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Not This Again : Ebert : Video games can never be art

AleeN634 said:
One day games may be respected as art. Until then:

215053589_dZc8g-L-2.jpg

So, wait, the game console itself is now a work or art? I'm confused.

^ And yeah i forgot about Little Nemo in Slumberland and probably a couple of other comic strips that have been rejected by comic strip culture. The case still stands...you can't keep rejecting opportunities to take the art-form to higher levels because they won't keep coming. Sooner or later the artists will get the hint and will get set in its ways and then its nearly impossible to move on from there.
 
Mr. B Natural said:
So, wait, the game console itself is now a work or art? I'm confused.

^ And yeah i forgot about Little Nemo in Slumberland and probably a couple of other comic strips that have been rejected by comic strip culture. The case still stands...you can't keep rejecting opportunities to take the art-form to higher levels because they won't keep coming. Sooner or later the artists will get the hint and will get set in its ways and then its nearly impossible to move on from there.

Just being a dick.
Don't worry about it.
 
Mr. B Natural said:
Calvin and Hobbes stepped it up but nobody cared. Now comic strips are about as irrelevant as ever.

Well: plenty of people cared, it just didn't affect how business was done in the specific business (newspaper daily strips) that Watterson was working in. You didn't really see the full impact of C&H's influence until the economics around comic strips changed enough that peoeple influenced by his work had the economic opportunity to create work that reflected that influence (in this case, it took the rise of webcomics.)

(EDIT: Though, as GhaleonQ rightfully points out, in many ways Watterson himself is actually harking back to an older era of comic strips during which they were a major selling point of newspapers rather than a mostly-ignored appendix -- the Citizen Kane of comics would be something like Little Nemo that was produced at the apex of commercial success, not someone later on trying to build on the elements of that work.)

It's silly to ignore economic factors in talking about these things. Film was a primarily commercial medium lacking in focused artistic intent for a long time. If you want to talk "Citizen Kane moments," the full impact of Welles' film wasn't really felt in American cinema until the influence of auteur theory and the French New Wave trickled back in during the 1970s. Games are very much similar -- you have some individual auteurs within the field, but everyone's still laboring under a studio system that restricts what is possible in the medium and the independent movement is still in its infancy.
 
seady said:
Also, the fact that this type of media has the word "game" in it will forever make people think of it less than what it is.
This generation, in examining the past, will leap from its bathtub exclaiming, "Holy fucking shit! Games are High Art! How did this go undiscovered for so goddamn long?".
 
I doubt that you'll reply to this, but...

charlequin said:
Art is really the same way. Yes, it's a broad word -- that's because it's a categorical description of all creative works created to provide edification, aesthetic enjoyment, or any of a variety of other experiences to those who consume them. People try to make it, too, into a word of judgment -- if a specific work meets some arbitrary and capricious standard then it gets to "be" art -- but that's nonsensical and doesn't even fit with how people normally use the word. If that were the case, how can there be "bad art"? How can controversial works ever be showcased when tastemakers (apparently) disagree whether they even qualify as art? How can people study "art history" rather than "art and bad things that aren't art history"?

I'm sure you mean to include other limits than "provide an emotional response" in your definition of art. You don't consider a sudoku puzzle to be art, do you?
 
gerg said:
I'm sure you mean to include other limits than "provide an emotional response" in your definition of art. You don't consider a sudoku puzzle to be art, do you?

Art is framed by context. That is the concept which Duchamp's Fountain aims to demonstrate and the ultimate reason why border-guarding the concept of art is silly. There is nothing innate to the concept of a sudoku puzzle that is inartistic besides its lack of notability in the context which it exists. You just have to look at the history of 20th century art to see it trivially demonstrated that you can take pretty much anything, stick it in a frame, and by so encouraging people to contemplate it for its aesthetic and symbolic qualities render it art.

It is quite likely that, say, EA NCAA Football 2006 will never in practice be considered by anyone in particular in the manner of a work of art because it's an ultra-disposable consumer product that most people have already thrown away, with no aspirations whatsoever to aesthetic beauty, symbolic meaning, or unique expression (much like an individual sudoku puzzle) but that doesn't actually say anything in particular about games as art. Other disposable objects have been plucked from obscurity to become art, unchanged except in context (see Fountain again); the aesthetics or meanings of disposable items have been reimagined and expanded to grant them new artistic power (see the work of Roy Liechtenstein or, heck, The Godfather); items once considered to have been empty, by-the-numbers pieces have been shown to have previously-unknown artistic depths when looked at through the long lens of history (see pretty much any case where old studio-system films or lost musical classics from the earlier part of the century were "rediscovered" in the modern era.)
 
charlequin said:
Art is framed by context. That is the concept which Duchamp's Fountain aims to demonstrate and the ultimate reason why border-guarding the concept of art is silly. There is nothing innate to the concept of a sudoku puzzle that is inartistic besides its lack of notability in the context which it exists. You just have to look at the history of 20th century art to see it trivially demonstrated that you can take pretty much anything, stick it in a frame, and by so encouraging people to contemplate it for its aesthetic and symbolic qualities render it art.

