Games will never be accepted as an art form

[retyopy]

Even if your story is the best in the world, even if your dialogue would put Shakespeare to shame, even if your game world is beautiful and mystical, your game isn't going to be called art outside of the gaming community. You want to know why? It's the "GAME" part of a GAME. You know, the part where you spend hours fighting off hordes of zombie and play phiysics puzzles and take part in random violence. Why is this a dooming quality? Because it could effectively be replaced by cutscenes, and it has no point. "But, you filthy, dirt encrusted dog whose name I don't dare speak lest it soil my soul," I hear you spit from the corner of your mouth as you try to comprehend ralking to someone so utterly disgusting and morally bankrupt, "A lot of art is pointless! Some great works of art don't send us a window into the artists soul. Think of the Dada movement. They just took fucking toilets and turned them into art!" And so you sit back on your throne of moral superioty, having won the day.
Or so you think. But first off, the dada movement was a load of shit between to shits on a shit sandwich, (so I basically included them just to get a dig in,) and all those other pointless bits of art are pointless because that's what they are supposed to be. Their meaning is to be meaningless, so to speak. Whereas all of gaming in games could be replaced by cutscenes. oh, sure, some games will be art, but they won't be games. They'll be linear corridors where your character is savaged by monsters that represent the artists inner demons a few times and then falls down a pit, and your only purpose for playing is to "make you feel his pain." But they won't be called games, oh no. They'll be called "immersive representations" or some such crap. So don't delude yourself. No meta-game is going to come along and redefine art and gaming as we know it. Games will never be accepted.

Now, I'm not just here to get beaten up and have my lunch money stolen, and you're not just here to beat me up and steal my lunch money! Your job, escapists, is to engineer a likely scenario in which games will be accepted. LIKELY! REALISTIC! KEY WORDS, PEOPLE! Or, failing that, just comment on what I've written. I'm just as depressed as you aren't, and I want you to pull me out of my funk. I apologize for the wall of textiness.

 

[SammiYin]

Personally, I don't give two shits whether it is / isn't art or not, or if it will even be accepted as art, I play games for fun, I don't want to sit there with a notepad analysing every piece like some pretentious arse head thinking aloud "Hmm, so this is what they developer wants me to feel at this point, interesting, but I only feel this, so I'm clearly playing this wrong, it's time to readjust my entire lifestyle based on the whim of this developer."

I'll play the game for fun, scares, interaction and more fun. Please don't take that away from me by making me analyse and think bullshit about entertainment.

 

[JoshuaMadoc]

Do games *have* to be an artform?

Not that I don't like the idea, but I didn't know this industry is supposed to be run by those cheese-eating, beret-wearing, wine-swilling trumpet-farters in art galleries that I'd rather kick in the face than hear them talk on and on about what art is supposed to be and how godly they are compared to us filthy commoners.

When people say the word "art", I often think about drawings and paintings. At worst, the copious amounts of Boris Vallejo knockoff paintings I'm getting pretty sick of.

Games feel more like storybooks for me.

Is that an artform? I really don't give a shit either way. Do I think Roger Ebert is right about his throatless opinion on games never intended to be an art form? I don't really care, but neither do I picture Ebert as someone who actually knew what the croaking fuck he was on about at the time.

What I may be jaded about right now is that many of these storybooks are either really shit or absolutely sadistic and mood-killing. Say, Bethesda, why the fuck did you make the Argonians and Khajit the perfect propaganda target for the anti-furry human supremacy campaign by the end of Oblivion again? And Blizzard, how much more of a card-playing dick do you want Diablo to be? You're basically dooming each generation of heroes into insanity, corruption or death, and at this rate, you might as well have Diablo 4 be about how both Heaven, Hell and Sanctuary get blown up by Diablo for shits and giggles.

 

[King of the Sandbox]

Art imitates life.

Also, The Sims.

Painting a portrait of a family scene is EXACTLY the same as creating a Sims family to live in your creations.

It's a new medium, get with the times.

Yourargumentisinvalid.jpg

 

[retyopy]

Art imitates life.

Also, The Sims.

Painting a portrait of a family scene is EXACTLY the same as creating a Sims family to live in your creations.

It's a new medium, get with the times.

Yourargumentisinvalid.jpg

It's only a new medium if all the artsy fartsy types let it be, which they won't.

