Poll: Should Games become art?

[bulbasaur765]

I guess my definition for art would something that expresses an idea through a medium such as a game whether it be visual, audio, narrative, etc. But games don't [have] be art if they're not intended to be art and may be mainly for fun.

 

[Zyst]

Doesn't matter: Is something drawn in a canvas art? Of course not, but art can still be drawn in a canvas.

A Game is similar. Does a game have to be art? Certainly not, but it can be art, it can move our hearts and make us cry, make us want to roar in happiness, make us frustrated and make us feel all sorts of emotions, so, do I think games CAN be art? Hell yes.

 

[42]

Do they have to be? i mean seriously, does everything have to be labelled artistic?
People say Braid was an example of video games as art. No it wasn't. It was a puzzle game that was well designed, and had good aesthetic. And i don't get why people are obsessed with games having to become an art form, when it's primarily used to be a form of entertainment to pass time. It's these sort've hipster wankers that see and go "oooh that has to be considered an art form or become one" and then go out of their way to take something and then try and intellectualise it, and then present it as something that can make a statement. Games don't have to make statements when we've got The Internet, Television, Movies, Paintings, Photographs, sculptures, installations, which already do all these messages and more. Games have nothing to gain from being considered art, however the only gain it does make means that it means that the artistic freedom of the developers remain intact, and by artistic freedom i mean what they create within and for the game.

 

[Tselis]

Books have been considered art for centuries, and there are still people out there who try to have them banned from schools and libraries. Where there are humans, there are differences of opinion. What's crucial is that we have the freedom to disagree, and the freedom to enjoy what art forms we wish too without interference from people who can't stand the thought of someone living life differently from them.

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

They CAN be art. They don't HAVE to be art. So no, I wouldn't say ALL games need to be art, but I believe that they can be art just as much as films or books.

 

[MagnetoHydroDynamics]

Games, as the result of a creative process are very hard to not consider as "art."

However, one can argue that your white-bread seen-before FPS is about as much art as your average mid-budget forgettable action cinema flick.

Games are art.
Films are art.
Novels are art
Music is art.
Painting is rt.
Etc.

You cannot say that Games are not art as a whole, but you can argue the individual case.

 

[Tristan6928]

For games to not be art that means that people would stop reviewing them, stop cherishing them, stop caring about them and basically for the whole industry to have an apathy attack and die.

I don't agree with that statement. As long as there were humans, there were games (hide and seek, sports, board games). None of these games have ever demanded to be called art in the 3000+ years that we have existed. And yet, they are still extremely popular. Rugby, Basketball, and chess are played by millions of people world wild every day and yet they aren't classified as art. These games should have died according to what you said, and yet they still exist and are extremely popular. Videogames are new, and have grown significantly without being called an art form till recently.

In sports the sport itself is categorized in roughly the same way as art. Individual plays and actions may be evaluated and treated like art. If you think sports aren't art then go talk to that fans who painted themselves in team colors with almost no clothes on in below 0 weather. You can't tell me that admiration doesn't constituent the kind of affection that defines art. In the same way games are are treated with an admiration as art. I don't define art by the wishy washy non-definitions that people come up with junk about needing to have X or Y. I choose to define art as a cultural aspect that is far more axiomatic and says the art is based on how we react rather then any thing in and of itself. Games survive because people treat them specially. There being treated specially is art. If they weren't art then they would not have come anywhere near where they are because people just wouldn't be interested.
Aside from that, why are you just making the blanket assumption that I'm talking about all kinds of games ever? Why can't I talk about video games alone? Why can't I refer to an subset of games? Why did you turn my argument into a straw-man and try to batter it down that way?

First of all, don't get me wrong! I've started this thread cause i went from being for games as art, to being unsure (I'm currently doing more research to gain a better understanding on this topic). I am currently "trying" to be as unbiased, and criticizing the points i don't agree with to possibly get an answer that might make me change my mind.

Secondly, what I'm asking is why should video games be different from other games? Why can't they work without being art whilst other games can?

I personally think that liking/loving something is not enough to call it art. And when you talk about admiration, people don't admire a sport or game. They admire the players or the way the game is being played. This is different from the game itself being an art.

Also, i feel as if your definition of art is a bit vague. Books are popular but not all books are considered art. From your definition, i could say that since we like books, all books are art (including instruction manuals).


Let me know if i accidentally misunderstood something or if i missed an argument of yours.

 

[Smooth Operator]

I still say games themselves aren't art, and I've been a gamer for the better half of 25 years of existence.

Game development, however - character and level design, music composition, writing, et al - I wholeheartedly agree with.

But we don't split other mediums into their seperate components to call them art, so why are games the exception.
They are intended to be experienced as a whole so why not consider it as such.

 

[Tristan6928]

Games, as the result of a creative process are very hard to not consider as "art."

However, one can argue that your white-bread seen-before FPS is about as much art as your average mid-budget forgettable action cinema flick.

Games are art.
Films are art.
Novels are art
Music is art.
Painting is rt.
Etc.