It is quite likely that, say, EA NCAA Football 2006 will never in practice be considered by anyone in particular in the manner of a work of art because it's an ultra-disposable consumer product that most people have already thrown away, with no aspirations whatsoever to aesthetic beauty, symbolic meaning, or unique expression (much like an individual sudoku puzzle) but that doesn't actually say anything in particular about games as art. Other disposable objects have been plucked from obscurity to become art, unchanged except in context (see Fountain again); the aesthetics or meanings of disposable items have been reimagined and expanded to grant them new artistic power (see the work of Roy Liechtenstein or, heck, The Godfather); items once considered to have been empty, by-the-numbers pieces have been shown to have previously-unknown artistic depths when looked at through the long lens of history (see pretty much any case where old studio-system films or lost musical classics from the earlier part of the century were "rediscovered" in the modern era.)

I think that we're mostly agreeing. However, my conclusion from this is not that the definition of art should be so broad as to mean "a categorical description of all creative works created to provide edification, aesthetic enjoyment, or any of a variety of other experiences to those who consume them", but that one can then define art as an attitude towards aesthetics in relation to the goals of the piece. That any singular response to a piece of art is neither necessary nor sufficient for a definition of art does not tell me that such a definition cannot be found, but that we must look beyond what the object does for the viewer to find it.

The reason why I prefer such a definition is because I think that there is a very apparent difference between art and design, even though both attempt to provide some kind of emotional response from the viewer.

Edit: I've quoted the bolded because, again, I feel that it highlights the differences in our approaches.
 
I find his whole position indefensible, not for his arguments but for the stance he takes on his argument.

For any argument to take place, there has to be the possibility that his opinion can be changed (this should be a rule for all argument really).

The way he respons on twitter and on his blog makes it clear that he's already made up his mind.

So why does he even write about it if he isn't open to changing his mind?

Seems like a waste of everyones time.
 
Ebert's whole argument is rendered moot by virtue of the fact the man doesn't play games.

He's simply not qualified to form an educated opinion on this matter.
 
Videogames are an artform. They're a pretty crude artform at this point, but that's not especially surprising given their infancy.
 
blame space said:
art is made by an artist. video games are played by players. is this seriously still contested?

you're manipulating an image in a predetermined scenario that a group of developers created. it's like people believing in god and saying: "my life is art!"

I know I'm quoting something from page 1, but wow this guy doesn't seem to really understand it.

Basically we have 'Art is made by an artist' and then 'video games are played by players', but why doesn't he talk about how 'art is watched by your average person (who's most likely not an artist) and 'the visuals of a game are made by an artist (who makes art, as his first sentence says)'.

I know this guy is probably just a troll, but I couldn't help but replying to this.

Either way, this topic is something that we will never get to agree with everybody. Mostly with old people who just can't grasp the idea of games becoming something quite 'big' and really good artists (much much better than many of the actual "artists" displaying their "art" in modern museums, imo) are working for it.
 
You know what was nice? One of my teachers used "games are art" as a given in a statement to argue something and there wan't a two hour argument. That was nice.
 
I just don't understand how having an objective or winning has anything to do with games being art or not. What about a gymnastics, dance, or figure skating competition? Is it no longer artistic because they're competing? The judges have objectives against which they grade the performance of the competitors.

Ebert is quite simply a fucking elistist and kind of a dick.

I absolutely agree that narratives in games are overwhelmingly shit. But then so is the narrative in 90% of movies. If he lambasts the narrative of a movie in a review does that mean that no movie can be art?

The models and ART ASSETS created in video games clearly artwork. I could just as easily say, "Films aren't art because all you do is point a camera at something." Player input into the game has nothing to do with the mediums value as an art form or not. I'm not even going to keep typing because his argument isn't worth the time.

In summary, anyone who agrees with him has an inferiority complex. Your games are every bit as artistic as movies, just fucking play them and have fun.
 
It's subjective. He's a critic. He only deals in subjectivity. But there are a couple of flaws in his arguments - objectively.

He's careful in how he words his experiences - I suspect he doesn't actually play them, so he's like a "painting" critic who just reads about the content of the painting and makes judgment on the descriptions.

There's no shame in being old or foggy enough to not be able to play games properly, but I can't help but think of an otherwise appreciative and intelligent fogey from the 60s complaining that Pop art isn't "art" because he's literally unable to digest the most compelling aspects of it. Missing the point, in other words.

