Video games can never be art
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html
Discuss.
I'll start it out: his thesis is a bit shallow, while it's difficult for a game to be art, many games do *contain* a great deal of art, and often very good art - music, stories, pixel-art. What about games like Deus Ex Machina, which were heavily about the story?
Discuss.
I'll start it out: his thesis is a bit shallow, while it's difficult for a game to be art, many games do *contain* a great deal of art, and often very good art - music, stories, pixel-art. What about games like Deus Ex Machina, which were heavily about the story?
Post edited by Winston on
Comments
As one of my friends on Twitter said, "I'd never even consider reviewing a film based on only hearing the audio" and yet that's what Ebert does when it comes to games.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Or a bed full of fags. If you like that sort of thing.
Art to me is defined as anything that provokes an emotional response....you could even call Ebert's Journal art in that way I suppose...Maybe that's what he's trying to do!? :lol:
Seriously though, you only need to look at things like SOTC, FFVII, Rez, Okami, etc. to see that art is possible in videogames...even Halo 3 and Little Big Planet have created some great stuff from the user generated side of things.....
Art is something that provokes a reaction, an emotion. To most people, Tracy Emin's unmade bed seems stupid. But you have to think about deeper than that.
Ebert actually makes a mistake in that article - the Lascaux cave paintings were about more than just the drawings on the wall. As I've heard it described, there was an entire ritual and a story told. You have to imagine being taken there to the cave, in the dark, and then seeing them in flickering torchlight as the elders passed on the wisdom...
...in other words, it was an interactive experience.
Funny blokie.
I'd never let an American lecture me about anything :D
Haha! That's funny!
Nothing to do with art though, although maybe due to the controversial nature of the statement maybe this line of text is art in itself?
*waves $300 bill
1 Art please!
Of course, it's not a universal thing (all generalizations suck, in general) but there certainly seems to be a correlation between calling them "videogames" and being anti- or a non-gamer or the Daily Wail.
depends on context, i say videogame to people i assume are non-gamers, but game to my mates.
Hmmmm yes ive never realy liked the phrase "Gamer" ether, not sure if id say videogame or just game. Probably just game, i think my dislike of the word gamer comes from people lile chris moyles declaring them selves "Gamers".
"I consider it craft, not art. Certainly there are artistic touches, and in modern video games there is of course a great deal of artwork. But a video game - any programming project, really - is more dependent on the attention to detail that we usually associate with craftsmanship, than the raw creative insight we associate with artistry."
I would add that games up until now have almost completely failed to say anything personal, which is probably why so many gamers are also fans of science fiction and other impersonal stuff.
https://discordapp.com/invite/cZt59EQ
without even reading the article i would have said something similar
surely it is how a medium is crafted that lends it to be art?
I read it, and it seems that not only has he failed to understand what these games actually are, he has also never quite understood what paintings are for!
The reasons he gives against games can easily be applied to any other form of art. I think that he has missed the point of 'art' altogether.
Silly, silly blokie!
Art can be created accidently, so it certainly isn't the way it's crafted.
not just the sound / graphics.. the code/engine that binds it all together..
the author has probably never seen a demo either.. as much as I can slate whats in the tate modern, I can't really give a true professional critic of it, only state an opinion.. whether that is valid or not is a different matter, some of the time it's just as I see it.
much as I chop up drum loops etc.. to get an end result.. which whatever you do is what most are concerned about..the end resulting left / right channel .. not like I'm gonna go and try to dis-assemble a speccy game, unless I want to learn how to code or improve my knowledge.
it's seems just either a reactionary piece OR just not informed.. yer it's easy to list shock games like waco etc.
