Even Roger Ebert once said that video games couldnt be art because they lack a singular artistic vision due to the colaborative process in which they are made.. and then continued reviewing movies xD
One could argue that architecture is also interactive art, especially on a large scale, as one could wander through say a church, in many different ways
This is a great way of viewing a lot of non-narrative games (or even things like fighting games, which have a narrative, but one that's kinda... optional). When you see people so emotionally invested in game mechanics and strategies -- when you hear the way people talk subjectively about the strategic landscape of their favourite games in often quite emotional terms -- you can kinda view the rules as an abstract structure which players, yeah, wander through and experience like a piece of architecture.
I think that to have an honest discussion about games as art, we first need to get rid of the BS notion that art is some kind of status symbol that separates the common from the special (or good from bad)
Art IS some kind of status symbol. It requires technique and dedication to learn it. If you can learn it in a couple of hours and anyone can do it, there's nothing special about it. That's why no one will (nor should, cause they'll encourage mediocreness) congratulate you every time you're frying some eggs, but they do to a chef who has prepared an "Ommellete du frommage a la garcon avec garlic et champignone alla orange". Why? Because his dish took 135 steps to make and years of training to master it correctly, yours took 2 steps and no previous training. The thing is, people nowadays are used to getting congratulated by their moms for farting, so when reality confronts them with a minimal quality bar, they whine on the internet like you do about how "everything should be art!". Reality doesn't care about your feelings. Man up and do your homework. My way of thinking has created all the artistic golden ages from every civilized culture around the planet right until the 20th century. Yours has created t(c)rap music and the Neo-cult of Mediocrity.
Art is a socially valued cultural element or situation, product of a sum of techniques and skills and the demostration (flexing) of them. The "flexing"/show off of skills is demostrated either through the quality a finished product or by the visualization of the creation process itself in the case of efimeral arts (think about sand drawing with a background music, or dance in general). Improvisation may be sometimes included as a skill, that is debatable and not really my forte, and also off this topic. There are two kinds of arts according to their skill's level. There is low art, where skills required are easy to learn and apply, and High Art, where it's hard. In music, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" played on flute and tambourine is low art, while a Mozart's Piano Concerto is High Art. On the other hand, a voice saying "I'm gonna rape yur mamma, y'all" over a boring rythmic drone is not art, it's just a punk burning time in his basement. Just the same as a nail in the middle of a contemporary museum's wall under the word "happiness" written with period's blood isn't art either, it's just some shit done by a degenerate psycho, and a boring person to be around with most likely. That's why (High Art) must be special, because it has to be some set of skills that few people with hard work and dedication can master, not everyone. It's an ethnicity or nation's tool to show social pride for the creation some members of their society can achieve. No wonder arts mostly showed up when division of labour first appeared. And now since I think but don't know according to you, as implied by your question, what do you THINK art is?
Roger Ebert had this belief and it still grinds me. I don't know why I care so much but it's like changing his mind would change so many others, even though there's few others that are still behind.
Very true, probably the best analysis of the question Ive heard. The good thing is that game designers are getting better at communicating and teaching the language of games and more and more people are learning it, which makes it possible for more interesting creations and uses of the language to exist.
So this is something I've seen come up in Historical European Martial Arts, the word "art" these days has basically come to mean "a thing that makes you feel stuff or think different". But another meaning is simply a thing that has been masterfully made. Someone who has mastered their craft can create masterpieces, and masterpieces are artful, right? They're beautiful, especially to those who truly understand and appreciate how difficult they were to make. We see the same thing in film, right, like Star Wars is art, it's a masterpiece, even though it's an action blockbuster that says nothing more than "shooting space Nazis is cool". You can study Star Wars for hundreds of hours in order to learn how to make better films, or you can simply use it for what it was made for, entertainment. The same goes for video games, clearly. Even the ones made solely for entertainment can be art (DOOM 2016 comes to mind as a personal favorite). But clearly there's been games that have deeply moved their players, those too are masterpieces and I see no reason to deny them the distinction of being 'art'.
