Are Games Art?

Not quite the last King Lear... do you always go around quoting shakespeare????

YAY! my news made hot topics! C00l!
last post?

Any time that I have heard or read about someone trashing games
as not being art they always refer to older games that are at least 5
years old (a long time in the gaming world). These games are not
the most visually appealling, there sound doesn\'t rumble your room,
and the stories are just enough to say they have one. But to say
these games were not any good is a farse because they are the
foundation of video games today. I would like to see those critics
play one game of Homeworld and say that the 3D art isn\'t
amazing. Or play through Final Fantasy 7 and not feel a pang of
sorrow when Aeris dies. Putting users into a Fantasy realm that
disassociates them from the everyday is the whole purpose of a
game and when a game successfully does this I would be proud to
be part of the team of artist that put that game together.

jeez poke, didn\'t mean to offend you. I am really not putting much effort into this arguement and I guess there is no reason to if you also love Shakespeare. I have gotten used to the language so it doesn\'t really pull me out of the film. And yes the plots are sometimes silly but so are the plots of other writers. Dickens for example.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that my Cat Scan contest\'s entries were featured in an art gallery but some people still fail to consider games as art?

Cliff

\"Whether \'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous creatures, or to take arms against a sea of marines, and by opposing, frag them.\"
hey, this is fun!

\"unless I look upon http://www.shugashack.com in the day/There is no day for me to look upon\"

heh

I mean, when I get pissed off I don\'t walk around saying \"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks\" or \"I am fortunes fool\" or things like that. lol.

oh--and think beatrice and benedick on those insults -- i realize to even argue this point you have to have some sort of smarts ;)

#241 -- true dat. wait\'ll sTeve wakes up, he\'ll laugh his ass off

jesus. do you have a mind? shit.
How can you read my posts and not notice that I love Shakespeare??? Let me spell it out for your clearly impaired intellect: I made the original shakespeare post because i thought it might be a good analogy to games. People were talking about dialogue that brings you out of games. I thought \"what does that remind me of?\" then i remembered in my basic film class we recently studied a Shakespeare film. I mention it. If you can handle it, find the reference in an earlier post.

Are you familiar with Shakespeare? At all? holy jesus -- the dialogue is, well, ancient. You can\'t go from a modern movie to Shakespeare seamlessly -- you are brought out of the film because of the effort in understanding the words. However, it richer and more rewarding for it. The plots are silly and contrived. It is a rare shakespeare play that you can watch and think \"this could happen, this is how things happen.\" They are also intricate and fun, and bring out emotion more than more mundane plots.

Do you understand yet? you don\'t have to tell me twice, but i\'m sure i will hear a third time that his stuff has \"gone on to become the center of english literature.\" Before you say it AGAIN, realize i am not arguing that. I was pointing out the similarity between our greatest playwright (see! I said it! you win! jesus!) and some video games.

haha you don\'t see an arguement about shakespeare on the shack everyday.

Oh and I think its pretty safe to be a Shakespeare fanboy. If he wrote it, it\'s good. Maybe not as enjoyable as some other stuff but it always was masterfully done and innovative.

Shakespeare\'s plays were incredible for their time and they did have some strange things in them but back then they would have been more believable. And they are meant to be silly anyway. I just don\'t think you can critisize his plots. They might have a few weak points, yes. They were incredibly revolutionary though. And I think that creativity is the true measure of art. Well Shakespeare has it in spades. The themes in his plays have gone on to become the center of english literature.

#236 -- shall I say it? you have all the symptoms: blind support for something that doesn\'t care whether or not you support it, discarding offhand any criticism, even the good kind . . .

SHAKESPEARE FANBOY!!! ;)

#236 -- did you read the rest of the post at all?

and come on. major shakespeare plot things --- crossdressing and people cant tell, people pretend to be dead, twins that everyone thinks are the same person

monday i saw much ado about nothing, the branaugh one. I loved the movie, just like i love shakespeare\'s plays. But you have such a dumb story line it\'s incredible -- if you were to take away the beautiful language (but un-decipherable by modern standards if it wasn\'t for the wonderful cast) you would have a dumb play.

