like it seems fucking obvious, right? any medium that can contain degrees of symbolism, has the potential to provoke viewer interpretation, has the potential to contain specific or vague messaging from the creator, and just generally can be used for self-expression has the potential to be an art form.
Why the fuck is/was this a point of discussion? to the point of heated discourse, even! Was it just the most geriatric people they could find on the street? Weird snobs?
like, the second games started having narratives this should have been a moot topic. why the fuck did Kojima parrot it?
reading his statement, i feel there's two different discourses happening, the already solved (:lt-dbyf-dubois:) point of "can video games be art" and the more interesting question of "does the video game industry currently have a culture that promotes artistic endeavor over mass appeal"
to which my personal answer is 'no, but we're slowly getting there with the rise of auteurism (despite some of the problems inherent to it) in acclaimed development teams (:praise-it:) and the indie scene's entirety, and we'll see if it starts to push against the corporate board schlock in the future.'
but still, god damn, half of this debate comes from the same place as the video games cause violence bit and the other half is just people being annoyed with call of duty schlock, which, fair. but why is the former even a debate that happened/is happening. i'm genuinely curious.
Let me play Christman’s advocate
Art isn’t just symbols and narratives. After all there are symbols in a standard deck of playing cards, or on a corporate resume. There are narratives contained within a series of stool samples or medical records. Obviously nobody would consider playing cards, resumes or medical records art.
There must be more to it, a cultural or social significance is present. A collective shared audience and interpretative body. A weight of importance placed is placed on certain media and their ability to portray and reflect our lives.
Could video games become art? Of course. Are video games art currently? I would argue the vast majority are not because society at large doesn’t see it that way.
You have outliers that a small minority of individuals might recognize as art, but the vast majority of the medium are just games. Games are systems of rules with a winner - such as soccer, boxing, chess, or Yahtzee. I wouldn’t consider these art, they are games. Even if they contain art, such as artwork on a board game. The more “art-like” video games, not coincidentally, are the ones that are basically a fixed narrative on rails and a glorified cinematic experience. The more “game-like” video games are sandbox or competitive or puzzle/task based. It seems there is a tension here where the more game-like a video game becomes, the less artistic it is.
I mean, I think that once again falls into that second category of debate. I'm more so astounded at the people who unironically argue it has no potential as an art form. Especially since I'm of the opinion that if it can be used to express the self, it can be art.
Not necessarily. Though they are certainly linear, I guess :lt-dbyf-dubois: and :trans-undertale: come to mind here in use of microreactivety in narrative choice and consequence/compounding branches of narrative that form a greater whole (I don't really know how to describe Undertale's linear-but-not-linear experience)?
Of course, they are indie, which allows them greater levels of creative control and risk-taking when it comes to narrative structure due to no checks from up high and less emphasis on the necessity of mass appeal, but they're prime examples of art-like games that don't necessarily railroad you into a singular experience.
I think Yahtzee had a good take on this intrinsically immersive narrative potential that games have to express themselves in an artistic form unlike all other mediums. Video games have this inherent advantage over other artistic mediums when it comes to being directly immersive and dynamic experiences. We're really only scratching the surface of the stories games can tell, and somewhat like Yahtzee I kinda believe we're in this weird transition period where we've discovered games can tell stories but are only understanding the surface level of what stories/means of expression only work within the medium of video games, and therefore we end up with the cinematic linear adventure game that is half of the AAA games in the modern age.
I'd even mention :praise-it: as a work that could only be properly told within the medium of a video game due to its emphasis on disconnected and environmental storytelling, as well as slowly piecing together discovered bits of the narrative puzzle as you discover them on path or out of the way, allowing it to flourish as this intimidating yet immersive setting.
But yeah, I think the latter is a more interesting medium of discussion. I definitely agree that there's a lot of 'just games' that complicate this discussion. Current industry culture isn't suited to the production of 'artistic' games, leading to a mass of 'just games' and for counterculture to pick up the artistic piece. On the other hand, would we say movies aren't art due to the existence and prevalence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Pretty sure that's the film equivalent of those 'just games', lmfao.
I'm utterly baffled by the former discourse though, which is truly the pinnacle of snobbery meeting boomer brain.
The evolution of playing card art is actually like low-key fascinating though. Like before printing really took off playing cards were hand painted on to various materials up to and including Ivory. They incorporated all kinds of interesting themes from critiques of political and religious figures to pornography to natural scenes to whatever else artists could think of. Even today modern evolutions like Magic the Gathering churn out a vast catalogue of fantasy art.
It's kind of funny to see playing cards held up as a, "Obviously no one would call this art" example, especially considering Tarot decks and the many artistic variants people make of them. I don't think there's a meaningful difference between those artistic variants and the more standard art, or between a Tarot deck and standard playing cards. We're just more used to seeing the art on standard playing cards to the point that we often don't really notice it and see the cards more for their function. And the same is often true with Magic: the Gathering, but I also know of people who don't even know how to play MTG and collect the cards solely for the art, and obviously art does not stop being art when you print it on a card.
i'm too tired for this shit but it might be useful to differentiate the .psd or original painting. there's even less soul or whatever going into a printing of a magic card than in Warhol's soup cans and tcg "for the art" collectors are no better than funko pop dorks.
thousands of shitty tourist photos of the mona lisa probably aren't art
What a shit take. I'm sorry, but it's absurd and nonsensical to suggest that there's "more soul" in the original file of digital artwork than in a copy of the file when it's literally the same thing, pixel for pixel. If I see a picture of Starry Night in a textbook, am I not looking at art?
