Video Games as an Accepted Medium of Art.

[The Fitzynator]

Note: Apologies for the spelling errors, I was in a rush.

Recently a friend and I where having a chat about games. We discussed a lot about what game we liked and what game we didn't like and what games we have recently played. We eventually came to a topic we discussed before about games being art. We both agreed that games could not be art because art isn't something you interact with. Now at this specific conversation we decided to change that theory. We agreed that games could be come art if there is an equal amount of interactivity in player and game. What that means is for a game to become art the game must play with you as much as you play with it.


Games I consider Art and a brief explanation of why.

Fallout
For any one who have played fallout (the first one) you must see why. This was a game well ahead of it's time, never did it hold your hand or or give you a straight path to go along. It gave you a mission and a world and told you to do it and I found myself scared of figuring things out for myself that I spent the longest time just doing caravan missions. But once I grew a pair and went out of the safe and familiar and was greeted with a strangely beautiful world and an ending that nearly made me cry.

Silent Hill 2
Any one who have seen the zero punctuation review of this game will see similar things said. This game really bring out the feeling of being alone because, you are alone. Everything about this game is beautiful, the whole time I was playing it I was shitting bullets with my fear but the odd part was nothing really happened. No pop outs no ungodly creatures from hell and no clowns just me and my own mind creating the suspense. The fact that a game can make me afraid of nothing it an amazing feat.

Halo
Ok first off I want to establish that this is halo 1, not any of it's wannabe children. Halo 1 I believe is the only one of the whole series that can stand on it's own two feet and call it self a game. Any one who had played this game can agree with me that the game presented itself well. You find yourself on this unknown ring that an alien race praises for an unknown reason and you don't know what the aliens want but all you do know is that you don't want them to have it. And it is only when you find out the purpose of it that you agree with the story that you must destroy it and on that last level was I the only one shouting EPIC!!!! Hopefully not. It was the unknown that made this game seem heroic and amazing, the fact that it was a process of discovery that made this game amazing, it is also the reason why the next ones weren't amazing, because we know what is going on (sorta).

Any who I don't want to bore you with my opinion so onto the purpose of this thread. I want to ask you if you believe games could become art, what games do you believe is art (art is obviously a personal thing and therefor is different to everyone so explain why) do you agree with my theory of video games and art and if you do not what is your theory?

 

[Deleted]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

 

[Dudemeister]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

I got this all the time in art. It really doesn't help that my drawing style is very cartoony.
Apparently, the amount of effort and detail you put into a picture doesn't matter if it's not in the exact renaissance style that old people expect.
That's such a closed minded view of what art is, it really annoys me.

 

[WrongSprite]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

I got this all the time in art. It really doesn't help that my drawing style is very cartoony.
Apparently, the amount of effort and detail you put into a picture doesn't matter if it's not in the exact renaissance style that old people expect.
That's such a closed minded view of what art is, it really annoys me.

That's wierd, 'cause it's the other way round where I live, with all this modern art bullshit.

Kid in my class stuck a load of words of his face, took a picture of it, and got full marks.

I did a pretty decent traditional watercolour landscape, and got a C. Makes me rage.

 

[LiquidGrape]

You actually reached an endgame yourself in the last paragraph.
The phenomenon is subjective.
I for one think we should abandon this archaic notion of what comprises "art".

 

[Outright Villainy]

We eventually came to a topic we discussed before about games being art. We both agreed that games could not be art because art isn't something you interact with.

That's missing the point, because other mediums of art can't be interactive, it's not a choice they make. What sets games apart is their interactivity, and to dismiss them on that count is doing them a great disservice. Games show their form as "art" best when the player can author quite a lot of their own experience; Free form games like fallout are great for this, and as said already, silent hill creates a lot of the tension in your head. Art is not just the statement of the artist, it's how people interpret it themselves. 4'33" by john cage is 4 and half minutes of no music, but the point was the music was in the surrounding sounds that people heard, and that's heralded as a major artistic statement in the 20th century.

 

[number2301]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

Your teacher was an elitist prick. Art is much like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Tracey Emin is as much lauded as derided for her unmade bed 'art'.

For me the key thing something needs to be art is integrity, a genuine expression of something without excessively cowtowing to what would be popular.

