Good to see this argument again. At least it's phrased properly this time.
First off, the definition listed is a pretty poor fit for the discussion, since it's not really an authoritative source when it comes to rt (Meriam Webster, feh) and most of those listed definitions have little or nothing to do with the discussion. I'd generally argue that any definition of art that takes fewer than five paragraphs and a lot of big words probably isn't adequate to describe the subject ANYWAY, so we'll just leave it at that.
Other observers are right, though - entertainment and art are not entirely mutually exclusive - just mostly so. There's a LOT of art that nobody would mistake for entertaining (you gotta be pretty creepy to want to hang a Maplethorpe in your living room), and if you're talking about that particular kind of art, games are doomed to never ever enter that particular school. Games will never be high art for much the same reason why blockbuster movies wouldn't be if it weren't for the Oscars and Merchant Ivory - money. It takes so much money to manufacture a game that it makes little sense at all to develop something of any substance that won't return a profit, and games that try to be high art are doomed not to do that, in part because their experiential value will be brief and not particularly good (how many times are you going to play The Marriage?) and in part because at least ninety percent of people play games to not deal with thinking and crap. They want to have fun, and art is almost NEVER fun, and it certainly cannot be exclusively fun.
Problems with the medium aside (there's no definition for art that would encompass the video game medium without specifically being tweaked to do so - the interactivity issues, the inability to replicate basic sensory experiences between viewings, and other problems simply make games too different from everything else we think of as art to allow them to group together without deciding at the outset that you're going to expand and warp the definition to allow video games in, and then you have some consideration about what ELSE you're allowing in at the same time - I'm not saying it can't be done if you want, but I don't see how it's useful to consider Braid and the Mona Lisa at the same time, ever, for comparison or otherwise), the goal for most games, like with television and graphic novels and regular novels and film and every other form of popular entertainment, is to, well, entertain. They're not artistic. The big-name games won't EVER be really artistic if the games industry doesn't develop some way to reward that sort of thing (you can squeeze really hard and milk some things out of a game like Call of Duty 4, but you're REALLY stretching, and even then it would be hard to argue that your derived statements and expressions are more than tangential to the experience), and the small-time games will flirt with the distinction, but mostly to excuse the fact that they're not particularly competently produced or executed, or possibly to justify a lack of depth and broad appeal.
First off, the definition listed is a pretty poor fit for the discussion, since it's not really an authoritative source when it comes to rt (Meriam Webster, feh) and most of those listed definitions have little or nothing to do with the discussion. I'd generally argue that any definition of art that takes fewer than five paragraphs and a lot of big words probably isn't adequate to describe the subject ANYWAY, so we'll just leave it at that.
Other observers are right, though - entertainment and art are not entirely mutually exclusive - just mostly so. There's a LOT of art that nobody would mistake for entertaining (you gotta be pretty creepy to want to hang a Maplethorpe in your living room), and if you're talking about that particular kind of art, games are doomed to never ever enter that particular school. Games will never be high art for much the same reason why blockbuster movies wouldn't be if it weren't for the Oscars and Merchant Ivory - money. It takes so much money to manufacture a game that it makes little sense at all to develop something of any substance that won't return a profit, and games that try to be high art are doomed not to do that, in part because their experiential value will be brief and not particularly good (how many times are you going to play The Marriage?) and in part because at least ninety percent of people play games to not deal with thinking and crap. They want to have fun, and art is almost NEVER fun, and it certainly cannot be exclusively fun.
Problems with the medium aside (there's no definition for art that would encompass the video game medium without specifically being tweaked to do so - the interactivity issues, the inability to replicate basic sensory experiences between viewings, and other problems simply make games too different from everything else we think of as art to allow them to group together without deciding at the outset that you're going to expand and warp the definition to allow video games in, and then you have some consideration about what ELSE you're allowing in at the same time - I'm not saying it can't be done if you want, but I don't see how it's useful to consider Braid and the Mona Lisa at the same time, ever, for comparison or otherwise), the goal for most games, like with television and graphic novels and regular novels and film and every other form of popular entertainment, is to, well, entertain. They're not artistic. The big-name games won't EVER be really artistic if the games industry doesn't develop some way to reward that sort of thing (you can squeeze really hard and milk some things out of a game like Call of Duty 4, but you're REALLY stretching, and even then it would be hard to argue that your derived statements and expressions are more than tangential to the experience), and the small-time games will flirt with the distinction, but mostly to excuse the fact that they're not particularly competently produced or executed, or possibly to justify a lack of depth and broad appeal.
