Progressing gaming

[briankoontz]

So are video games art? Who cares? Can video games provide artists experiences to certain audiences? Of course. Are video games entertainment or art?

It's the same thing. If you care about your life and want to have the best experience in the world that you can, then it's the exact same thing. The Tempest and Hamlet are great entertainment *because* they are great art, and vice versa.

Deus Ex is great art *because* it's great entertainment.

Now, if you're a "human" living in a post-human dystopia and seek to self-negate through "zoning out" playing games or whatever, then it really doesn't matter what you do with your time. You can call your time spent "entertaining" or something else but it doesn't mean anything.

Art is not separate from life. Nyan Cat is art - it's entertainment. The same thing. It's entertaining because it's a formulation of something important in the world that had previously not been so accurately formulated. It's art for the exact same reason.

If one has a dark vision of the world, filled with mayhem and terror, then games featuring mass murder make sense. They are "teaching" the gamer something or at least reinforcing his worldview. They are, to the gamer, art. In other words, entertainment.

 

[PirataMan]

Deus Ex is great art *because* it's great entertainment.

And those the experiense is subjective, those it can be great art or waste of time. In movies people are used to blockbusters and author films, and they make the distinction between entertainment and artistic vision, because you can one without the other.

If one has a dark vision of the world, filled with mayhem and terror, then games featuring mass murder make sense. They are "teaching" the gamer something or at least reinforcing his worldview. They are, to the gamer, art. In other words, entertainment.

Not necesarelly true, it is an hypothesis but representations on a society need the corroboration of that society to have an idea of the value. Let say you have a society that have faced war conflict from 50 years, the entertainment they produce could glorify, demonize or dodge any issue related with war, but without knowing that society we are unable to know their actual stance, we only know what they produce but not the intention of the production or in extreme cases, what they intended to say. And as that society has its own way to deal with their subjects through the medias, these can be seen as art or as entertainment in different ways. Which again come to the problem of art challenging what we define as art, and even more the problems we face at reading art to reach a society.

 

[runic knight]

No it simply needs a mature audience with some degree of civility, nothing more then that.
Because then you can approach all mature topics in gaming just the same as any other medium, unlike now where most of the gaming audience flies off the handle and turns into barking monkeys at the first sign of mature content. You seriously can't have a civil discussion with raging monkeys.

Interesting.

Why do you think gaming audience is somehow inherently "worse" then that of tv or movies, who would probably have something close to 95% or higher overlap (meaning that all game audiences would also be movie/tv audience members as well). Does that mean that all audiences are then lacking, or just gaming's for some reason?

Also, is what your saying that the audience itself needs to be the ones to mature before the medium will mature?

Well, yes, at least to an extent.

If the audience only ever wants to play brown shooters about white males killing foreigns, then games will be brown shooters about white males killing foreigns.

For gaming to progress, their has to be a desire for it amongst the gamers.

I think you may be concentrating a bit too much on audience taste. One could make the same statement you made here about movies and blockbuster films. Do you think that movies require less explosive action flicks to be a better medium as well? And I get the sense that you feel the maturity and progress of a medium depends on the audience itself growing into it and then the medium responding to that, is that right?

 

[Thaluikhain]

I think you may be concentrating a bit too much on audience taste. One could make the same statement you made here about movies and blockbuster films. Do you think that movies require less explosive action flicks to be a better medium as well?

Sure, if people only want to watch bad teen comedies, all we'll get is bad teen comedies.

And I get the sense that you feel the maturity and progress of a medium depends on the audience itself growing into it and then the medium responding to that, is that right?

At least to a large part, I'm not saying there aren't any other factor, but that it's a big one.

 

[Agkistro]

>Gaming needs more diversity.
>Gaming needs to be populated entirely by people who share my sociopolitical views.

Choose one.

Umm... I am sorry, but your post doesn't touch on anything I was talking about. At all. What exactly are you trying to say here and where did you make that mental leap to get there?

I am talking about if gaming as a medium requires a superior audience in order to grow and progress itself. I personally disagree.

Nothing about any of that relates people wanting or not wanting diversity. How did you even get to that point?

It totally touches on what you're talking about, I almost wrote the same thing myself. You're posing the debate as "Should we only allow people with my sociopolitical viewpoints to play videogames, or should we use video games to manipulate people into my sociopolitical viewpoints?" It seems to me there is at least one more option; maybe leftist/progressives aren't right about everything, and it's ok for people who disagree with them to not only play video games, but to actually have games that cater to their sensibilities.