Is Video Gaming Art

[teamcharlie]

I dunno if games are art. Probably? This isn't like an 'Is Ted a bachelor?' question where you can research it and, assuming you know enough about Ted, can get a clear answer that nobody has to argue about as regards his marital status. There are a buttload of different definitions of art and not all of them will apply to gaming. Some will though.

Are there any really good video games? Sure are. Can they make you think? Yep.

That's good enough for me.

 

[UberPubert]

I'd say yes, absolutely, and I don't even think the "better technology"/"better graphics" point is even necessary. Any game that can intentionally convey the creator's meaning to the user through the way they interact with it is it what I'd call videogame or interactive art, and this can apply to everything from the joy of a simplistic platformer to stressful high-tension nature of a first person shooter. If the audience is emotionally engaged or provoked in the same way that a painting, music or even dance would then it has every right to be called art.

But I don't particularly care which specific games register as art to people - personal taste does become a factor at some point - so long as we recognize that the medium has that potential and should be awarded the same rights and privileges as others.

 

[Spacemonkey430]

I would definitely say that there are many different facets of video games that can be considered art. Many games, several of which were mentioned already, have a wonderful narrative that rivals, in my opinion, rival many works of literature. And further, not only the graphics but the art style and world creation that goes into many other games rivals that of other, more conventional works of art like paintings and such. Even for games that aren't graphics intensive like Thomas was Alone. Not to mention, making smooth and seamless gameplay mechanics are like an art form all their own since it can be quite hard and require a lot of creativity to make mechanics that really play well.

 

[Vigormortis]

Why is this even a question anymore?

Yes. Games are art. In most definitions of the word. Just as films, music, painting, drawing, dance, writing, etc are considered art. But, just like those other genres, that doesn't necessarily mean every game is worthy to be considered good or high art.

As a media product, they are both a single piece of art and a culmination of many disparate art forms. Bringing animation, sound design, architectural design, music composition, voice acting, and drawing into one piece. In this regard, they are much like films except, however, video games offer one form of art-expression that film does not. Namely, viewer interaction.

This is the primary thing that sets video games apart from other forms of media art. It may not seem like a form of art but conceiving of, crafting, designing, and planning the methods in which a player interacts with the game, and figuring out ways to tell the story through such interactions, are just as much an art form as using a specific form of painting.

 

[Vigormortis]

Unless you've never taken a game seriously or only have played a game socially, you can probably answer with a "yes" from your own personal experience.

I think the primary reason why its difficult to convince people that games are art, besides general unwillingness to adapt to change, is that to experience games as art, you have to become a gamer. You have to be willing to participate. And possibly one of the biggest stumbling blocks, you have to become capable of playing the game. You can watch as many Let Plays as you want, you will never experience a game through a Lets Play the same way you'd experience it as if you played the game yourself because there's a fundamental difference in that there's no choice when you watch. The only way a person will become immersed in a game is if they want to, they have to want to exercise their interaction, and thats why so many critics look down on games - they're unwilling to try, for whatever reason (most likely stubbornness).

While true, that doesn't really negate video games' status as a form of media art. No more than, say, someone asserting films aren't art because they never bother to watch any movies.

Speaking of which, when films first began many blow-hards who were avid admirers of fine literature or theater insisted that films were rubbish and would never be considered true, high art.

Now look where we are. So the one thing I always say to people when this topic comes up is, "Art is always changing. Always adapting. That's the point. So just ignore the detractors. They'll become irrelevant soon enough."

 

[chozo_hybrid]

[small]I like how OP doesn't even get involved in the discussion himself.[/small]

This is a discussion I have yet to say anything in, because I tend to suck with word things. But here I will try, as I feel it is time to put some thoughts into words that I have held on to for a long time:

Games can be art, but not all games are I guess. It depends on what one considers art to begin with. For some, it's a painting like the Mona Lisa, for others it's a structure like the Washington Monument. It all comes down to the individual, because art is just one of may ways of defining expression. If someone making a game puts some emotion and hard work into it and calls it art, no one can say he/she is outright wrong. People can however disagree and not see it as art themselves, and doing so does not mean it is no longer art to the person who made it, or those that admire it as such too.

 

[Nazulu]

Yep. Just like every other medium it can create that magic feeling that will stay with you forever through great execution.

 

[Phuctifyno]

It has nothing to do with graphics or technology.

Game-making has already been an art-form for centuries.

See: Chess

 

[Bocaj2000]

This is a misleading question. First of all, art is one of the most ambiguous terms in the english language due to the dada and abstract movements. In this case, I will assume that you mean "high art", because anything can be classified as art. My case and point lies in the piece "Fountain" by Duchamp.