 

[Hagi]

Yeah....

I think I'm actually just going to wait and see instead of believing a post lacking quality spelling, punctuation and paragraphs..... Not to mention actual sources and structured hypotheses, reasoning and conclusions....

 

[NastoK]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109835-Games-Now-Legally-Considered-an-Art-Form-in-the-USA

Oh, what's that? I wonder.. Should I click it?

Anyways, not that I care whether it is considered art or not, 'cause I know there are many, many silly things that people claim to be art (My brother being an Art Academy student, I got the pleasure of hearing it all from him), but, apparently, it's not to us common folk to decide what art is.

 

[retyopy]

Yeah....

I think I'm actually just going to wait and see instead of believing a post lacking quality spelling, punctuation and paragraphs..... Not to mention actual sources and structured hypotheses, reasoning and conclusions....

Sheesh, just an opinion. No need to get heavy with the insults.

 

[ChupathingyX]

Personally, I don't give two shits whether it is / isn't art or not, or if it will even be accepted as art, I play games for fun, I don't want to sit there with a notepad analysing every piece like some pretentious arse head thinking aloud "Hmm, so this is what they developer wants me to feel at this point, interesting, but I only feel this, so I'm clearly playing this wrong, it's time to readjust my entire lifestyle based on the whim of this developer."

I'll play the game for fun, scares, interaction and more fun. Please don't take that away from me by making me analyse and think bullshit about entertainment.

Why can't we have both?

Why can't we have a game that is fun to play and that many people can just sit down and play through, while at the same time include many hidden messages and characters with interesting stories and backgrounds that other gamers can analyse and pick apart themselves?

 

[infohippie]

Games are art to those of us who are "game-literate" as it were. We who understand the medium and are familiar with the tropes and the history. They're not art to other people who lack the experience to understand them as art, and that is not so very different to the situation with other forms of art.

 

[NastoK]

Yeah....

I think I'm actually just going to wait and see instead of believing a post lacking quality spelling, punctuation and paragraphs..... Not to mention actual sources and structured hypotheses, reasoning and conclusions....

To think I almost ninja'd you. I must hone my skills *_*

 

[GameMaNiAC]

Art imitates life.

Also, The Sims.

Painting a portrait of a family scene is EXACTLY the same as creating a Sims family to live in your creations.

It's a new medium, get with the times.

Yourargumentisinvalid.jpg

This.

Think of games as a medium where instead of watching a movie, you are in the movie.

And if movies can be art, so can video-games.

The developers pour their hearts and souls into their video-game. They have worked hard to bring us enjoyment in our lives. Now you tell me that isn't art.

Also...

[img]http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/8492/thief1.jpg[/img]

This is the first thing I thought of when you mentioned Shakespeare.

 

[TCPirate]

While games do fall under the definition of art, I don't really want to have them called art.
While we do have an array of amazing games coming out this year (Skyrim, BF3, etc.) I wouldn't want the way games are to change because we can call them art.

To be fair, No one really knows how it would change the gaming world if we did called them art, I don't imagine it to be good. I could be completely wrong and calling them art could end up giving us more storyline and amazing art style in the game. I just feel comfortable with the majority of games that are coming out that I wouldn't want to change the way games are.

While there are acceptions to this, with games such as call of duty (People could try to argue that it's suppose to be a view on how western communities see people with different ideologies and how we need to change, when really we know they just want to play to see if they can beat their friends to 10th pretige of W/e). I'm happy to live with this.

Edit: I just wanted to say that people don't class games as art because it's something we're playing and having to work through. This is a completely stupid idea. I would rather spend £40 on a game that was fantastic and provided me with hours and hour (or months in the case of Oblivion) of entertainment than pay £10 or £12 on a ticket to see some film that i'll sit and watch for an hour or so and go "Meh. It was alright, I guess."

 

[TCPirate]

-'The US National Endowment for the Arts now considers videogames eligible for artistic funding, legally recognizing them as an art form.'-

You can call video games art (legally) if you want. You can call a piece of excrement on top of a white canvas art too. You can call a wall made out oscillating fans art. Everything is art, didn't you get the memo?

I feel I should quote my old Art Teacher on this.
"If you can justify it and give some reason why you think it's art. It's art. It's up to the person to give it a deeper meaning."

She was a complete and utter b**ch but this made sense to me.

