Games as art - why do we even care?!?

[GeneralFungi]

I believe that games are art. Now, before you stop reading this post and disregard it completely, hear me out. Do you find certain video games to have a significant emotional impact on you? Do you enjoy the way gaming makes you think, and tests things like your adaptability or your reflexes? Do you simply find shooting a guy in the face with a shot gun entertaining?

Well, that's good for you.

Does the above make gaming art? That is up to you. I'm so sick and tired of people PREACHING to each other about whether gaming is an art form or not. This banter back and forth annoys me to no end. People are forgetting that art is subjective. Art is not as black and white as people make it out to be. If you don't think it's art? That's what you think. If games don't meet your personal criteria of something that is art, no amount of me shouting in your face is going to change that. Trying to convince someone that gaming is art is NOT enlightening them.

That's akin to me thinking that rocky road ice cream is the best ice cream and demanding that everyone come to recognize that. It doesn't serve any function other then to drive people insane. Art can be anything to an individual if it meets their criteria.

If gaming fits in your criteria for art, then as far as you are concerned, it's art. If it doesn't fit in your criteria, it's not art. It's your decision. I still think that the government trying to single out things as art to be extremely ham-handed, but that's my opinion.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I think the word "art" should be taken out back and shot, then burned to ashes and pissed on.

I'm so sick of hearing it in regards to gaming, and people using it as a "we matter" arguement for the outside world. Games are a billion dollar industry; We already matter. The label of "art" isn't going to change anything.

All that this "games are art" bullcrap reminds me of is anime fans desperately trying to get non-anime fans to like/approve their shit; "See, see, Cowboy Bebop and Baccano are good. See, see, look."

 

[Varrdy]

This is something that's been bouncing around in my head for a while now:

Why do we even care if games are considered "art" or not?

As long as we're enjoying them, what does it matter if the rest of the world doesn't think they're art?

Are our egos really so fragile that we need games to be considered art in order for the time we spend playing them to seem worthwhile? Will our lives somehow be different if people see gaming as something akin to visiting a gallery or watching a noir film rather than just sitting in front of a screen mashing buttons?

Fans of all sorts of music - be it metal, electronic, hip hop, punk, whatever - have had people telling them for years that their preferred music is "just noise" and "not real music". But do they care? On the whole, no, they don't. They're too busy having fun. Should gamers be taking a leaf out of their book and just ignoring the whole issue?

I more or less agree with you completely!

Why can't games just be games? It wouldn't diminish my enjoyment of them one iota if that's all they would ever be seen as!

Besides...The "art" label these days can be tagged to pretty much anything. Take for instance that un-made bed covered with soiled underwear and drug paraphernalia that Tracy Ermin wheeled out a few years ago.

What a bloody benchmark, huh?

 

[Sehnsucht Engel]

Are our egos really so fragile that we need games to be considered art in order for the time we spend playing them to seem worthwhile? Will our lives somehow be different if people see gaming as something akin to visiting a gallery or watching a noir film rather than just sitting in front of a screen mashing buttons?

I don't think that games should ever be on the level of visiting a gallery. It doesn't even feel like it fits them. I think it should be an accepted medium of creative expression though, like a movie maybe.

 

[-Samurai-]

I've been asking this question since the first "Can games be art?" threads started popping up, and I've come to the conclusion that I personally don't care.

You can call them art, you can call them not art. You can call them games, experiences, wastes of time, or you can call them ham sandwiches. It has no affect on my enjoyment of them.

I enjoy them for what they are, not for the title they have, or the category they're placed in.

 

[Eamar]

Sure I'd like it if I could discuss gaming with a non-gamer and not get the eye-rolling treatment, but it's really not much of an issue in my mind. I mean, who wants the gaming equivalent of "Oscar bait" movies?

In all seriousness though, I'm firmly of the opinion that it'll happen eventually, we don't need to crusade for it. Games will eventually be accepted, just like films, pretty much every "new" genre of music, even novels (if we're going far enough back) were. The ignorant backlash that considers games the root of all evil is nothing new and is not unique to gaming: everyone knows that rock music was considered some corrupting influence, but we should also remember that the exact same things were said of Elvis, jazz, blues... it'll pass and some other medium or genre will emerge to be stigmatised and belittled.