Here's a couple of things that annoyed me recently and represented what I think is going wrong with gaming. One was a post on a forum about a new game where the poster waxed lyrical about the graphics, the "atmosphere", the bloody storyline and the set-pieces but didn't once mention the thing that matters - what was it like to play. Another was someone talking about what they'd like to see in a modern-day game (no prizes for guessing that the gameplay mechanics weren't mentioned once) and in doing so referred to games as having become a "mature medium" which insinuated that old-school games were somehow unimportant children's toys and (more importantly) suggested that the most important development in games is that they can tackle adult themes and have sub-Hollywood storylines. Just... no.
There's a place for art in games - good music improves the atmosphere, as do good graphics; a good storyline can keep a player involved, especially in an adventure-based game - but let's not kid ourselves that these are the game. The game is still a shooter, or a puzzle game, or a problem-solving adventure game. What matters are the mechanics (as with chess, or Go, or Monopoly) and these are not art. They're worthwhile cultural artefacts and they enrich our lives as art does but that doesn't make them art in and of themselves.
They are reading it backwards. You cannot choose a "type" as an art and generalize it. You have to take every art product and think about them, one by one.
eg. Not all of the movies are art. Cinema has an Art form also has an industrial craft form. Same goes for paintings: you can paint a technical drawing and you call it "blueprint" etc. And writing, not all writing is an art. But some are.
I consider some of the games as art some not. Treasure Island Dizzy is art. Clouds (a pc game) is art. Sumotori Dreams is art. Call of Duty is not.
Electronic Media is the newest form of art. You cannot remove it's biggest part, games, from it.
Conclusion: Games can be art.
...at our school, we used to call it home time ;-)
my first impulse would be that a Video Game is as much art as any movie or book...
but then you have the ludic side of it, and I would hardly call a board game a piece of art... (certenly not Monopoly or Rat Race...).
and can one, really consider a movie with Lorenzo Lamas a piece of art?
As someone who is currently working as a movie critic, I've always considered most movie critics pompous A$$es (and if it wasn't for the rent I would rather do something else... like making dam movies instead of analising the works of others for instance...).
but I stand by the idea of "author" defended by the frensh novel vague in the 60's, that goes something like, you consider an author any one that you can see a continuity in it's work and can look at something made by him and say "this is undoubtly a work of X". And if it's a work of an author, than it sure has to be art...
and if we follow that, and we think of (for example) all of the unique spectrum games creators that we can recognize their work, style & subject (and that is just speccy), than I would have to say that video games that translate the vision of an Author, are defenetly art!
Someone who's raised on the likes of Burnout might well find the play mechanics of something like Myst, or Zelda: Twilight Princess flat-out boring, yet other people play them because they want to immerse themselves in the ongoing story. They're happy not to over-analyse the mechanics, or to chart the linearity hiding behind the fa?ade of freedom; they prefer to connect with what's happening at an emotional level. To take your argument to another medium, it would imply that a book can't be art, but the illustrations can be. Yet story-telling is most definitely an art in itself, whatever the medium.
What Ebert doesn't get is that just because he doesn't appreciate something as art, doesn't mean that other people can't. And that's why his opinion is trivialised by its own argument. If just one person can appreciate the artistry in something, then someone else can't claim universally that it isn't art.
That raises some questions too - is the creation of a board game (such as Chess, Go, or Othello), and all its rules, that allow subtle nuances of play, an art? I'd say it's highly creative.
Then you have the playing of the game - for the most part, that's not going to be a hugely creative exercise if you're just slogging through something. But look at some of the elaborate ways people play something like Dance Dance Revoloution - highly creative dance moves just to bash a few floor buttons in the right order. That's artistry. So in the playing of a game, and being highly creative within the rules, there is scope for art. Whether it's there every time you play though, is down to the player.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Deux Ex Machina being a good example of an 'artistic' game.
Throughout history the greatest artists of all mediums have been unable to define the term "art", so I wouldn't place too much emphasis on that article. Still, in the absence of workable definition, we each can only use our own feelings to decide what we consider emotive enough to strike us individually as art. I mean, Winston and I once argued about Tracy Emin's tent (that she sowed the names of her former lovers in, and sold for a fortune to some stinking rich but taste poor mug). I said that it was not art, and he said that it was but was bad art. Who was right? I say me, and he says him. And since neither of us can prove the other wrong, then we have to agree to disagree. The one thing we did agree on, and I know no one personally who has said otherwise, is that if it is art then it's rubbish.
