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.
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.