One of the most common issues i see with games becoming an art, is the way how people perceive games after this transition. Let's say there is 3 definitions of games: 1. A form of enterteinment (original meaning). 2. A competition (variating from chess to football). 3. An interactive piece of art (the definition that comes with games becoming an art). The misconception i often see is that one group of people thinks that if games will become an art, than defenitions 1 and 2 will go away, while the second one tries to apply the latter to all games. The thing to note for those people is that literature is an art, but not all text is an art.
Also worth noting, in my opinion, is the individual experience one has in relation to the art. Two people aren't required to share the same feelings about a piece of art because it can represent different viewpoints in each observer. So controlling a storyline through gameplay isn't a necessary deviation for variation in subjective experience.
I wouldn't call those "art videogames", but they clearly have a lot of artistic merit. Their strength seems to lie in their setting and storytelling aspects.
There is also the fact that entire genreaas of games explore failure. Look at soullikes and roguelikes, often times these games very explicitly target difficulty and failure. From experience pretty much every roguelike I have played has a protegonist that stands against an insourmountable challenge, which they can only win due to almost masochistic edurance and peresereance. Some, like Hades, do it in a narrative way, while others like Nuclear Throne do it by being hard to the point of unfairness. And yet you can succeed and thrive in both.
I say art is a creation, be it man-made or natural, that speaks to you/has a message, and I don't mean that in a strictly narrative sense. A painting can be appreciated as art for the image/scene itself as well as what the artist wishes to convey. Games can convey thoughts of the developer just like how brush strokes convey the painter's. Really I only think that games are not considered art by the general (or perceived general) populus because there is a lack of understanding and games are only looked at at face value and their deeper meanings are not divulged.
Interesting! I suppose when I think of art, the goal of putting yourself in it is something I feel it's important. In a comp sci 101 class I took I wrote a bit if code and didn't try to put myself into nearly any of it. Like many essays I've written, I wouldn't call it art.
A few foreign films are generic enough to be watched satisfyingly without dubbing nor subtitles comes to mind. Ong Bak comes to mind - it's a Thai film about a villager who is tasked by his village elders to retrieve a stolen Macguffin.
I can't see that video games are not art. I think people are just being extra because they're a relatively new type. Pressing a button on a control pad is turning a page or looking at a moving portrait of *someone's idea... Video games are art...
sorry to sound ignorant but the idea of not seeing video games as art just feels really really silly to me. aside from just, trying to boil down a catch-all definition of art that can encompass anything, video games are made by artists making hundreds of meaningful decisions to create a product that will evoke valuable emotion. like, is that not intuitive enough? any reason I've seen for why video games shouldn't be considered art just feels so childish and thoughtless. most arguments I've found can't hold up to "why not?". why can't art be interactive? why can't you form your own experience through someone else's creation? why must art be static and fully in the control of the creator? to me, the "video games are not art" stance feels like that table allegory from innuendo studios. they see a flat slab of wood, want to think its a table, and will form legs in order to make it a table and prove they're right. you can knock out a leg but it doesn't matter because they'll replace if with a new leg, the legs have no merit of their own. the legs don't matter, they're just a means to proving themselves right. critics are confronted with video games, and are dead set on seeing them as non art, and will come up with fallible reasons to explain why they're non art. you can destroy the reasons but it doesn't matter, the video games are not art argument is not founded off of reasons, it founded off a predetermined conclusion. people want to view video games as non art, and form excuses for why they're right. and let's not ignore the agenda of critics who REALLY don't want video games to be perceived as art...
But anyway games do have an ending that's the same for everyone, or a few possible endings that are the same for everyone, endings on games are not open, just like in books and films.
Two of my favorite games are the Ace Attorney series and Mother 3. They’ve each had a huge influence on my relationship with media in general, and I’d say they’re both stellar examples of video games as “art”. The Ace Attorney series delivers a strong message about law, both within the actions and dialogue of the characters, and as meta-commentary. It’s an unflattering caricature of the Japanese legal system, and it’s a blatant condemnation of “trial by public opinion”. Of course there’s a lot of other themes and messages and gimmicks, but the heart and soul lies in the pursuit of justice and questioning what our meaning of justice is. Mother 3 is a game about grief and growth. The losses that occur early on are felt throughout the entire narrative, and the changes in the environment directly parallel the growth of the main character. It’s a somber, heartfelt, and visceral account of a boy becoming a man and coming to terms with the loss of a loved one. I’ve seen a lot of good movies and read dozens of books, but it was only when I experienced these games that I realized just how impactful art and storytelling can be on shaping my worldview.