Second of all, video games as a whole is not high art. The same goes with books, comics, and movies. With that said, there are individual pieces from each medium that are artistic and can be classified as high art. But by looking at the term "video games" it is easy to say that there is no artistic merit due to the competition factor and its use as a toy instead of a device for narrative and anti-narrative- after all, a game must have a win/lose condition. Instead I will use the term interactive media to include all forms of interactivity from "Choose Your Own Adventure" books to video games to interactive art.

Third of all, to understand this discussion, you must first know what interactive art looks like:

Spoiler

There are better examples, but this will do for now. Now that that's out of the way, better judgements can be made about interactive media and what it looks like when it strives to be high art. The piece Proteus represents the farthest end of the anti-narrative high art spectrum, and Bejewled, Pong, and Tetris represent the farthest end of the nothing-but-a-game spectrum. Everything in between is what the gaming community is most familiar with. Pieces such as Hotline Miami push towards the avant guard while Call of Duty's multi-player is content with being nothing but a game.

It's a lot like Hollywood vs. independent studios conflict in which the blockbusters strive to have artistic merit while the avant-guard strive to be entertaining. This can be seen in films such as Drive striving to be entertaining and Watchmen striving to be avant guard. The inevitable conclusion is avant-pop such as Djengo Unchained and Tarantino's other works. Parallels can be seen in interactive media as well with AAA developers trying to replicate the avant guard of indy studios and indy studios trying to replicate the entertainment value of AAA games.

tldr; Video games as a whole is not art, but specific pieces of interactive media are.

 

[Racecarlock]

Why do you care? Why does anyone care? Like, what does it matter? Seriously, why does it matter if someone considers video gaming to be a form of high art? You don't see people who sit on the couch watching football trying to make a "Sitting on the couch watching football" exhibit at the smithsonian, do you?

Why are we so insecure about our hobby that we so desperately need someone, somewhere to consider gaming to be equivalent to a da vinci painting?

Just why?

 

[Racecarlock]

Why do you care? Why does anyone care? Like, what does it matter? Seriously, why does it matter if someone considers video gaming to be a form of high art? You don't see people who sit on the couch watching football trying to make a "Sitting on the couch watching football" exhibit at the smithsonian, do you?

Why are we so insecure about our hobby that we so desperately need someone, somewhere to consider gaming to be equivalent to a da vinci painting?

Just why?

Maybe some people feel that a lot of these experiences deserve more recognition and credit than just beings toys, lumped into the same category as dress-up dolls and miniature fire trucks. The makers of games like Loneliness, Spec Ops: The Line, and Dys4ia would be very upset if you lumped those works in with that, the same way somebody who directs a film about the Holocaust (Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Book Thief) would be upset if you put it on the same level as a casual game of bowling, an episode of The Jersey Shore, or a masturbation session. Yes, some games are relatively mindless fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. But some games are more than that, and its a disservice to those artists to dismiss their artwork as being equivalent to playing with tiny green army men.

And what is so bad about toys, sir? If you don't think they can be taken seriously, look at american football, European futbol, baseball, basketball, and many more sports. People riot over these things. Do you think they can't be considered important?

Also, we already know which games try to be art and which games try to be fun. They're called genres. There's more than enough fans of those games you listed for them to be considered a genre. It's a niche, but it's there.

Edit: Also, deserve more recognition and credit FROM WHO? Roger Ebert? Too late, he's dead. Fox News? NASA? Harvard University? Who?

 

[likalaruku]

Video games are the very definition of art, but community art, rather than something a single person worked on.

I wouldn't go by what Ebert said. The man was an elitist with zero taste in movies.

 

[Fireaxe]

Games are definitely art, some are just shitty art.

 

[Billy D Williams]

Like every single book, movie, peom, painting, sculpture, doodle and macaroni picture ever fucking made yes, every signle video game with any sort of emotional engagement (so arguably every signle video game) is art. Being art isn't a big deal, give me a second (grabs pencil and paper, starts drawing) aaannnnnd done. I just drew a picture of a black guy and a white guy holding hands, and its a picture that is supposed to show we shouldn't descriminate who we pick as friends based on race. That was art, and its also a stupid fucking picture.

Your probably wondering why I'm talking about my shitty picture I just drew and its because of this. There is nothing special about being art. Art can be complete shit, and it can be amazing. To be honest it's just a meaningless label and we shouldn't be asking ourselves whether games are art, not just because its pointless to ask but also because it is a fact that games are. Its not debatable in any way more than it is debatable that 2+2=4.