Most people engage with any piece of art primarily through reproductions. A very small percentage of people who have seen Starry Night have seen the original painting. This is just hipster shit of hating things because they popular and accessible, and doing arbitrary gatekeeping.
i was saying that the 2 inch print loses something in the process and context, not that identical digital copies are different. (although the exported png literally doesn't have the layers anymore)
if you make a copy of a copy of a copy... of starry night and look at a tiny and lossy printing of a painting that's larger than your book (73.7 cm × 92.1 cm) then you have lost a shitload of detail and it's not gatekeeping to say that looking at some trash tier low dpi cheap printing of something isn't good enough.
The art is literally designed for the purpose of creating the 2 inch print. The layers and original file are just part of the process of creating the finished product, which is the card. Cookie dough might taste better than the finished cookie, but that doesn't mean that the finished cookie isn't food.
Good enough to be considered art, you mean? Do you think that images have to be of a certain baseline quality to be considered art, or is it the loss of fidelity to an original image that disqualifies something from being art? If, hypothetically, the original Starry Night had been created at the same size and quality as it appears in my textbook, then would you consider that original work to be art, or not?
i think reproductions of art aren't automatically art. like a picture of me isn't me so why is a picture of some art that art?
I can't comprehend that stance, especially in the context of digital art. It's extremely bizarre to me. I have no idea what standard you're applying to determine if something is or isn't art or where you're getting that standard or what you mean when you say something's not art.
Do you apply this strange position to music, as well? Here I thought I'd spent countless hours over the course of my life listening to music and experiencing the artistic value of it, but it turns out the only times it had any artistic value are the times I've heard it live. That's probably legit like a millionth of the music I've heard in my life. All that time wasted because I was listening to a reproduction of it. They really need to crack down on album sales, because artists are trying to scam us and pass it off as the real thing, you know, just because it sounds the same.
plz watch Ways of Seeing
i'm not quite finished yet but the kid saying "i think it's a woman because she's got curls" while the host is right there with his curly hair is hilarious https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk?t=1627
watch all 4 parts of the series for the full experience
i was not expecting the anticapitalism in part 4. that went pretty hard, especially for the beeb.
Hence why I said a deck of standard playing cards. As in, the mass produced corporate decks that are now fully commoditized games and not at all art (even if they contain art on them - containing art is not the same as being art, otherwise a crate holding a painting would be art).
I gotta disagree with like all of this. Just the developmental artwork, the concept artwork that goes in to just conceptualizing what a game will look like, could fill a thousand galleries. Games aren't just systems of rules, they're elegant systems of rules. You can't just throw some algorithms together, everything has to nest in massive complexity. Everything from the color of objects in the world to the movement speed of the characters has to be carefully calculated and tweaked and revised. Any game with cinematic pretenses has moments that are intended to inspire emotion, whether it's the moment where you come out of a dark tunnel to witness breathtaking scenery, or a poignant character moment. A landscape artist paints a single slice of the world. A world designer creates landscapes that can be viewed from any point within them. The landscape has to incorporate aesthetics alongside game design goals to create a space that is immersive and compelling, all within the limitations of the game engine and the system it's designed to run one. A game isn't just art, it's a nexus of many different kinds of art, all (ideally) working in harmony to produce a coherent experience for the viewer. All with a degree of interactivity that no other medium can hope to achieve.
Also, the heyday of text heavy RPGs has passed, but there have been RPGs with text running in to the hundreds of thousands of words, presenting multiple threads of plot and character narratives that interact with the other gameplay systems to provide unpredictable and surprising results for the viewer. Planescape: Torment, to name just one, is popularly regarded by fans as one of the best novels of the 1990s.
is art-ness transitive? does my computer monitor become art if I look at art on it? do the parts of my eye become art by the mechanical process of seeing art?
Does a movie screen become art when a movie is playing on it? Does a painting carry merit as an artwork because it is paint on a canvas, or because it conveys an expression of something beyond its literal constituent parts?
i find maximalist interpretations tiresome and am much more interested in the working definition of these terms, so the latter, probably, but if you can defend maximalism go for it.
part of the concern is that people consider being 'game-like' to be of less value then art when that makes very little sense. they are both forms of cultural expression.
People do this dance with every new media form that comes out. Novels went through this, movies went through this, many music genres were derided as unworthy of hte term "art".
Yes all forms of art must initially struggle to be recognized as art, but they don’t become art until they are socially accepted as such. Novels, films and music were not art previous to their broad acceptance as art. It was this very struggle for acceptance that eventually led to them being accepted. We shall see if the same happens with video games.
I think the disconnect is you all seem to have a platonic idea of what art is, some unchanging perfect ideal. It seems weird to you that something could be not art one day, and then art the next. But that’s how it is, art is subjective and descriptive - not a perfect platonic idea floating in the ether
People don’t just consider it, it seems to be universally understood that the more puzzle/task/competitive a game becomes the less it fits into “art” and the more it fits into game, which seem to be mutually distinct categories that oppose each other
Actually, y'know what, if we go by the standards of what you're proposing here as necessarily definitional for what constitutes "True Art", then I can in fact name a specific game/game-series that I think would qualify despite the distaste we might have for it.
You might already have an idea of what that is, but the answer is the Call of Duty franchise, especially as it exists post-CoD4. It is an extremely important focal point of contemporary American culture (don't laugh), that absolutely does have a massive, collective shared audience & interpretive body; and it's cultural importance is significant enough that the US Government takes a direct interest in it's development.
Now, that doesn't make it good art. It is bad art in the same way that most Fascist art is, in that it isn't really interested in any way with personal introspection, or the enlightenment of man; it interested only in exalting the ostensible virtues of competition & of dominance over one's enemies. But it is still art, in the ways which you are talking about art, even if it is ugly & antisocial art.