Also, once that does happen developers won't all be getting a free pass to hide behind the "art" shield. Just as lots of very fun, perfectly good movies will never seriously be considered "art," not all games will earn or even want that title.

Having said all that, I don't really think games are ready to be considered art yet. Sure there are a few titles that can be, but overall I feel that this is very much an *emerging* medium. It's just coming out of its infancy. To be honest, even writing or acting (for example) that are praised as shining examples of games' highest achievements just wouldn't be considered that good when compared to their equivalents in other media. We just accept that most games have poor stories, terrible acting or unsatisfying endings (NOT trying to turn this into a discussion about the obvious current example here, but it is something that's been brought up in those arguments from time to time). I love games, and I'm not saying that we should always be comparing them to movies or whatever, but we've got a way to go yet. Like I said though, it'll happen eventually. In the meantime there's really no point in getting worked up about it.

That's what I think anyway.

 

[Suicidejim]

I started writing a response to this, then realized I've already done one before on an earlier thread, and it was probably better than what I was going to write, so here's that one instead:

There are actually quite a few reasons from what I can see.

Obviously, there are the legal benefits and protections to begin with, which pretty much can constitute an entire argument on their own. A lot of people want games to be able to approach and deal with mature subject matter without being threatened with censorship or crusades against them "for the sake of the children."

Next, social perceptions. Firstly, the obvious one, wherein gamers aren't singled out and mocked by non-gamers. Now, a lot of people seem to consider this a petty or selfish one, but if we remove the stigma from being a gamer, and allow it to become something that anyone can indulge in, it could benefit gaming as a whole. If gaming were to be respected as a normal pursuit like reading or watching movies, more people would buy and become interested in games, and the industry could find vast, untapped reserves of customers, all with varying tastes and desires, and create a wider range of new products to cater to them. Secondly, working in the game industry would no longer be stigmatized either (well, no more than working in any artistic industry . . . so, still a lot, but an improvement nevertheless). Being a game developer would be a respectable career choice, and you wouldn't get talented individuals turned away from that path because of parents/friends etc. considering it to be childish and stupid, like wanting to be a rockstar or an astronaut. It's possible that more people would go into colleges and universities and take courses on game design and theory, and it's in such an environment that you'd get some true innovation, and maybe a few new concepts that could change the entire face of gaming if we're lucky.

Now, many gamers, myself included, are blinded by the passion of the fanatic. We believe that, if we just get people to play some of these games, suddenly everyone will realize they were wrong all along, and games are awesome, and everyone will want to play games forever and ever and it'll be rainbows and sunshine and all that. Obviously this won't be the case. If games aren't a person's thing, they just won't care. But some people are genuinely turned away by the stigma of playing games, even though they do enjoy them. That is a tragedy, and it saddens me that silly social concepts turn people away from enjoyable or enlightening experiences.

Lastly, why the hell not? Many people here would probably agree that games are art, so why shouldn't that be recognized? I genuinely can't see a decent downside to it. It's not like we'll suddenly end up knee deep in obscure arthouse games or anything like that.

Heck, plenty of other mediums are considered art, and it's not as though they magically became less awesome, and there's plenty of benefits. So why not?

 

[SnakeoilSage]

Video game developers, meet me at Camera 4: you know it's really kind of arrogant and pretentious for anyone to declare their effort to be "a work of art" right? You can slap a scene of the Illusive Man silhouetted before a dying star and it's all colorful and sci-fi, but five minutes later you'll be shooting robots in the face and having sex with blue alien women who are culturally and biologically required to have sex with everything in the galaxy, so don't pretend there's something fucking sacred about your cash cow.

Bioware, MovieBob is bullshitting you. He says you could be making art instead of a product. But that isn't true. You are entertainers. You don't write Shakespeare. You don't even write Tolkien. You create pulp. You create TV serials. You're Stephen King at best, comic book hacks at worst. And right now, you're leaning closer to Rob Leifeld than anyone.