My point is to all the people on the thread that talked about the shitty dialogue and plot in computer games.

WTF poke? Shakespeare sucks most of the time? Plot lines aren\'t good? Ummmm he was an incredible writer and his plots have gone on to become the backbone of modern english literature.

Yawn. No wonder I don\'t subscribe to Newsweek. Crusty Jack Kroll has been blathering away there for so long, it\'s a wonder they haven\'t put him in a museum and called *him* art -- cave art! The question of whether computer games are art is rather moot, since the art world long ago (about 80 years, if you must know) decided that everything from a pisser yanked out of the bathroom and on up is art. *If* the right person installs it in the *right* museum, and the *right* critics discuss it, and the *right* patrons buy it, then it is art. Art! (Ironically, it also helps if the old guard *hates* it; so it\'s also *right* to have the *wrong* people against you, generally old, moldy, and tenured.) Then, about a century or so later, give or take a few decades, there\'s a reaction, started by a new bunch of the right people (who regard themselves as, well, *more right* than the last set, and they decide that what was cool is now shit). Kroll is trying to be one of the right people, and a fogey, at the same time -- it\'s a curious condition that attaches itself to weekly newsmagazine writers. Clue to the Kroll-on Anti-perspirant: you ain\'t Mr. Right, bustah.

I think most everyone on this board has forgotten that music is art. And if music is art, which is just a bunch of black dots on a page, then i am sure as hell that games are. It isn\'t the binary that makes it art, it\'s the PLAYING -- just like plays, music, and even computer games. It\'s all in how it\'s performed, which means for games, it\'s in the experience.

What a pompus fuckwit,.. who does he think he is to say whats art and whats not.
To me half what is considered art is just a bunch of kids drawings.
I think that some games should be concidered art just because its not \"painted by real paint\" dont mean shit. cos 50% of all \"real art\" is fucked.

#222 you didn\'t read it did you.

#225 - notice how I listed Kenshin in my secondary list (#208)? ;)

#195
Check out the Kenshin series. The 4 part OVA is the best anime I\'ve ever seen in terms of everything. Grave of the Fireflies is amazing as well.

#202
Ninja Scroll is cool, but its sort of like Samurai Rambo. No illusion of depth.

To fart is part art.

yes.

here\'s some text bitch

hey, while you\'re at it, why don\'t you take this text and shove it up your ass

sideways

bitch

http://www.penny-arcade.com
wisdom at it\'s best, 3 times a week.

here\'s a renowned game industry giant, and his take on the subject.


To claim that Video Games cannot \"Engage the Heart\" is foolhardy. Mr. Kroll (as in, \"Kroll around on the ground whimpering after I kick him square in the balls\") states:

\"Games can be fun and rewarding in many ways, but they can\'t transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art.\"

Hey jerk-off! Played any Final Fantasy lately? Uh, ever played any game, ever? I discard your specious assertion out of hand. Why? Aside from the fact that this nut-roll doesn\'t support it with any facts, this medium clearly compels millions, every day, in ways that he implies it is functionally incapable of doing. I would imagine if you\'re reading Penny Arcade, these digital experiences have some kind of effect on you. Look at another priceless quote:

\"And it\'s human beings who create art, not the polygons and Bezier curves of digital technology.\"

Huh? What? Of course polygons and Bezier curves don\'t create art - the same way that words and paper don\'t create literature! You can\'t sit in your chair in a high-rise somewhere and issue an edict stating which mediums are and aren\'t acceptable for expression. It\'s not your job. Most games aren\'t vying to be art, to begin with - they\'re vying to be games, for God\'s sake. Is checkers art? Chess? The pieces themselves are not necessarily art - I\'ve seen some fabulous chess sets, is all I\'m saying - but when played... Something. Just. Happens. More than the pieces and trappings. More than the sum of its parts. It occurs in the places in-between - it creates the conditions necessary for a human experience. I call that art.