I wouldn't say Halo classifies very strongly as art, it has fantastic artistic style, but much the same as an Alfa Romeo, that doesn't necessarily make it art in itself. I would agree that the story was epic, but it certainly wasn't the pinnacle of story telling and was all told rather generic.

I would tend to look for the games with powerful emotional experiences (like GTA IV where I found the story compelling) or odd little art games for evidence of games as art. Today I Die is a very good example.

After rather a lot of rambling, essentially anything can be art, depending on its integrity and the opinion of the person experiencing it.

 

[Nincompoop]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

I got this all the time in art. It really doesn't help that my drawing style is very cartoony.
Apparently, the amount of effort and detail you put into a picture doesn't matter if it's not in the exact renaissance style that old people expect.
That's such a closed minded view of what art is, it really annoys me.

In my opinion, art has nothing to do with fun. Isn't art just when someone has created something? Something that has no practical usage, but to be beheld? It's what makes it so awesome. You love it despite not being able to use it to anything.

I hate when people say it's supposed to be fun, but I hate equally much when people refuse to call something someone created art. If it's a painting, sculpture or perhaps music, it is art. But I do not find games to be art, since it's 'interactive'. I can be more than beheld.

This is a subjective opinion of mine. One can look up the definition of art to be sure. But I find it to be a somewhat subjective phenomenon.

 

[Looking For Alaska]

Almost all games have stories, written by writers. Writers are artists.
All games have graphics that are made by 3D/2D/whatever artists.

Thusly ever game ever is, indeed, art.

E:This is definition I go by, so I never understand when people say Silent Hill 2 and Planescape: Torment is art but, say, Modern Warfare 2 isn't. Sure PS:T and SH2 are better in almost every conceivable way, but I don't see how they can be more "art" than another game.

 

[Kollega]

Art is subjective. It's in the eye of the beholder. But videogames can be art in the same way cinema and animation can - as long as those are considered art, games should also be.

 

[Lift]

I heard an art scholar say that for something to be art, it can have no purpose, no function, other than itself. And video games have no function, they are not a tool that can be used. For this reason, cartoons, music, video games, graphic design, and movies should be considered art.

When you realy come down to it, we as video game fans are art critics. We discus and argue of story, music, design, even acting. All thing that on their own are an art form. So frankly... how can games, in their modern form, not be an art form. We have studios pumping as many dollers as they can in to their own digital symphony. Then say it is not an artform because some dusty old critic, or underpaid (and most likely under-laid)professor says their not?

I heard my boss once say that an artist is an engineer that failed math. Now we have a generation of musicians, illustrators, digital designers, and writers, working under one flag. but when its called a movie its art, and when its called a game it isn't

 

[Anticitizen_Two]

Art in in the eye of the beholder, as a post above me says.

But Halo 1 is NOT art.

Yeah, I know I'm a hypocrite.

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Interestingly enough, there was a letter to the editor over 5 years ago in the now-deceased Electronic Gaming Monthly (R.I.P. E.G.M.) which made a very good argument for game not being art.

I'm not going to go hunting for the letter, but the central theme of his argument revolved around the notion that games are inherently incomplete because of their interactive nature. He put forth the standard examples of art (painting, photography, cinema) and, while they were ment to do something to the viewer, how they are essentially a one-way medium. Games, he proposed, were a two-way medium, and thus could not be complete without that final interaction. Because of their incomplete nature, they can not stand alone like traditional forms of "art" and thus could not be considered art.

It was a good letter, and the editorial staff agreed, so much so that it was made the letter of the month and he got an artzy J-Horror game as a rebuttal.

Personally, I don't subscribe to his view of art, mainly because I've seen (and dispised) modern art. Several pieces I've viewed required a significant degree of interaction between the piece and the viewer, including a white-noise room and several pieces that "exist in your mind" (i.e. the piece was a discription and the image in your head was the "actual" piece of art). While I questioned the nature of these pieces, I simply accepted them as part of the broader definition of "art."

If I were to raise one video game to the level of art, though, it would probably be "Indego Prophecy," the spiritual precursor to Heavy Rain. Yes, the plot was confusing and took a left down the wrong way of the one-way street of "magical conspiracies," not to mention questionable gameplay mechanics and camera work, but it always pulled the player forward with how it told the plot. You cared about the characters you played as, whether it was the central protagonist who is trying to figure out why he killed a guy in a diner restroom and carved symbols into his wrist, to the detective who battles with a fear of dark and enclosed spaces, to her video-game-loving partner who is dealing with choosing between his job and his wife. It even had the first "normal" gay guy that I had ever seen in a game (although it was a breif dialoge exchange and mini game that lasted no longer than 10 minutes, it is still one of the only depictions of guy who happens to be gay). It had its rough points like all early pieces of art, but in exchange it was a compelling game, regardless of its shortcomings.