Art isn't decided by the artist. Art is decided by people 50, 100, 500 years from now who hold your creation up as symbol of the timeless human condition, or as a cornerstone of your culture and era. History decides if you leave any kind of legacy, and at best you're looking at a shitty Hollywood film that spectacularly fails the spirit of your story in favor of some cheap garbage designed to fill in the pre-summer Blockbuster season.

Do you think you can just slap a video game together and be called next Tolkien? Do you think that selling a million units of a video game on its first day will mean we'll still be playing it or even talking about it in fifty years?

"Don't change my art" is the weakest excuse you can give not to correct your work. Before you start whining about fan backlash, try reading the Evil Overlord list, Rule #12: "One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."

It's not a hard concept to grasp, so grow the hell up. You fucked up. You can deny it all you want but none of us, including yourselves, are being fooled by it. You. Fucked. Up. Learn from it and move on. Do you hear what I'm telling you? LEARN and MOVE ON.

 

[Yuno Gasai]

The current mindset of "we need permission from the public to be creative and make things they won't play anyway" is totally backwards. Developers should make whatever they want and the public should grow to accept us because of it, not let us once they have accepted it. The industry as a whole needs to man up and stop being pushed around, not get some green card from a different medium most people regard as mindless entertainment anyway.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head, here.

I don't understand why the public feel the need to intervene on games being made around certain topics without even bothering to do the research on how those topics are handled.

 

[Jaeke]

Well... there are a FEW reasons...

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2)more $$
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6)What else....

 

[Gamer_152]

For a lot of people I think it's been about proving something to the world about games or convincing themselves that their own pastime was worthwhile, but I don't think that's what the games as art debate has to mean. The debate over whether games are at can be an interesting topic in itself, can give us an idea of what games are capable of and can better help us understand the medium as a whole.

 

[Busard]

On my side, I don't see why is there all this "art bashing" going around in the gaming community, that is as rampant as the "games are art" community. I especially cringe when I hear people, may it be here or some other forums, spitting on works that went through centuries of human history and thrived despite dark ages and the ignorance of man until today, just so they can be belittled again here by people's who main culture come from video games.

The art label will never hurt this media. It's just that. You don't need to get pissy about it. Games like Dear Esther and Limbo won't become the norm. Heck, the people who worked on Dear Esther are gonna assist the guys from Amnesia to make a new game. I'd say that is a pretty nice step forward, because we get a mix of two teams with each their own specialty.

And the whole Bioware thing is one case, one game amidst tons of other products who will be either good or bad, and ME3's ending will mostly not define some kind of arbitrary artist integrity. I'm pretty sure a big majority of the development world agrees with the players on that case (that they should just focus on making stuff player wants and not what they think is best).

What should change is how video games are viewed as art. Still now, devs and the public try to compare art in video games as they see art in paintings and in movies. It's not the same type of expression: it mixes visual expression, interactivity with a plethora of mechanics and player-driven narrative (as in it goes by the player's pace not only during cutscenes but during gameplay, not necessarily that the player chooses how the story goes). Devs and the public have to learn new ways to create, learn and enjoy the form of art that are video games.

But denying that games are art is just silly. It brings nothing and makes it just lose it's credibility to push it back as just "kids toys", or so what I think.

Let the artists try to be artists, and make their experiments, it's not gonna harm the industry. You are free to not like the recent games that came out, but eventually these new artsy devs will learn to perfect themselves and adapt to the industry they're in.

Also, please stop seeing art as some kind of pretentious type of expression. Art has always been there to try to enlighten the common man and bring the better part of him out. It is an "elite" type of thing, but in the good sense: it tries to push our comprehension of things beyond it's normal boundaries, and to provoke different emotions and feelings. It's not just here to be pretty. But it's also not here to be patronizing (although excuse me if I come across as such, it's not my intention).

 

[II2]

I think it's mostly a symptom of being concerned about other people's opinions.

There is no further insight to be gleaned from recycling this topic.