DryvBy
Member
Video games are not art. They never were, never will be, and never should be considered as such. The only reason the topic is so frequently brought up, and why the comparison was even started in the first place, was due to a very costly mistake that the hobby is still paying for to this very day.
That mistake was the use of politics to save the hobby from an outside threat. Confused? Let me start at the beginning:
The same can be said about where we are now in the gaming hobby and why it’s under attack from angry, ultra-progressive mobs demanding certain games be banned, threatening developers until their projects get killed, or writing hit pieces about popular games due to their supposedly “problematic”nature. How is that so, you ask?
Let’s go back to the early 2000’s, when a lawyer by the name of Jack Thompson was on a full scale crusade against violent video games and blamed several acts of violence on the supposedly corrupting influence they had on the minds of the children involved.
To combat Thompson, gaming media changed significantly. As a shut-in nerd that spent all his free time online in various “geek” communities and worked for a gaming webzine at the time, I noticed that a new style of game website began to arise in response to Thompson’s prodding of the industry; websites written by “professionals” who were “highly educated” and “well-versed in law”. Websites where gaming was approached in a serious way with a format geared towards older, supposedly more sophisticated gamers.
Sites like GamePolitics, Gamasutra, and Ars Technica were either created to fight the anti-gaming rhetoric (GamePolitics was created in 2005 specifically for that end), or became popular and well-known for fighting it after years of existing in relative obscurity (Like Gamasutra and Ars Technica).
(few paragraphs later)
It was a subtle little slide, but I couldn’t help but notice it as it took place around 2009 or so, with websites slowly drifting further to that style of games writing, all pushing the same ridiculous notion that gaming wasn’t about the visuals, technical aspects, challenge, or mathematical underpinnings that made them the digital equivalent of chess that they in fact were, but instead deep pieces of art that examined humanity and existed solely to make us think critically about real world issues and concerns.
(and a few more)
It was these websites – staffed and created by these casual “gamers” who cared more about the societal impact of games than whether or not the game was buggy and ran well on low spec hardware – that were now the new gatekeepers of the hobby.
The article goes into a bit more detail of the evolution of gaming from Ultima to Fallout and within a series. Then:
This problem all stems from game developers desperately wanting to make their games “art” instead of a game. A good example is the cinematic focus Bethesda emphasized in Fallout 4.
The insertion of your character’s name in dialog, the voiced protagonist, the limited conversation options, the lack of any real non-linearity or faction play; it was all a side effect of them focusing more on making a playable movie than a true CRPG.
Yet you are told by “fans” that if you don’t like the “new direction” your series is taking, you either aren’t a fan, or you need to just get over it and adapt.
Just don’t buy it if you don’t like it, you are urged. Of course, this thinking is ludicrous, since if we all do this, it emboldens developers to continue attempting it since they would receive no resistance.
So what does this dumbing down of games have to do with the adoption of the “Games are Art” mentality?
Though a large part of the great dumbing down (Or “Great Decline”) was due to gaming suddenly growing very large and profitable in the previous decade and developers smelling fresh money ready to be coerced out of willing pockets, it’s my assertion that none of the mainstream attention that helped gaming surpass movies and music as the number one form of consumed media would have materialized were it not for the response to the Jack Thompson/Government Censorship/Joe Lieberman/Political attacks that we used to defeat them.
Had we not gone running with tears streaming down our eyes to a bunch of university-educated, trust-fund-having, hipster and casual gamers to fight our battle by playing the “Games are art, art is protected by law” narrative, we wouldn’t have attracted the influx of dyed-haired, johnny-come-latelies that now speak as if they are a majority in the hobby.
You wouldn’t see articles calling George Kamitani a sexist, or praising Dead or Alive 6 (pictured above) for removing boob physics, or arguing that Samus has always been transgender.
But this is what happens when you play the “Games are art” card. You attract hipster casuals looking for a megaphone.
Nearly every malady that afflicts modern gaming is a direct result of how easily and with such staggering aplomb we latched onto it as a defense against outward attacks.
Now, coming back to bite us in the rear, are the same people we attracted with that talk who are now demanding we go one step further by making gaming *truly* an artform by removing combat or completely sanitizing all of a game’s content.
This is the future that “Games are art” talk has created. A reality where nearly every geek hobby, from gaming to comics to sci-fi, are all getting filled with loud-mouthed casual “art loving” fans that don’t or can’t financially support the industry.
They hold sway despite not buying said games, due to their powerful gatekeeper position within the media, and are able to magnify their own minority concerns and force them upon the majority who does financially support the hobby.
Source: https://nichegamer.com/2018/08/29/o...thinking-they-are-has-dragged-down-the-hobby/
This article is pretty long and purely an opinion piece, but I enjoyed it because I've never held the idea that "games are art". If they are art, why would anyone on the art side try to ban certain games or tell a director what they should/shouldn't put in their art?