Video Games as an Accepted Medium of Art.

[Hallow'sEve]

Truthfully, I don't know if I want video games established as an art form. I kinda like our outsider club, chilling out in the treehouse telling stories and playing games while all the serious art goes to the mall, or sitting in the back of the cafeteria cracking jokes and starting food fights.

 

[SavingPrincess]

Taken from: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.176653-A-Princess-Worth-Saving-The-Second-Dimension

Somehow, it got into everyone's brain that making more expensive, shorter games with less that zero replay value was the way to go. The catchphrase of the day was (is) "cinematic gaming" in an ever enduring quest for games to be taken seriously as an art form by... umm... mimicking another art form.

Let's have a little self-awareness party here shall we? Gaming, has been, and always will be entirely gimmick-based. Game developers are as prone to faddism as their clientele and will nearly always hop on the next "Me-Too" bus because the consumer base is largely consistent of attention-deficient "impress-me-now's" that unless you have bump-mapping, force-feedback-ing, moral-choice-metering, downloadable-content-ing, online-multiplayer-ing goodness in your title, consider you yesterday's news. We're a bunch of gameplay mechanic fashionistas that demand the newest available technology be injected into everything we open our wallet for... which is how you get fantastic games like Duke Nukem Forever.

The reason why the second dimension is one of the most important Princesses to save in my mind is much akin to the reason a haiku exists: Creativity bred from limitations. When you have to make a compelling experience in a technically limited space, the creative mind taps into a different part of the right side of the brain and forces the creator to be a different kind of creative than they would be with seemingly limitless possibilities. Imagine if you had to create a game like God of War in only two dimensions. Immediately your brain starts tapping into a different type of thinking; the kind that makes us figure out ways to fit square pegs into round holes. This is what made the SNES/Genesis days give us some of the most memorable experiences in gaming to this day, and why some of the best games on the first-gen 3D consoles were still brilliantly rendered in two dimensions (read: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night).

I think this speaks to the OP's post in that it is the game designers themselves that are pushing themselves futher away from the idea of "art" by trying to keep up with the times. Paint is a limiting medium, pencil is a limiting medium, celluloid (not CG) is a limiting medium. I think art is defined by its ability to convey emotion through liimits. When you take something as limitless as modern gaming, it's hard to find the "artistic message" inside it all.

 

[omega 616]

Why are people so eager for games to be art or accepted by the mainstream?

Will it make that much of a difference? I don't think so, all your doing is slapping another label on it.

Whats wrong with the label it already has? By calling it art are you hoping it will be seen as a more mature activity?

Just call it what it is, a game. Why be ashamed of gaming or being a gamer?

I would much rather sit down for a few hours having fun playing a game than sit by the edge of a river with a stick and bit of string waiting for a fish to bite, I heard the average time to wait for a bite is 56 minutes, thats almost an hour of sitting doing nothing at all then when you do get a fish (most of the time) you have to release it and do it all again, how exciting!

Any game that the devs claim is art or try and make it something it isn't just winds me up, it's like the term yummy mummy, it's just trying to make MILF sound better.

Plus if it does become art you will have art critics analyze it and nobody likes art critics, trying to force meaning into nothing and say something isn't art for some made up reason but think David Beckham sleeping for 12 hours in a loop is art.

 

[SavingPrincess]

I finished Halo 1 and all i found upon completion was a mediocre game aspiring to greatness. So yeah, where's your argument now.

Seconded.

Halo as a series was the introduction to a genre for a whole new generation of game players, but hardly even close to touching the upper eschelons of its class.

 

[The Spectator]

For me they are art. Or at least some of them. Silent Hill 2 and Shadow of the Colossus are definitely more than just games.

... But for some reason I see Halo fail as art.