So what videogames do you consider to be GOOD art?

[Mikeyfell]

Looking at games as art, I think something we have to acknowledge as their greatest strength is the depth of immersion that's possible here. Yes, people can get really into a book, movie, or an album, but it's different with a video game. A video game can go that extra mile. You have some level of control, and so you feel some level of responsibility. You will see someone have a very visible physical reaction to something that happens in a game.

With this in mind, I think you should look at games that try to get the player immersed into their worlds. Games that try to really sink their teeth into you. Whether they succeed or fail, it doesn't entirely matter. Not all Art is perfect, you know.

Edit: I'm organizing them by length, that way you can find a way to get more bang for your buck. The ones in caps are highly, highly recommended. As in, if you're going to talk about games being art, I think you need to have experienced these games and have them in your vocabulary.

Play these games:

FLOWER

LIMBO

Portal

Zeno Clash

HEAVY RAIN

Mirror's Edge

Condemned: Criminal Origins

BIOSHOCK

Ico

SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

HALF-LIFE series (You can skip H-L 1 with a wiki page.)

Any Peter Molyneux game.

Mass Effect 1-2

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

Fallout 3

I'm sorry, did you just say

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

I'm going to have to ask you to step outside

all those other games are great examples
but

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

is not anywhere near the level of those games

 

[Flapjack Ninja]

Mirror's Edge and Prince of Persia. Both have very unique looks, designs and music. Both are game showcases for art.

 

[Sarah Kerrigan]

Okami is a new brainer.

Portal maybe and then Bioshock 1 is a close second.

 

[Sarah Kerrigan]

Mirror's Edge and Prince of Persia. Both have very unique looks, designs and music. Both are game showcases for art.

Wow never thought of Mirror's Edge...good idea!

 

[Sn1P3r M98]

Mirrors Edge. The game makes you focus on the environment, which adds to the feeling of it as art.

 

[BoxCutter]

Music is art.

Animation is art.

Games have music and animation. How is that not art?

Story is art.

All games are artistic in some respect. But for me any game with a captivating and well written story is grounds for a "masterpiece".

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

I think you should try to take some of the more low brow games Like Saints Row or Army of Two or Manhunt and try to argue how they are art. If you can sell the argument with immature games like these then you can do it for any game.

 

[Halo Fanboy]

Messages, graphics, story, music ect. are not whats important to me. Which is probably why I don't like books, movies and other art. Games live and die by their rules. Go is thousands of years old and certainly not still played for its story or sculptures. Instead of asking if a game is art, lets focus on making a game good which is complex mechanics that foster competition. Supporting horrible "art" games will only take us away from what made games good in the first place.

 

[SpaceGhostPoncherello]

Spoiler

THIS. A HUNDRED TIMES THIS.

 

[Kiju]

Just play Okami, and point at it to your art teacher.

An in-game screenshot for an example:

Spoiler

Tell them that it's done almost entirely in the Japanese style of Sumi-e. From an artistic standpoint, that game is gorgeous.

 

[Spark Ignition]

oh god yes to mirrors edge. it was innovative and immersive in a way no other platformer that I've seen as achieved. Talk about your Silent Hill nightmares, I had freerunning dreams for ages after Mirror's Edge! I actually had a mental one where I was running around an old factory using a combination of Faith's moves, L4D hunter pounces, Alex Mercer wallrunning and portals, but that's me getting off topic. (It was soo awesome!)

But yes I think we've reached some consensus about what makes a good game artistically, and I've got a lot fo games to go look up now. Thank you all!

 

[slarrs]

I still say Mass Effect. It has an incredible immersion, and I've never though so much about choices I made in a video game.

Something doesn't have to be unique or bizarre to be art. There ARE games that can be called art, and above that, GOOD art besides Shadow of the Collosus, Beyond Good and Evil, Portal, and Okami. Don't take such a narrow view on such a broad medium.

How about Psychonauts? It wasn't too pretty to look at and the controls were mediocre on the best of days, but it was one of the most fun adventures to be had in gaming.

Xenogears was practically just a movie you got to interact with once in a while, and it's among my favorite games. Let's think outside the box people.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Okami works...

But mostly all of them.

Music is art.

Animation is art.

Games have music and animation. How is that not art?

music and animation are both mediums in which art can take form, the problem with video games is that the gameplay itself has not become art, even if it has a good story and it looks pretty, gameplay remains simply as entertainment.

This is the reason I always put Shadow of the Colossus front and center in these discussions: the gameplay, on a very fundamental level, reflects the story arc and the development of the protagonist. You spend the entire game attempting to hold on to these towering beasts, slowly becoming more and more proficient at it. Your goal, as player, is to never let go - just as wander refuses to let go of his lost love.

The culmination of the entire experience is an ending wherein the player must let go. Otherwise, the game does not end. You can draw out the final player-controlled sequence indefinitely if you so choose. Only when you accept your fate and literally "let go" can the story conclude.

I've never been so touched by a gaming experience, honestly. I fiddled around for something like 2-3 minutes trying to worm my way out of that ending, the whole while wondering "why give me control if I can't affect the outcome of this scene?". When it dawned on me that this was the point, my brain sort of exploded. Favorite game ever.

 

[Mr Pantomime]

nobodys mentioned beyond good and evil?

Odin Sphere is curiously absent as well...