I'd argue that it does, but the way its explained in the video is kind of nebulous. If a book has poor pacing, at least in my experience, it ends up taking me longer to finish it than if the pacing was better. That being said the pacing of a book and how quickly I read through it aren't completely connected. I might be reading a very well paced book but also have a busy schedule which means less time to read and therefore more time to finish the book
Roger Ebert said that before games improved in their art form. He’s extremely narrow minded in this case, lacking the imagination to see beyond the then current forms. Games then could show still images, it can play videos.. not hard to see the potential for art, unless he thinks a movie is no longer high art if you throw in interaction at the very start. If that was the case, I guess DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s aren’t high art; pressing play is interaction. Of course, he’s never played Myst so calling it a scavenger hunt is just... like he hasn’t even read a detailed review of it.
i would even argue that video game re often made with the idea that you won't 100% finish them, even the main storyline. sure it is problematic to understand the piece for something realy narative focused, such as life is strange. but if you only managed to bite like 3/4 of the level of doom, you can still say that you enjoyed the game.
Solid video, save for the fact that you completely missed the point when discussing pacing with literature. When we talk about the pacing of a book, we're talking about something *intrinsic* to the writing, not something extrinsic. We're talking about the flow of the narrative and the prose. It absolutely does not refer to the amount of time it takes a person to read the text--which is utterly absurd. The pacing of games *is* different because a great deal of the pacing is determined by the player. Whether or not you set aside a novel for a week before finishing it, or pause a movie to go make a salad, the actual content is unchanged. Scenes, dialog, plotting, etc. all occur in exactly the same manner with exactly the same arrangement, aligned exactly with the intent of the author. This is not the case for games, because the player is an *active* participant, helping to author the experience his or her self within the confines of the programmed and scripted worlds.
True, I had the same thought, but there IS going to be intrinsic pacing in a video game, more so the more linear they are and/or the more story-heavy they are. No matter how often you get lost on the way to your destination there will often still be things you can't do until you do something else, and progress may feel rushed or too slow. If you read the dialogue the pacing there can feel off. (Perhaps purposefully. If you have options maybe you were given the option to bring up something before you've even greeted the NPC and are then admonished for it.) But art has many definitions and it can be hard to draw lines sometimes. If video games are art, are board games? Many have narratives, even complex ones, after all. If art is use of a creative skill or the product thereof, are mathematical proofs art? And what about the distinctions people make between craft and art? I'm happy to let people categorize how they like. In the end what matters is the value those who enjoy it find in consuming or creating it, not arbitrary, vaguely defined classifications. Sorry I went off on a bit of a tangent from my original point.
Becca I agree with you. A single player game experience like GTA V has a storyline that you experience linearly the same as all other players, more or less. You have the ability to delay experiencing those moments by playing around in the sandbox or doing side missions. To me, that's the equivalent of flipping around two earlier parts of a book to recontextualize them after reading an important later part of the book. No one would say that the book's pacing is ruined because you did that. To Me, video games provide new ways to experience the content. In the same way that you will experience a movie differently when you're 20 versus when you're 60, or when your happy versus when you're depressed. Once again, those changes never disqualify a book or a movie as art, and I don't think the change ability of the experience of a video game should disqualify it from being art as well. Ultimately, there is content embedded in the video game in some way, and it's that content that qualifies the overall experience as art, just as with the interactive art that foldy provided examples of.
Well the original post basically answers itself. "When we talk about the pacing of a book, we're talking about something intrinsic to the writing, not something extrinsic." I can't imagine any good video game, was made with out any thought put into the games over all pacing.
Board games. They are both aren't they, i mean we define them as a game, but for instance Chess, the board and pieces are all art, you have a graphic art, and you have wee sculptures/ carvings. As for defining art, i don't think it means one specific thing, nor should it.
If anyone out there has spent as long thinking about the mona lisa as I have spent playing skyrim then I will believe that video games aren't art but you must have a sad life if you've spent 800 hours thinking about a single painting.