 

[SextusMaximus]

Games are considered an art form by many people, and are accepted as art forms by many painters / musicians...

So, yeah, games ARE accepted as an art form by people - sorry an all.

 

[Hagi]

Sheesh, just an opinion. No need to get heavy with the insults.

How am I insulting you?

You make wide ranging statements which you present as factual truth without taking the time for even quality spelling, punctuation and paragraphs. Not to mention structure or sources. That makes your post unreliable at best. That's not an insult, that's just an observation.

Follow any course on how to write a structured and substantiated piece of text, they'll all tell you that this piece you wrote is not how you do it. It being an opinion does not excuse it from lacking structure or substantiation when it comes to making statement like you're making.

It's just an observation, your post is unsubstantiated and unstructured. Simple as that.

 

[Alexnader]

Even if your story is the best in the world, even if your dialogue would put Shakespeare to shame, even if your game world is beautiful and mystical, your game isn't going to be called art outside of the gaming community. You want to know why? It's the "GAME" part of a GAME. You know, the part where you spend hours fighting off hordes of zombie and play phiysics puzzles and take part in random violence. Why is this a dooming quality? Because it could effectively be replaced by cutscenes, and it has no point. "But, you filthy, dirt encrusted dog whose name I don't dare speak lest it soil my soul," I hear you spit from the corner of your mouth as you try to comprehend ralking to someone so utterly disgusting and morally bankrupt, "A lot of art is pointless! Some great works of art don't send us a window into the artists soul. Think of the Dada movement. They just took fucking toilets and turned them into art!" And so you sit back on your throne of moral superioty, having won the day.
Or so you think. But first off, the dada movement was a load of shit between to shits on a shit sandwich, (so I basically included them just to get a dig in,) and all those other pointless bits of art are pointless because that's what they are supposed to be. Their meaning is to be meaningless, so to speak. Whereas all of gaming in games could be replaced by cutscenes. oh, sure, some games will be art, but they won't be games. They'll be linear corridors where your character is savaged by monsters that represent the artists inner demons a few times and then falls down a pit, and your only purpose for playing is to "make you feel his pain." But they won't be called games, oh no. They'll be called "immersive representations" or some such crap. So don't delude yourself. No meta-game is going to come along and redefine art and gaming as we know it. Games will never be accepted.

Now, I'm not just here to get beaten up and have my lunch money stolen, and you're not just here to beat me up and steal my lunch money! Your job, escapists, is to engineer a likely scenario in which games will be accepted. LIKELY! REALISTIC! KEY WORDS, PEOPLE! Or, failing that, just comment on what I've written. I'm just as depressed as you aren't, and I want you to pull me out of my funk. I apologize for the wall of textiness.

So much of what you say is just... argh. Seriously argh. Instead of shooting you down because the sheer volume of argh in your post is boggling I will take the more fun route and try and come up with a scenario in which a game is art.

It's called Treetoucher, a game in which you guide a hiker through varying areas of intense natural beauty in order for him to reach specific trees and touch them. You must manage his energy, hydration, warmth, comfort etc and in many ways it'll be almost like a sim hiking game. The difficulty comes in the harsh restrictions on how often you can take breaks. The closer he gets to his objective the less often you will be able to sit your character down and tend to his health.

You will lead him through a variety of environments in order to reach target trees of different species. Taking the first letter of each of these species will spell "Elisa, I miss you" though the player is not told this immediately but must instead work it out. The player is rewarded for successfully managing the hiker by being able to walk through areas of intense beauty as well as challenging rock climbing sections etc. The character is driven purely by grief and at first his motivations will not coincide with those of the player as the player simply wants to keep the guy alive while the hiker only wants to move forward. The player will grow to empathise with the hiker and their objectives will begin to coincide as the drive forward brings new natural spectacles, this becomes a healing process or a pilgrimage which is completed when the man completes his quest.


I came up with that in like 2 minutes and I think it has some merit to it even if it is a bit wanky and weird. I'm sure Indy devs can come up with better given a proper development cycle.


Also I need to respond to one bit of derp, interactivity cannot be replaced by cutscenes in terms of artistic merit. That "art" game where you play the columbine shooter would not be particularly effecting or controversial if it was just a movie. By placing people in the crazy guy's shoes situations take on a whole new meaning.