You cannot say that Games are not art as a whole, but you can argue the individual case.

I do agree that the process of making a game is an art-form. But that does not make games art. It's the same thing as playing game. There could be an artistic quality to the way the person plays a game, but that does not make the game an art.

I could be wrong though

 

[Tristan6928]

They CAN be art. They don't HAVE to be art. So no, I wouldn't say ALL games need to be art, but I believe that they can be art just as much as films or books.

I agree.

 

[Kae]

I am a work of art and I gain nothing from it, so my answer is no, not really I do think that they are art just most of them are bad art, but whether they are or not it doesn't really change a thing and therefore should not really matter and I believe that people who fight over whether they are or aren't art are just plain annoying because, why should anyone care?

 

[Flare Phoenix]

All video games are, and always will be, art. The debate on whether or not they are art is completely pointless. The real question at hand should be "are video games considered to be good art or bad art?".

 

[SageRuffin]

Game development, however - character and level design, music composition, writing, et al - I wholeheartedly agree with.

So you're saying that process of creating the game is an artform, but not the game itself?

I consider the game itself an amalgamation of the various "conventional" art forms, if you will. So yes, that is what I'm saying.

Unless you're talking strictly in terms of conception, in which the sheer act of brainstorming can most likely be considered art. But that's delving into metaphysics and I don't wanna turn the subject into a debate on tangibles.

But we don't split other mediums into their seperate components to call them art, so why are games the exception.
They are intended to be experienced as a whole so why not consider it as such.

And I do - as a game. I dunno if you've noticed, but those "separate components" that I listed could very well exist outside the game itself. And there have even been a few times where the overall package does the individual pieces a disservice since it ends up collapsing under itself (and the reverse is true as well).

And you can certainly break down, say, movies as such as well. The various components may not have as much impact by themselves, but they can certainly be judged on their own merits (as they often are).

You don't have to agree with this, and that's cool. But there's little you, the previous poster I quoted, or anyone else on this forum can do to change my opinion. And really, it's far too early in the morning [here] for any of us to be arguing over pointless details. So, you have your thesis and I have mine, so let's stop here and go on with our lives, yes?

 

[Veylon]

Art is a useless title people want to have in order to be regarded highly by society. For every title there is a cost, though, and I worry about what might be traded away in order to get society to confer it. I see immense effort lavished on gaming's most superficial elements whilst the core component, gameplay, languishes with relatively little thought or attention.

The real achilles heel of games in the realm of art is that they have a difficult time expressing any sort of coherent narrative or idea while being true to themselves. It's easy to tell a story through movies or text because those aren't interactive. They don't require input or commitment by the player. Games do: it's what makes them unique.

Then there's this issue that's always bothered me:

These pieces are some of the single most crowning achievements in artistic endeavors in the history of our race. This isn't really hyperbole really: Bach is probably one of the single most brilliant minds who ever walked the earth, and Beethoven's 9th is widely considered to be the single greatest piece of classical music ever written. And yeah, Beethoven is also pretty close to being one of the single greatest minds who ever lived as well.

If Beethoven had lived a couple hundred years earlier, you would never have heard of him. Or Mozart, or any of the others, no matter how brilliant they were. They were incredibly fortunate to live in a time in which their music could be written down, when new instruments were being made, when music was studied at a scientific level, and when kings and emperors would pay them to do what they did best. Better yet, they managed to latch on towards the beginning, before the masters' pantheon was sealed shut. Even if someone today did out-do Beethoven or Bach in classical composition, their work would never be acknowledged as such any more than one could be said to out-write Shakespeare.

This relates back to video games in that they are regarded as socially inferior regardless of their merits. One cannot state a love of gaming above classical music without forfeiting one's claim to class. Art is not a subjective world, but a rigidly hierarchical one where certain forms of painting and music sit at the top and gaming sits near, if not at, the bottom.

 

[Jimmy Sylvers]

I think that games are art a lot of the time. Film is considered an art form as is literature, both of these mediums tell stories, entertain and have ideas being expressed within them. Video games too tell stories and express ideas, not all do but a lot do. Other video games are aesthetically pleasing much like traditional visual arts like painting.

So really any game that is aesthetically pleasing, has any kind of storyline or expresses ideas is an artwork. I'm sure there are people out there who could find a game that has none of these elements but I can't think of one....

But if you think about it most popular games are the collaborative work of concept artists, texture artists, voice talents, writers, character artists, environment artists, creative directors etc. all of whom are artists so I find it hard to believe that what they are making is not art. Especially when many artists of similar description are used to create the widely accepted art form of film.

 

[Twilight_guy]

For games to not be art that means that people would stop reviewing them, stop cherishing them, stop caring about them and basically for the whole industry to have an apathy attack and die.

I don't agree with that statement. As long as there were humans, there were games (hide and seek, sports, board games). None of these games have ever demanded to be called art in the 3000+ years that we have existed. And yet, they are still extremely popular. Rugby, Basketball, and chess are played by millions of people world wild every day and yet they aren't classified as art. These games should have died according to what you said, and yet they still exist and are extremely popular. Videogames are new, and have grown significantly without being called an art form till recently.