John Constables Haywain, that's great art, and I love it. The Mona Lise, I don't like it personally, but I can see that it is good art. Andy Warhol's pictures might be art, but I don't like them at all. And drawings like Dangermouse or Futurama are art, albeit not too skilled (good though), and I like them, although obviously my liking for them is at least in part due to my liking of their cartoons as a whole.
My point being that it's easy to decide what you like, but harder to decide what art is. You could say that art is a human creation that inspires emotion in the viewer, so that Laurel and Hardy's film Blockheads, Monty Python's Life of Brian, and the Timeless Fawlty Towers are art, as they inspire real laughter.
And surely a game is art if it inspires addiction, or (genuine) praise? Not to mention any audio or graphical art that game might possess.
I mean look at Skooldaze and Back to Skool. I've said before that to me they are two of the best graphical examples on the Speccy, as the artist displays that true gift that only the best artists have, of making you see more than the medium allows. The Spectrum's limited pixel resolution makes it unable to show faces in small sprites, and indeed in almost every game, such as the excellent games Jetset Willy, Dynamite Dan, Brian Bloodaxe, etc, the player is satisfied not to see this detail. But in Skooldaze and Back to Skool, even though there are no facial details for the characters, you are fooled into believing that they are there, often by one very well judged pixel. Surely that's as close to genius as you can get, in the area of Spectrum's graphics.
And surely music can be considered art? I doubt that anyone would seriously disagree. In which case the superb music for the opening of Fairlight (all the more impressive) has to be art, as has the work of people like Tim Follin and our own Mister Beep. Lots of games across many platforms have first class music, like the Atari ST's Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, the C64's Ghosts 'n' Goblins, the N64's Jet Force Gemini, and countless others.
And game play has to be art, as it can be so involving and attention grabbing? So you have to class Jetset Willy, Skooldaze, The Sentinel, 3D Deathchase, Cobra, Chaos, Chuckie Egg etc as art if you judge them by game play. The same with Half-Life, Deus Ex,
Bioshock is extremely atmospheric. Surely if one game is art, it's that one, at least in the sense of visual art. And if you do judge by atmosphere, then what about Silent Hill? That game has so much atmosphere. Or Chronicles of Riddick. And granted to that today's generation, games like Jetset Willy and Ant Attack have no atmosphere, but at the time they really felt eerie. And the otherwise awful Manhunt had a lot of (horrible) atmosphere.
And if you argue that Ant Attack and Jetset Willy cannot be art as they have aged so much that younger people will no longer play them, then by the same token silent films cannot be art, as younger people won't watch them either. In fact most youngsters don't watch black and white stuff either, though to be fair this is now at least partly the fault of the TV companies, who almost never show black and white stuff anymore.
To be honest, though, I don't think it matters what anyone claims about whether or not computer games are art. I don't think it even matters if they are art, although I do think that, yes, many of them are art, such as Skooldaze, Dynamite Dan 2, The Sentinel, Perfect Dark, Half-Life, Doom, Jimmy White's Snooker and so on. My criteria would be that a game draws you in, and involves you in it, and makes you experience interest and emotions (even if it's just the emotions of wanting to play and succeed, and maybe discover more or beat a high score), and to me that's art. Something that effects the viewer in intangible ways.
insomnia dot ac
The site owner has a fair bit to say about this. Indeed, he has a lot to say about a lot of things.
I don't get you, what would be wrong with him knowing that people came from WOS to his site?
he seems like if his net connection ever went down he'd start shooting up a school.
not sure what attention he could give us that we wouldn't want, most of what he was saying was PC fanboy nonsense. and how obscure jap games are better than sliced bread.