(CW)TB out.

i got four four so you kids no going

Seems to me most of the people saying \"video games are not art\" don\'t have a clear and personal idea of what *IS* art. Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, e.e. cummings; these are all considered great artists in hindsight, but the truth is they were considered sensationalists in their own time--now they\'re seen as innovators.

Tell me: 15 years from now, how will we look at Miyamoto? If he is not an artist, then who the hell is? Simply put, video games are the MOST exciting and fastest growing art form today, and in the next 10-15 years I guarantee we\'ll see this issue blossom into a big debate (i.e. movies, i.e. rock n\' roll) which eventually ends with video games being generally accepted as art.

If you want to hear someone in the industry talking intelligently about the power of interactive entertainment, check out Ernest Adams web site at:

http://hometown.aol.com/ewadams/index.html

He also writes regularly on Gamasutra.com. And to go with the theme of \"art as an emotion and intellectual experience\" read below for Ernest\'s big revelation, back in the 80\'s:

\"The other game that made me feel really weird, in a very different way, was Balance of Power, which came out in 1986. Balance of Power was a simulation of global geopolitics. You played either America or the Soviet Union, and the idea was to increase your global prestige and decrease that of your opponent by supporting the governments of countries that were friendly to you, and fomenting coups or revolutions in countries that were unfriendly. You could do this by sending economic or military aid, signing defense treaties, and other means. But every action you took was being scrutinized by the other side, and might provoke a crisis. A lot of prestige was at stake in a crisis, and whoever backed down first was bound to suffer mightily. (If you didnÂ’t ever back down, you risked a nuclear war, which ended the game.)

\"All this might sound a little dry, even dull. The user interface for Balance of Power consisted of a map, some newspaper headlines, a few dialog boxes… and it was in black-and-white, no less! It ran on the original Macintosh or on the PC under, believe it or not, a standalone version of Windows 1.0. But the extraordinary thing about Balance of Power was the way that your opponent behaved. Each time you played, the Russian leadership was different. Sometimes they were particularly tough and hard-nosed, driving every confrontation to the brink of nuclear disaster. Other times they were pushovers, backing down at the slightest complaint. Sometimes they were adventurous, interfering all over the world – even in Mexico, right next door! Other times they stayed quietly at home and didn’t get involved in foreign entanglements.

\"Now hereÂ’s the weird part: I normally played Balance of Power from the American perspective. But one day, I tried playing it from the Russian side. I discovered then that the game was not symmetric. The Russians had a lot more manpower, but a lot less money. Although they could easily send in troops to prop up a government they were supporting, they couldnÂ’t buy much friendship with economic aid. And that wasnÂ’t all. They were surrounded by a ring of steel: NATO in the west, Japan in the east, Canada over the pole. Even though China was a Communist country too, it was hostile and suspicious. While the U.S. had Britain, France, Germany, and Japan for allies, most of the U.S.S.R.Â’s friends were poor as church mice.

\"For the first time in my life, I got a direct and immediate insight about why the Russians seemed so paranoid, so confrontational (this was during the Reagan administration, remember). The hugely powerful United States and its allies had declared that the entire Soviet way of life was wrong, and were using their unimaginable wealth to turn the world against them, hedging them in, denying them their rightful role as a great power in the community of nations.

\"It sounds simple, even silly, in retrospect. But getting a personal understanding of what the Soviets were up against left me with an odd feeling that lasted several hours. You can learn a lot by playing the other side.\"

I think this shows some of the great potential video games have as the first and only truly interactive art...to be able to shift perspective and see and interact with the world through \"the enemy\'s\" eyes--what an amazing power these games can have...

kelster even.

Well said Kelser.