So this is silly late, even more late with the original upload date, but all the same I kind of want to offer a thought for anybody still poking around these comment sections. I think Elitism and Ignorance are absolutely a huge factor but.. More and more I think there's a bit of an internal tension around games from people who like to play them. I think everyone wants games to be taken seriously, but at the same time, some people aren't willing to take their own games that seriously. You can't want games to be art, and 'keep politics out of games.' Personally, I see the value in, say, Call of Duty. Despite being an intensely political game, and one which has implications I don't really like, I've had fun playing a few games in the series. That said, there is a violent pushback from some people who enjoy games in response to that kind of analysis. I absolutely think games are a form of art, and that opens the door for all that includes. I think much like film, there are pieces in the medium that aren't challenging or complicated, almost like candy, and there are pieces which are incredibly well put together and artistic. Both are open to criticism. However, I think some outside observers can see that internal tension and compound it with the idea of games as a childish thing, they can look at.. I don't know, the way games so often frame women (That dead or alive volleyball game comes to mind, or are there a lot of them? There are probably a lot of them) and dismiss them easily that way. Even Ico, which I have heard awesome things about, has a bit of a yikes relationship with women. I'm rambling a bit and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody ever read to this point, but the point is... Without more push to internally not just claim games as art, but critically *treat* them as art to be appreciated, deconstructed, and critiqued, we'll find it is a slow journey to make the fact that they are art known. Granted, it has been a positive journey, and games are a lot more mainstream now than they were 10 years ago. But I, for one, can't wait to see the art games we make 10 years from now, especially if we keep pushing for that artistic analysis.
I mean, is a game of baseball art? It has a lot of of art in it. Be it the logos of the teams, or the music playing during the game. But is the game itself, 9 innings and a score at the end with stats. Is that art? My opinion is no. I think it is a game. It is just categorically different than art. In the same way the activity of doing a puzzle, or doing a Rubriks Cube are not art. They both can be art but doing the thing is my art, I think video games exist in a realm much closer to these things, as an action a person takes that involves experiencing a lot of art, but the activity itself is not art.
A game of baseball is not designed, can’t be imbued with artistic meaning. A video game is Sports are what the rules don’t constrain Video games are what the rules allow
I disagree philosophically, and i’m not an art nerd. I don’t view video games as art for the same reason I don’t view a season of NFL football as art. It is a game. It is just a different thing. And while you can find profound meaning and beauty in games, they just aren’t the same categorical thing as art, in my opinion. Programming is not art. It is a language. Games are programming logic gamified. Not art.
Multiplayer video games are usually closer to sports or other competitive games like chess. With single player games it's much clearer that they have nothing at all in common with sports. Games like Portal, Braid, Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid and Dark Souls are much closer to movies and books in terms of themes and creative expression. Interactivity and challenge are fundamental aspects of video games, and in my opinion those things are what legitimize games as a unique art form. They are the things that make games unique, valuable and interesting. It would be very hard for a book or a movie to teach you about space as well as Portal, or about time as well as Braid. Also, when you say "Programming is not art, therefore games that are built with programming isn't art." is pretty much the same as saying "The ink this book was written in isn't art, therefore the book isn't art." It's a complete non-sequitur.
The NFL is a game in between two teams which is only controlled by a set of rules. Video games generally are a story controlled by the developer. The NFL doesn't have a scripted beginning middle and end, Mario does.
You make risks in games all the time. When you make a jump from one platform to another in Mario you risk missing the jump and loosing a life. Thats a risk is it not?
Perhaps it would be sensible to make an even stronger claim: All art is an interactive discourse with the reader, the difference lies in the magnitude of this interaction as well as its specific shape. The interaction-equals-no-art argument relies on the reader to be a passive recipient of whatever they encounter, but this is far from true (and also a touch behavioristic), after all, take books: Simply staring at them does next to nothing, instead the reader has to actively read them, effectively participating in building the world and the narrative. In this prosses, the core content might always stay the same, as it is written down, but what the reader actually makes out of it, what kind of story they build from it, what kind of place it takes place in, who the characters even are, what they look like. Language can only convey so much, the specifics are always something the reader needs to bring in themselves. The same holds true for film and other media, although the language is as different as the ways in which to read it.