That brings us to something that is important; High Art. This is what actually matters. This is the stuff that changes the way people look at things, I think what touches us to our very core, this is the shit that we call special. And it is completely subjective, and it belongs not to a medium but rather to each indiviual piece of art, for example I consider the film Toy Story 3 to be high art and I consider the film Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen to NOT be high art. You can disagree and we will both be right because it is up to each person to decide what is and isn't high art.

In the end I guess what I am trying to say is this is a pointless question as the answer is not only objectively yes, but is more or less meaningless as the term art is more or less meaningless outside of being a label, and the only question that does matter is if a piece of art is high art and that is completely subjective and varies from each individual piece of art rather than the medium as a whole. In my opinion, some games are high art (The Walking Dead and Mass Effect are perfect examples) and some games are not (Call of Duty: Ghosts and Super Mario Galaxy). I also compare CoD: Ghosts and SMG to show that a game doesn't even have to be high art to be good. SMG might not be high art in my opinion because it didn't engage me on any emotional level, but I had more fun with that game than 99% of the games I've played in the last few years. And in the end, whether it be through artistic vision or pure entertainment or a mix of both, that having a good experience is all that matters.

Also, here is the picture I drew

 

[Salvius]

A few disjointed thoughts/responses:

Speaking of which, when films first began many blow-hards who were avid admirers of fine literature or theater insisted that films were rubbish and would never be considered true, high art.

Oh, it goes way beyond that. This whole discussion is reiterating arguments that have basically been made about literally every new artistic medium in history. Films and comic books (and now videogames) are just the most recent examples: I can remember a literature professor in college telling us about how, when the earliest *novels* were published, the intelligentsia insisted they could never be anything but cheap populist escapism, and would never approach the aesthetic heights of classical heroic verse.

Why do you care? Why does anyone care?

I care because videogames are a fledgling artistic medium, and that's an inherently exciting thing to watch, and see where it goes. It's important because there is a real risk of that fledgling medium having its wings clipped through censorship by people who don't recognize its merits (c.f. the Hays Code and the Comics Code Authority, both of which, IMO, held films and comics back from reaching their full potential for some years).

If we want video games to be art, we have to accept ALL of video games, not just the ones we think worthy.

In his foreward to Shell Shocked [http://www.amazon.com/Shell-Shocked-Turtles-Eddie-Frank/dp/1617808466], Howard Kaylan's recent autobiography, Penn Jillette describes going to see Frank Zappa, and being (initially) dismayed to see the two guys from The Turtles on stage in Zappa's band:

Boston 1971: The most important concert of my life and there were the Turtle guys onstage with the man who had taught me to love twentieth-century classical music and real literature.

Years later, brilliant voice actor Billy West would say, "There's one show business." I didn't have those words for it then, but Frank Zappa, Howard Kaylan, and Mark Volman taught me that there was only one showbiz that night in Boston.

It was all mixed together. It was a show that was smart and stupid, heavy and light, beautiful and more beautiful. They were doing a show with cheesy jokes, and it was also art. How could that be? It wasn't stuffy -- it was funny, entertaining, showbiz, vaudeville, and fun, and it still had content.

It was that moment, during that show in Boston, that the line between showbiz and art was erased for me. If Turtles could be Mothers, maybe a hick juggler could speak his heart in a magic show.

Incidentally, Penn Jillette also talked in one of his podcasts about a time his son tried to teach him Minecraft, and how this precisely paralleled his own youthful attempt to play Velvet Underground music for his mother.

You can watch as many Let Plays as you want, you will never experience a game through a Lets Play the same way you'd experience it as if you played the game yourself because there's a fundamental difference in that there's no choice when you watch.

Yep. Judging the videogame medium based on watching videos of other people playing them would be like judging the artistic merits of film based on reading some IMDB synopses, without ever actually having seen one. It's missing something pretty central to the experience.

Remember, too, that unless you're a fairly serious game aficionado, you've probably never even heard of something like Papers, Please or The Stanley Parable. The average non-gamer's awareness of videogames is pretty much limited to whichever ones are shown in TV commercials, which means their perception of the medium is rather skewed. Sort of like basing your opinion of film as a medium entirely on the trailers for big blockbuster extravaganzas.

 

[SeeIn2D]

I actually wrote a paper about this for a class during my first semester of college. I'll post a link to it here. If you don't want to read the entire thing, then my opinion in short is, yes video games are art. If you do decide to read it (don't worry it's not too long) then forgive my mediocre freshman year of college writing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aj-D-GLz2PKyABfXjMjPO7JyYMxvKsLZFVc4lxs4KnM/edit?usp=sharing

 

[hermes]

Video gaming? No. That would be like saying swimming is art.
Video games, on the other hand, are definitely art.