In sports the sport itself is categorized in roughly the same way as art. Individual plays and actions may be evaluated and treated like art. If you think sports aren't art then go talk to that fans who painted themselves in team colors with almost no clothes on in below 0 weather. You can't tell me that admiration doesn't constituent the kind of affection that defines art. In the same way games are are treated with an admiration as art. I don't define art by the wishy washy non-definitions that people come up with junk about needing to have X or Y. I choose to define art as a cultural aspect that is far more axiomatic and says the art is based on how we react rather then any thing in and of itself. Games survive because people treat them specially. There being treated specially is art. If they weren't art then they would not have come anywhere near where they are because people just wouldn't be interested.
Aside from that, why are you just making the blanket assumption that I'm talking about all kinds of games ever? Why can't I talk about video games alone? Why can't I refer to an subset of games? Why did you turn my argument into a straw-man and try to batter it down that way?

First of all, don't get me wrong! I've started this thread cause i went from being for games as art, to being unsure (I'm currently doing more research to gain a better understanding on this topic). I am currently "trying" to be as unbiased, and criticizing the points i don't agree with to possibly get an answer that might make me change my mind.

Secondly, what I'm asking is why should video games be different from other games? Why can't they work without being art whilst other games can?

I personally think that liking/loving something is not enough to call it art. And when you talk about admiration, people don't admire a sport or game. They admire the players or the way the game is being played. This is different from the game itself being an art.

Also, i feel as if your definition of art is a bit vague. Books are popular but not all books are considered art. From your definition, i could say that since we like books, all books are art (including instruction manuals).


Let me know if i accidentally misunderstood something or if i missed an argument of yours.

Art is a subject that has no right answer if we could define it then we wouldn't be talking about it, we'd write it down in a book and when someone asked what it was then we'd point him to the book. It's fun to think about and try to understand but really does come down to what you think it is. I support you trying to figure out what your definition is though.

As for games, I don't really make the distinction between types of games here. Video games just happen to be art. There not art because there games, they just happen to be games, and art. It sounds bass ackwards but art isn't defined by criteria, its anything and everything that people arbitrary decide is art or treat as art. Like I said, its a sort of axiom. What is art? Hell if I or anyone else knows but I can point out what people treat as art. Therefore even if I can't define art I can still examine it. In geometry a point is an axiomatic object. Nobody can define a point nobody can say what it is or if it exists, yet we can still have geometry because even if we can't say what the point is, people have an agreed upon notion of what it is that we understand. Trying to make the point "this is art because X" will never work because that's trying to put rule that ties art down and beats it into a form that its not. That's why people's definitions of art are so nebulous because every time you make a definition someone points to something that doesn't fit and suddenly the definition needs to be changed and suddenly it either becomes a big blob of indistinct nothing or people have to start declaring that things used as counter-examples don't count in order to maintain some level of distinctiveness.

As for why games would fail as a non-art form. Sports are fun. Sports are a part of culture that fit some need or are a natural occurrence (thus why they are in every society ever). Art is a part of culture and thus why it appears in all societies (every society produces something and usually has some notion of which is good and which isn't which implies the kind of subjective judgment that entails art). Games are to some extent an intersection. They kind of act the same way sports and other games do and they kind of don't. I honestly think that if they weren't art we wouldn't care nearly as much. People get excited about watching their favorite players and monitoring a game for interesting events. They like to win and fight and be challenged. They like the possibility of winning. The set of rules that defines the game and the mechanics aren't as interesting as watching or participating. The mechanics of games, and sports as a subset, are perpetuated because people enjoy the things associated with the sport, the rules and the official doctrine aren't important, in fact the official rules of sports change all the time and sports themselves have come and gone and evolved and degenerated. The key element is that special drive that people have that goes beyond the simple game. I think people admire video games because they get that same special drive that goes beyond a sea of code and a set of rules. I think that if video games weren't art we simply wouldn't care and we would never establish that sense of the action or the fun of the game. I think that its the art that gives it that flavor that special something. Without some notion of artistry then it becomes kind of a bland sea of code and rules and loses that excitement. It's like taking a sonnet and examining it from a grammatically and spelling viewpoint only while completely ignore things like similes and imagery.

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass and I have no idea what makes things work but then again maybe I have achieved enlightenment and become one with the artz. There isn't a right answer and it's up to you to decide for yourself. As for me, I like my axiomatic definition even if it says games are art because games are art. Hell if I know what makes art is but I can still point it out regardless.

 

[Tristan6928]

Beauty is not enough to make something art.

 

[immortalfrieza]

I put "can become art, but don't gain from that title". This is because Art is far too much of a relative term to be applicable to anything. However, even if video games could be unanimously considered Art, it wouldn't matter in the end because what's ultimately important about a video game is how enjoyable it is to play, and how appealing as an Art it is only a very small part of that.

 

[shadow_Fox81]

"art is a lie, that makes makes us see truth"

i think games fit that description

EDIT; thats my favorite definition of art