Indeed, books can fail to communicate because of their difficulty to read. If that's the case, then Ulysses is the Dark Souls of literature. And I genuinely feel confident about that statement, and didn't just say it as hyperbole. Ulysses is hard to read.
I'd say Ulysses isn't hard to read so much as it's hard to parse because it's incredibly dense with allusion, dialect, contemporary references, symbolism etc. That's what I found when I attempted it some time ago at least, you read and you're just wandering how much of it you actually missed while still getting some of the stylistics and narrative (as much as there is one) gist. And that can trip you (or at least me) up
@@Ghosthacker94 It occcurs to me that it stands in multiple ways about pacing. I've been reading it for years because it's so dense i keep needing a break, but the writing style actually asks you to read it fairly quickly, particularly as it's made up primarily of inner monologue, which in reality takes place faster than the meatspace dialogue between people. So from one side it's paced very well and reads like the rapidfire (or occasionally slow, depending who's head you're inside) inner workings of people's heads, and on the other it's exhausting, especially if you read through a transition between styles in one sitting because you have to switch speeds and get on the same page as that next one. It would be fascinating to play a game that had a similar effect, something you reaaaallly have to sink your teeth into to approach but has slow times, and action packed times within it.
@@Ghosthacker94 well yeah, but i think thats a pointless distinction. Given the book is in a language you speak reading any book shouldnt be difficult, when we say a book is difficult to read its almost always in reference to our ability to understand what it means/means to say, not a difficulty to literally read it.
GiRayne that's the same thing. For me at least. There is a huge part of gaming community who want only "objective" reviews without personal opinions involved, and actually claim that games are not art, but instead are just a product for escapism
GiRayne I would like to clarify that I did indeed see gamers who opposed politics in reviews, while claiming that games are not art. Those people are rare, bu they do exist
To me film, television, video games, comics and novels can be both art and escapism. Spirited Away which is probably my favorite film is escapism into a fantastical world but also is art with themes of greed, growing up, compassion and remembering who you are.
What is art? trying to keep a simple view. video games are art. or in another perspective, are an art in their own right. similar to movies, that they both uses multiple sources of art to create, they use music, graphic etc etc. Or you can personally define art as something that is done skillfully, and a well put together game is art. (though i feel in our current paradigm, limiting art to one definition is wrong.) this a rather cop out answer, i admit, but the definition of art doesn't seem to get touched on much in this discussion.
When talking about games as art I'm always reminded of this quote from Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney during their 'renaissance'; "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement. In order to make money, we must always make entertaining movies, and if we make entertaining movies, at times we will inevitably make history, art, a statement, or all three." I think the discussion of games as art has always been dominated in the mainstream by the presence of big budget studios who only pump out products under this mantra. Movies have been around long enough and proven themselves artistically enough that movies without surface-evident broad appeal to the masses can still receive funding and be produced with a fairly substantial budget, while in the realm of videogames the big budget titles and even the medium budget titles all come from people who share Eisner's philosophy. They're making entertainment for mass consumption which may at times incidentally become significant. Games that are actively trying to be art always come out of smaller, independent studios, and very rarely see much mainstream discussion. I think the tides are very gradually starting to shift on this, though, as more titles like Undertale become such substantial cult hits that they bleed into the mainstream in a big way and force big studios to start seriously considering less tried and true game formulae if for no other reason than these much cheaper projects often see a vastly more substantial return on investment when they do become popular than any big budget title could hope for. Of course one can adopt the philosophy that it doesn't matter what you're trying to do or how society views any particular work's artistic merits, any sort of expression can and is art; but I don't believe that's something the vast majority of people hold true. For most, there is a clear distinction between art and entertainment, and while art can be entertaining, it doesn't have to be, and very often isn't; nor does entertainment have to be artistic. Even those who believe all expression is art generally categorize things by degrees of artistic merit and importance; so even if one would insist that, for example, Duke Nukem Forever is a work of art, I don't think many would defend it as an important work. Videogames are art, sure - all of them, without exception, right down to the most basic cookie clicker knockoff littering the Steam storefront, but the vast majority of the games that get any public attention or scrutiny are not trying to be in any sense and so the masses rightly decide that based on the information they have, videogames are devoid of artistic merit and largely unimportant.