Yeah, and Muramasa: The Demon Blade. Same Dev team as Odin Sphere, pretty much same art style too.

 

[boholikeu]

and to boholikeu: Good choices! I'm studying Fine Art (3rd year BA Hons) and am interested in interactive mediums as a whole (aka ALL GAMES!). I agree with what you're saying about the Half Life series, but surely Bioshock achives that jsut as well? And Fallout 3, for having so many unscripted but brilliant visual moments that the game subtly nudges you towards (leaving the vault, the entire Enclave section etc...). My interest is in creating an art form where every participant will have a different experience deriving from both random chance and the choices they make. To this end Fallout 3 is incredibly effective, as is any RPG. I adore Bioware (every game they've made excels in what you call the 'literature' category). I am yet to play any of the games you say have no connections to any of these forms, but will look into them and see what you mean by that.

Bioshock and Fallout do the "cinematic effect" thing as well, but IMO it's more advanced in HL2. HL2 emulates some pretty interesting "camerawork" through the level design by literally forcing the player to look at key scenes from certain angles (all while keeping them in control of the camera). The other two games really only seem to use the "mise-en-scene" technique of communicating story info through the environment. Don't get me wrong, it's still a powerful technique, and they definitely use it well, but I have yet to see another designer match the complexity of Valve's cinematic level design.

RE: art where every viewer has a different experience.
This interests me as well, but I think it's important that the artist still has at least some sort of authorial control. For example, a game in which you could "do anything" doesn't really interest me from an artistic standpoint because although the players might have an interesting experience from it, nothing was communicated from the artist to the player.

About the games that have no connections to any other forms of art:
Basically what I mean by this is that the message they are trying to communicate the player is being delivered primarily through mechanics rather than through some other method. For example, the game Passage (available for free at http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/) gets its point across with almost no text and just a few key visual representations. The bulk of the information conveyed is experienced through gameplay alone.

Anyway art isnt tagged as entertainment, it's usually called aesthetic experience, and i wouldn't call Requium for a dream entertaining though it's still a great example of film making.
However a lot of art tries to convey a message or informs the audiance of something. I think video games can be art at the rate they are progressing and becoming more complex in their story telling.

That's exactly my point. Requiem certainly isn't "entertaining" in the traditional sense, but it is engaging because it conveys an interesting message.

Many games nowadays do the same thing (although they are usually from smaller studios). The gameplay of The Path, for example, essentially boils down to some rudimentary "find this object" mechanics. Hardly fun in and of itself, but when taken within the context of the entire game it actually works pretty well.

 

[Naota_391]

Looking at games as art, I think something we have to acknowledge as their greatest strength is the depth of immersion that's possible here. Yes, people can get really into a book, movie, or an album, but it's different with a video game. A video game can go that extra mile. You have some level of control, and so you feel some level of responsibility. You will see someone have a very visible physical reaction to something that happens in a game.

With this in mind, I think you should look at games that try to get the player immersed into their worlds. Games that try to really sink their teeth into you. Whether they succeed or fail, it doesn't entirely matter. Not all Art is perfect, you know.

Edit: I'm organizing them by length, that way you can find a way to get more bang for your buck. The ones in caps are highly, highly recommended. As in, if you're going to talk about games being art, I think you need to have experienced these games and have them in your vocabulary.

Play these games:

FLOWER

LIMBO

Portal

Zeno Clash

HEAVY RAIN

Mirror's Edge

Condemned: Criminal Origins

BIOSHOCK

Ico

SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

HALF-LIFE series (You can skip H-L 1 with a wiki page.)

Any Peter Molyneux game.

Mass Effect 1-2

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

Fallout 3

I'm sorry, did you just say

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

I'm going to have to ask you to step outside

all those other games are great examples
but

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

is not anywhere near the level of those games

I actually think GTA IV did a SUPERB job of trying to create a convincing world. The way people would react depending on how and where they were shot was great and believable. The amount of effort they put into making the city feel alive, with citizens you could follow all day and watch how they would interact with the world. You could sit in your apartment and watch television. The radio was absolutely full of interesting things to hear. The world looked really good, and until about half way through the game, there was a lot of great story telling to be had.

Was the game perfect? Absolutely not. But it did a great job of immersing the player into the game if the player was willing. I heard a lot of stories from all over the internet about how people found themselves obeying traffic laws in a GRAND THEFT AUTO game, because acting outrageous in such a realistic city felt too weird. The pangs of guilt people felt when they shot a pedestrian and watched them stumble around, screaming and begging for help. I was definitely one of those guys, and I have to pat the game on the back.

There was a lot to take away from that game. Even in the flaws. I've definitely had a lot of conversations about Niko Bellic inevitably ruining the feel of the game because he was presented as a nice guy in a bad situation, yet he could slaughter an entire sidewalk full of people and feel no different. A flaw in game design to be sure, but an interesting one that presented a lot of questions about how a sand box game should approach story, and what could be taken away about Niko Bellic himself. The way he acted in story moments, ways that might disagree with the player, reminded players that just because you control a character and make a few choices doesn't make their personality your own. Is the game broken if a character you influence does something you disagree with, or is this us having a hard time accepting that a character with an already established personality will do as he will, regardless of us? Like many other stories we are told in various mediums?

Bah, I've blabbed too much, but I hope you get my point here.