I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I want to write a longer post/ full-length essay about this. However, I thought I’d put it to my friends out there on the webternets to tell me what they think. So if you have any kind of views on this, even if (actually, maybe ESPECIALLY if- ) you’re not interested in playing games yourself, air them in the comments. I’d love to see a discussion go on about this in the comments, and I will join in myself.
Some points to think about:
Games are a combination of several art forms. Does this strengthen games’ position as art or does it make games an industry rather than an art?
On industry: Studio games these days have bigger budgets than most big-budget films and take years to develop with huge teams. They have several people just to keep the economics in check! Other games (independent and freeware ones) are developed by small and even single-person teams.
Film is established as an art, so does this negate the entire industry argument against games as art? If not, why? What makes film different from games?
ARE films art?!
What IS art? Specifically? What is required to call something art? An art degree? A purpose? A meaning? Anything at all?
Games don’t seem to generally have the same versatility that films, books, paintings, comics and other art forms have. Is this because they’re still new? Will even mainstream games develop to such a degree that they can create a war game that actually treats war with the depth that war films can?
Some indie games deal with quite heavy themes and also experiment a lot more with gameplay, pushing the boundaries of what games are and can be. Are indie games inherently more artistic than mainstream games?
Are we in the middle of the game industry’s version of the Avant-Garde?
I’ve probably made some assumptions you don’t agree with here, and if I have, feel free to say so! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
{ 5 } Comments
Video games are very versatile in their ability to create and convey a reality of perhaps a much greater complexity than a simple painting or statue, the level of nuance available when immersive virtual technologies becomes common will amaze even the HIGHEST skeptics, I am sure.
One can already experience meaningful spiritual or artistic instances through a digital format:
http://vi.sualize.us/popular/landscape/
http://tr.youtube.com/watch?v=QN7ZBLCr50Y&feature=PlayList&p=19D92675011A3DB3&index=20
so why not in games like BRAID?
yes they are.
In germany they are even concidered culture.
As with all artforms, there’s good art, and bad art. Though the definition of either, is mainly subjective. there’s only so far you can go with whether it is well made on a technical level, then the analysis of whether the result matches the intention etc, etc before you go into subjectivity. Someone once said something along the lines of “Art/Culture is what’s left once you’ve taken away everything you have to do/have to have/have to know. ” That’s partly true, but in any case, my point is that the creation of games is an artform. The same as making a movie, writing a play, or writing a book. The biggest difference, and probably why it is even a question, is the fact that pre-digital, games were entertainment, even a sport, not art (though most definitely culture). With digital gaming, the initial attitude was therefore that of boardgames turned digital. They were themed, and then quickly started moving more and more into the story-realm. Unfortunately, the notion of games being art took a while (and clearly isn’t there yet seeing as you’re posing this question), but there’s art in every part of the production of today’s game (even marketing…). Someone has sat down to create a story. Someone built the characters, someone built the world. -they just chose to do it in a purely (for the most part) digital realm, which makes it hard for the “digitally challenged” out there to accept it as an artform. -If you imdb some of the designers involved in some of the big games, you’ll find they’ve worked on movies as well -and I’m not talking just independent.
Whether all games are artfully made however, is a different question.
A friend of mine wrote his dissertation about games and their relation to culture/art.He especially focusses on what he calls ludic artefacts, i.e. what *gamers* make of it. Here’s the dissertation as PDF:
http://gaming-2-0.blogs.sonance.net/a-download-gaming-20/
Oops, I forgot, the text is written in German. Here’s an English abstract:
http://gaming-2-0.blogs.sonance.net/abstract-english/
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