Concerning player/control- what about those old 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books? Are not able to be art like other books? Of course they can be art. Therefore visual novel games can be art. Visual novel games are video games so at the very least some games must be art, if not all.
It's remarkable that even now, after almost 40 years of video games being a thing, there is still a stigma around video games from so much of society. Perhaps society needs to realise that if video games don't meet the definition of art, its the definition of art that needs to change
I've been watching all of your videos since finding out about your channel a week ago and it's been great. This video touches upon a bunch of points made in a comment I posted on your video on context. (the comment seemingly vanished the moment I made it and it was too long to rewrite on a phone.) The basic jist being that a work of art being commercial in nature doesn't detract from its value (another popular argument used against games being art) as conveyance is the heart of all art and art only realizes its potential once it meets its audience. Videogames have very complex means of conveyance that evolve and change over the course of exposure and mastery. As a game desginer, one of the principles I try to adhere to is mechanics that can be easily understood but that with mastery, vastly change the way the game is experienced. Platinum Games has a large breadth of work that capitalizes on this concept. Games a beginner can enjoy on a surface level of just getting to the end but with deep systems that reveal themselves and alter how the player wants to interact with the game. Do you play PC games? We (my studio) are currently creating a game for PC that based on your enjoyment of Ico and the Souls series, you might enjoy (our game is built using similar philosophies of conveyance but is drastically different in theme and mechanics).
Same boat! I just discovered his channel recently too, albeit several months less recent than yourself. I'm still on the fence about whether I prefer the puppet or not, but I'm glad his content has meaningfully evolved(something a lot of entertainment channels utterly fail to do) I enjoy the content quite a bit, and feel like I've stumbled upon a "section" of youtube dedicated more to legitimate criticism than entertaining the audience... a section I wish I'd discovered ages ago. That particular paradigm certainly explains the lack of subs and views on his channel, unfortunately.
After having just finished reading "Animal Crossing: WELCOME TO CAMP" it immediately made me think of this video. Video Games have simply become the peak of Art😩
It has been almost FOUR DECADES since books and games merged into one, new medium (visual novels) but people are still delusional enough to deny possibility of games being art. It's sad and funny at the same time.
I would argue anything created and shared has the potential to be art. My view of art is kind of like Kung Fu. I see something as a work of art when it has been taken to a higher level. There's an invisible masters mark that comes through in an emotional response. IDK if that makes sense.
Art can be anything. Anything that can be PRESENTED as art, and therefore CONSUMED as art, is art. That's it. That's all you need. The only thing art requires is for someone to go, "I now will this to be art," and for someone else to go, "yes." Sometimes it helps if there are other people people involved, or someone selling tickets, or critics to tell us if it's any good or not, but so long as there is a CREATOR and an AUDIENCE/CONSUMER, you've got the basics covered.
I agree, after thinking a lot about how I would define art, the most satisfying answer I've come up with is "something someone made with a purpose". whether that purpose is to make people passing by stare in awe at your skyscraper, to channel your own opinions and angst, make your listener cry, or just make people buy your product because you made the packaging look nice. anything made can be considered art. and a second definition I like toying the idea of is "something someone really appreciates". I think nature can be art, as well as someone's coffee stain on their shirt. as soon as someone takes a non-literal understanding of something, I think that can be considered art.
PLEASE MAKE MORE VIDEOS ON GAMES I'm astonished RU-vid JUST showed this one to me, after i've already seen like 30 of your videos. Like so many others, your Suicide Squad video got me hooked, the hunt for your prose about video games keeps me subscribed.
The whole video, I was distracted by how much I hate the term "video game". To me they have always been computer games, which makes perfect sense, because they're games you play on a computer. In New Zealand English, video almost always meant video cassette right up until RU-vid came along, so calling them video games rather than computer games sounded nonsensical, even perhaps idiotic. What this says about the effectiveness of communication via the medium of language, I'm not sure, but it seems like it might be at least possibly relevant. You say what you mean, with the expectation others will understand what you mean, but in reality they are forming their own meanings from your words, and assuming that your intended meaning actually matches their perceived meaning. In this sense, even holding a simple conversation becomes an art form in itself, as one must consider all the possible miscommunications that might result, anticipate how it could be perceived, and move beyond saying what you mean to saying what will cause the other to hear what you mean.