 

[Burblesnot]

Art is most usually assosiated with the ideals of beauty, and in fact there is a rather healthy debate over the merits of Art as Beauty, or Art for the sake of Art.
Personally, I don't think a shit smeared Madonna is art, I don't think a gathered pile of waste from other artists projects can be considered art. But thankfulyl for everyone else, I don't diefine what is considered art. And Honestly, there isn't a single person out there, artist or otherwise, who has the same right. Art is what a person wwants it to be. Shadows of the Colossus was a work of art to me. My collection of Preacher and Transmetropolitian graphicnovels novels are works of art to me. To others they are trashy comics.

Art is what we want it to be. When it stirs your heart or makes you think of things that are completely unrelated to the image, that is art. When it makes you sad or angry, that is art. When it pisses you off for no reason that you can think of, it just does, that is art. We live in a world or art, why limit ourselves?

 

[The Fitzynator]

We eventually came to a topic we discussed before about games being art. We both agreed that games could not be art because art isn't something you interact with.

That's missing the point, because other mediums of art can't be interactive, it's not a choice they make. What sets games apart is their interactivity, and to dismiss them on that count is doing them a great disservice. Games show their form as "art" best when the player can author quite a lot of their own experience; Free form games like fallout are great for this, and as said already, silent hill creates a lot of the tension in your head. Art is not just the statement of the artist, it's how people interpret it themselves. 4'33" by john cage is 4 and half minutes of no music, but the point was the music was in the surrounding sounds that people heard, and that's heralded as a major artistic statement in the 20th century.

Sorry I didn't really expand on that note, Me and my friend don't agree with that theory any more, we had that theory like two years ago and we have matured quite a bit since then. I believe now that art can be interactive but art is something that interacts with another as well weather it's be expressing a specific moment in the artist life or what ever reason you have for making the piece of art.

 

[The Fitzynator]

I wouldn't say Halo classifies very strongly as art, it has fantastic artistic style, but much the same as an Alfa Romeo, that doesn't necessarily make it art in itself. I would agree that the story was epic, but it certainly wasn't the pinnacle of story telling and was all told rather generic.

I agree with you halo isn't "a strong art form" In fact I didn't really want to put that up on my post but i felt the need to express how a simple game such as halo can be an art form, also i wanted to sneak in my personal opinion on how the first halo is the only one that stands on it's own two feet. I'm pretty sure if halo 1 didn't exist and halo 2 was the first one it wouldn't have done nearly as close as it had.

 

[Amarok]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

Sounds like your art teacher was a prick.

For GCSE art my final submitted pieces were both comic strips. One of an alien coming to Earth and becoming a cross-dresser, and one of me calling out the fact that art is graded clinically at schools is utter bullshit. I actually used the word shit 27 times in that piece alone.

And I passed!

Edit: Also, the art teacher I had throughout said class specifically said that videogames can be considered art (I asked her). So I don't think your art teacher has absolute power here. It's still very much a subjective thing I suppose.

 

[The Fitzynator]

Well once in art class my teacher rejected my picture of a class on the sheer fact that it was a cartoon, she said it had no artistic merit. So my theory is that if its fun on its own, it can't become art. Painting is fun to some people, but painting was always art. Buncha pompous pricks, the lot of them.

Your art teacher obviously never read Chester Brown's "I never liked you" which is simply black and white cartoons. The fact that the cartoons are black and white is a very symbolic meaning to the main character as being an empty figure and how all the main characters have very adult face's yet they are all teenagers is defining the act of ones childhood being the building blocks of ones childhood.

 

[Stranger of Sorts]

Linger In Shadows anyone? Flower? Flow? These are all basically forms of art. Then you have the Prince of Persia and Saboteur thing of 'colouring in the world'. So yes video games can be art.

Also some user made levels on LBP were basically interactive art, rather than levels.

 

[WorldCritic]

My belief, art depends on the person's opinon. I think quite a few games can be considered art, I think some anime and cartoons can be considered art.