The Problem With Games

[Nieroshai]

Can a very good, very beautiful vacuum cleaner be high art? No it can't, it's too complex a mechanism to be a unified object. Its shape may be art and it can be put in a museum, but then it's not treated as a vacuum cleaner but as a sculpture.

I feel the same is the case for games. Games are composite things made out of thousands of little elements. They can have subelements that are art, but a game will rarely be able to be a coherent whole. As a matter of fact I think the games that are closest to being a unified piece of art, are the Pongs, Rogues and Space Invaders of the past. Because of their simplicity they get closer to our perception of traditional art.

I still believe Delta was one of those early games that got closest to coherent art, other people will surely have other candidates. It integrates simple graphics, music and gameplay into one. It's really more of a rhytm game than a sidescrolling shooter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02YBWKxDXPI

For now, it's ok to find enjoyment, sometimes fulfillment, from playing Red Dead Redemption, Tomb Raider and Skyrim. There's nothing wrong with that, but I, for one, want a game (or experience) to move me, not just kinetically, not in a "oh, this is so fun" way, but emotionally. I haven't found a game that unifies the systems of its software, Art and Story to a degree where there is no doubt, but when I find it, by god I'll trumpet it to the heavens.

It seems to me you are looking at the vacuum cleaners expecting one to be an epiphany. You probably wont find one that satisfies your expectations. Vacuum cleaners are meant to suck away the dust, not to be art. Games are meant to be enjoyable to play, not to be art.

Movies are meant to be enjoyable to watch. A book is meant to be enjoyable to read. Tell me, is a film not art to one of the actors, because he is following a script and because he is not a passive onlooker? How is the player of a game not that actor? The fact that you as the player are the intended audience? That's not the question. Are there times when art is not art, are there people who art does not apply to?
If you haven't ever been moved by a game, I apologize for any crassness but your experience is not typical. There are moving games, there have been people moved by games. I can name a few that made me cry, or jump startled from my seat, or whose narrative made me angry. The fact that you have not experienced such a reaction is entirely on you.
A vacuum cleaner is a tool. Vacuum cleaners are not designed out of the gate to be art. Video games, however, often are. A video game has no other purpose than to entertain. Same with film. Same with fiction books. Same with paintings. Same with theatre, same with street jugglers, same with clowns, mimes, and puppets. Art is that which we create to entertain and to draw upon emotions. If you haven't played a video game that does this, you have been playing the wrong games. That, or the problem in its entirety is that you are looking at a film and asking what's art about a sequence of images. Looking at a plucky silent comedy about a housekeeper struggling with a stubborn, ridiculously afflicted vacuum cleaner, and ask the laughing audience "What the hell is wrong with all of you? There is NOTHING amusing about vacuum cleaners!"

 

[Nieroshai]

So are paintings art? They serve many purposes whether it be decoration, appreciation, symbolic meaning, covering cracks in walls, etc. and so do not have a unified purpose, and they include many elements in their design: line art, colour, paint types, mixing, motion, flow, symbolism, feeling, etc. and that is only in the design of the painting itself, ignoring what the painting is painted on, framing, setting, history, etc. so how can they be considered art if they have so many elements to them, yet a video game cannot? Who defined art as a unified concept and if things with only few elements are art, how many is too much?

If we talk about games as art, I assume we talk about a game as a unified concept. Otherwise we could ask ourselves the question "Is game graphics art?" or "Is game music art?". I suppose the problem is not so much whether games are art, but maybe more if a game is a thing, or if it is really many things at once.

I see paintings as something very unified, sure it consists of many elements but the end result is hopefully something complete. Games on the other hand often consists of things that by themselves can be considered art and which can in practice be isolated from the rest, music, artwork, story. I think thats where a lot of the confusion stems from.

Often when someone observes a game as a piece of art, they are not observing the game as a whole, but perhaps the story or other elements. In that case the game ceases to be a game and becomes something else entirely. Thats why I used the vacuum cleaner analogy. A vacuum cleaner that is put on a pedestal ceases to be a vacuum cleaner and becomes a sculpture.

I was not trying to define art or to exclude anything from the category of art. I was trying to comment on a common fallacy that tends to happen when people view something functional as a piece of art. They often forget about the functionality, and focus entirely on the form. Maybe due to the predominant idea that art can't be functional.

Speaking on this point, I direct you to film. Film has narrative, music, acting, and visual stimulation as fully realized components, yet an individual film is art. We hear of Citizen Kane as a piece of art, but rarely if ever do we hear specifically of the soundtrack or an audio-less cut of the snow globe falling, or Orson Welles' performance as an audio file. The film itself is a complete work, delivered as it was meant to be seen.

 

[Nieroshai]

Can a very good, very beautiful vacuum cleaner be high art? No it can't, it's too complex a mechanism to be a unified object. Its shape may be art and it can be put in a museum, but then it's not treated as a vacuum cleaner but as a sculpture.

I feel the same is the case for games. Games are composite things made out of thousands of little elements. They can have subelements that are art, but a game will rarely be able to be a coherent whole. As a matter of fact I think the games that are closest to being a unified piece of art, are the Pongs, Rogues and Space Invaders of the past. Because of their simplicity they get closer to our perception of traditional art.

I still believe Delta was one of those early games that got closest to coherent art, other people will surely have other candidates. It integrates simple graphics, music and gameplay into one. It's really more of a rhytm game than a sidescrolling shooter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02YBWKxDXPI

So are paintings art? They serve many purposes whether it be decoration, appreciation, symbolic meaning, covering cracks in walls, etc. and so do not have a unified purpose, and they include many elements in their design: line art, colour, paint types, mixing, motion, flow, symbolism, feeling, etc. and that is only in the design of the painting itself, ignoring what the painting is painted on, framing, setting, history, etc. so how can they be considered art if they have so many elements to them, yet a video game cannot? Who defined art as a unified concept and if things with only few elements are art, how many is too much?

