to the rise of sufficiently advanced technology, which paved the way for new forms of government, like fascism.
Calling "light" art a "consumer product" only has meaning in relationship to the "functionlessness" that Ardorno championed as an ideal state of autonomous art. This function, however, has nothing to do with gameplay, or anything remotely like such a nested concept. The term is defined in a much more technical fashion, and refers to it's function as a tool to impose the "culture industry". Being bought and sold is not an automatic way to trigger this "consumer product" label, and, indeed, Adorno defends the classical relationship of the patron and the artist as being one that was capable of being able to create autonomous art.
There's a certain intrinsic level of presumed justification to Ardorno's work that's worth pointing out. His arguments about what is actually "autonomous" artwork, and what isn't, basically boils down to his own preferences.
He makes the esoteric argument that certain, purely formal, works of art come from a pure, ideal, place while everything else - does not. This is the cutoff for determining what is a "consumer product", in the realm of modern works of art. If it isn't found to be containing a strong "dialectic" in it's basic form, it's to be excluded from the very slim list of truly autonomous artwork, which, coincidentally, highly favors his home country of Germany, and his own personal taste. Representational work, almost wholesale, is suspect, even that which contains calls to political action. This is because, according to Ardorno, such calls to action can only work within the framework of their own political reality - it's not an escape. Representational artwork reflects reality, and reality is tainted. Art, for Ardorno, is supposed to be about working towards things that truly exist outside of reality, in synergy with the goal of utopia.
This is important to repeat - according to Ardorno, even other radical left-wing artists were creating artwork that was essentially no different than that of the very people they considered their intellectual opposites, unless they subscribed to Ardorno's very specific axioms as to exactly what formal elements of artwork were "autonomous" from the tainted world of capitalistic influence, and the drudgery of human feedback.
In other words, Ardorno's argument comes off a lot like saying "only by creating artwork in a very narrow, exacting way that I prescribe are you truly creating artwork free of influence", even though he denied being an elitist. He had a fervently separatist point of view, thinking that "high art" needed to be distinctly categorized because, unlike popular art, it's motivations were pure and truthful.
While influential, Ardorno isn't taken very seriously as a media critic. He had an obstinate dislike for jazz music, which some critics have pointed out, borders on racism, which gave his views on art a bad reputation. The prism of his ideological lens is very focused. Indeed, almost the entirety of human output, according to Ardorno, is unworthy of genuine consideration, which many find unnecessarily bleak. In Ardorno's view, we should pretty much hold off on legitimate artistic appreciation until the "rapture" of a neo-Marxist, post-capitalist, utopia is upon us - whenever that's supposed to happen. In the meantime, we let that utopia rest, as some sort of last hope, in contemplation of "high-art".
If anything Ardorno would probably insist that we distance ourselves from the artwork, in review, entirely, and focus on it's larger context in society, and the ways it stands to reinforce late-stage capitalism...which the OP's article was attempting, more than most, perhaps. The game's actual aesthetic qualities, such as gameplay, would be interesting in so much as they served as a good examples of the culture industry at work.