I think overall, the problem with art is the inherent elitism and absurdity in the concept. People attempt to define art not because art is a quantifiable thing that they want to understand, but because the concept of art is lofty and fantastic, and adds notoriety to whatever can feasibly claim itself to be "art". However, when it is looked at without such selfish bias, art is a word without much meaning in today's society, and people would probably be better off not bothering with the concept, instead just labeling video games as "video games" and paintings as "paintings", not because they are necessarily art or not art, but because of what they are in themselves. Video games should be protected on the grounds of free speech, not because they are "art".

Art also is, and has been back through recorded history, a form of personal and cultural expression. The encouragement of art is in many ways the encouragement of culture, both traditionally and progressively. Art is Man creating for the sake of creation, outside of a bleak existence where he must create to survive or make money or find a mate. Can art serve these purposes? Yes, they can. But where necessity rears its ugly head, function beats form every time.

 

[michael87cn]

I don't need art.

I need fun.

There is no problem for me. Games have been bringing a smile to my face for 21 years now (started playing when I was five).

 

[Bostur]

Speaking on this point, I direct you to film. Film has narrative, music, acting, and visual stimulation as fully realized components, yet an individual film is art. We hear of Citizen Kane as a piece of art, but rarely if ever do we hear specifically of the soundtrack or an audio-less cut of the snow globe falling, or Orson Welles' performance as an audio file. The film itself is a complete work, delivered as it was meant to be seen.

Thats really the only point I tried to make. ;-)

I generally see movies and books as a whole, if I feel a book or movie is disjointed I consider it to be poor.

Some games move me, but when that happens it's usually sub-elements of the game that makes an impression. Usually the storytelling, but it can also be the soundtrak or the artwork. Braid has beautiful artwork, but it's still 'just' a puzzle platformer. I would have been moved by the artwork no matter how it was presented.

I was deeply moved by "The Longest Journey", but that was the story certainly not the game as a whole because the actual gameplay was rubbish.

And then aproximately once every decade I experience that game where all the pieces fit together and the subelements become indistinguishable. Most recently it was Alan Wake, before that it was Grim Fandango.

My example with the vacuum cleaner was meant to illustrate that things can change their nature depending on the point of view of the observer. Most traditional art is entirely passive experiences. And my feeling is that when games are called art, or observed as traditional art, they cease to be games and become something much more passive. Which I feel is a shame because I think games have merits entirely as their own medium.

 

[sextus the crazy]

Can a very good, very beautiful vacuum cleaner be high art? No it can't, it's too complex a mechanism to be a unified object.

Rules like this remind me of George Carlin's statement that gymnastics is not a sport because it's "something Romanians are good at."

Of course, his rules were INTENTIONALLY silly and arbitrary; that was a large point of the routine.

"Swimming is not a sport. It's something you do to keep from drowning. It's just common sense."

OT: video games have always been art because they are a medium of artistic expression.

What we need now is not a definition, but recognition by the people and legal system.

 

[Something Amyss]

The symphony is an interesting example too. But a symphony, while having multiple performers, typically has one composer. Wouldn't the musicians just become components in the art? Like paint on a canvas?

No. The individual musicians each are artists or even technicians, depending on the outlook, whose very presence in the system impacts the system in much the same way you argue for multiple designers/programmers will impact the final vision of a game. Each instance of a symphony is mass produced by these standards, as the only way to ensure the composer's vision is for him to meticulously input it into a program. In fact, he can input it exactly to notational specifications and not get what he was looking for in his head. Believe me, I've been there (though I write rock and folk, not whole symphonies: even then, two four piece bands can look at the notation and come up with different interpretations).

Music is more than notes on a page. There's a dozen little things, maybe more like hundreds. Vibrato, tone, volume, tempo (and even if you give precise tempos of X bpm rather than allegro or andante). Each musician is a person with their own style and temperment. Even two musicians trained in the same school of music on the same instrument may approach differently. Even the conductor impacts the piece and s/he may decide to throw out the notations entirely. There's an entire level of music snobbery based on all these things combined, which can make all the difference between two performances of the same piece being masterpieces or garbage.

In fact, the composer probably has less final input into their piece than a game's creator does. That's situational; it depends on who's doing the composition and why, but I would maintain the "probably" part as accurate.

And while I'm at it, let's look at film. Is Star Wars Episode 2 more artistic or less mass produced because George Lucas went with his own vision than Episode 5, where not only did he have ghost writers on the treatment but also had the very actors telling him what he could or couldn't do? Is the Original Trilogy less artistic than the rather soulless prequel films? George Lucas had much more control with the later movies, so surely it should be more artistic by this metric.

 

[Something Amyss]

"Swimming is not a sport. It's something you do to keep from drowning. It's just common sense."

XD

What we need now is not a definition, but recognition by the people and legal system.

In America, we have the latter and don't really NEED he former. It'd be nice, I guess.

At the end of the day, I don't care if people think games aren't or can't be art. I will address ridiculous reasons as I always do, but I can't really change preconceived notions and it's not worth trying. You can see people trying mental gymnastics in this thread alone, tying to justify why their positions on games still hold even if other media they think is art fails the test as well. They're going to keep doing that. Since they can't hurt us, we should probably just let it go.