To me, it isn't even a question. Of course games are art. And this I suspect is where gaf's outrage comes from - is the instinctual knowledge that it's obviously art.
 
Soneet said:
I'm a lone programmer & designer and I'm making my own game. It's my only way to express something, because I want to share a world that's in my head. A world I created and I want others to experience that world. I plan to release it for free in the hope that as many people can experience it. So if I do it alone, don't do it for the money, every single part of it is made by myself (the visuals, the presentation, the concepts of interactivity, the feelings I'm trying to extract) and it's something I created... it's still not art? I don't really see that as fair. But if it's a definition and this doesn't fall under that category, then so be it. Then I'm making "just a game". But then the Eiffeltower is "just a tower".

I said a lot more than you quoted. I just believe most people are so caught up in the Ebert hate/automatic rejection of his premise based on the special significance videogames haves to theirs lives.

I'm only really saying that Ebert does have a point. And he did address your example. The difference between a single artists vs. many artisans building a cathedral to the specs of the artist. But ultimately he still rejects games as being art.

As I noted, we get too tied up with 'experiences' in the very superficial sense of music, and graphics when we discuss games as art. I don't think he's ever rejected games as not being able to evoke emotions (worth nothing again the emotion can usually be very base - anger, aggression, greed)

As I noted that if there is an element of 'art' to games, it would be gameplay. It's not something you can easily describe, it is something you know, just as we know great art. It's really how the components of a game falls together in the same way the brush strokes in a Monet painting elevates it from someone who is a 'craftsman' who knows their trade to an 'artist'. It exists in all games, it's not a 'winnable' element, it's the glue that holds a game together and differentiates the high production mediocrity from the truly great games.
 
Jackson said:
People are continually comparing mainstream games to art house films and saying "games are not art".

No, mainstream games can't be art because they were not created as art, they were created to make money, funded not by the artists themselves and thus are not ultimately in full control of their work. Art house films that are truly art house films are never created to make money, only to create art.
I really don't have anything else to say that hasn't been said already, but I hate this argument so much it is not to be believed, because it's just wrong. The "art must be for art's sake" argument is and always has been patently wrong.

Look at any of the major examples of early classical music you'll hear in any music appreciation or theory class in a high school - anything by Bach or Mozart or Pachelbel or what have you. Many of these songs are considered some of the most important and artistically-crafted songs of all time (how many stupidly overblown metal bands have done that Canon in D cover again?), yet these composers, as well as most artists, were employed by the the wealthy class to create these works. They were live-in artists for lords and courts and other high-class members of society whose job was simply to compose new music or whatever to make their employers look more cultured or flaunt their wealth. By your definition, the majority of classical music should just be thrown out because the people making it were looking to get paid.

Likewise we should say that the Sistine Chapel, while a marvel, has no merit because Michaelangelo was paid by the Catholic Church to do it. Or that most of the things we considered art should just be thrown out the window because somewhere, at some point, money changed hands.

Art and commerce are, unfortunately, things that go hand-in-hand. The unfortunate truth is that art is only able to happen 95% of the time because someone is backing it. Now, you can make an argument that most things that are popular in contemporary times will ultimately be written out of history by the art historians and snobs that define what art is, while many of the auteurs we hold up as visionaries are ones who failed to make their work commercially viable, but that strikes me as more of a sociological/psychological argument about what defines popularity. But suffice to say, art, be it low-art or high-art, only happens because it's commercially viable for it to happen; if it wasn't, no one would do it.
 
l2ounD said:
That dude is just being a critic... oh wait.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=383744&page=62

But yeah, games have come a long way in terms of visual art.

What qualifies you to say that beyond your own subjective opinion of what art is? I mean when you look at this:

kandinsky.black-violet.jpg


Are you actually apprecaiting that as art? And regardless, his argument is that video games cannot be art, not that games now aren't artistic. He is saying that as a medium it is impossible to create something artistic.

(sarcasm to reinforce how stupid ebert is)
 
Another weird thing: he complains about people suggesting "this game and that game," as if there were an inexhaustible supply of suggestions. He doesn't play video games, however. He just reads Wikipedia summaries, watches a gameplay clip, and reads 1 or analyses. He could easily exhaust every good and bad suggestion in a week so he'd never feel the need to comment again. Why doesn't he just do that?
 
Jexhius said:
...Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

If you were to ask Ebert, he would tell you that Freddy Got Fingered's "prose" is superior to Braid's.

He should play: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

You can't "win", there are no rules, points, objectives. Only an outcome, like all movies.
 
If movies can be art, games can be art. Both are predetermined, for the most part, and experienced by the viewer/player to tell a story.

If movies cannot be art, games cannot be art.

If art must be still and lifeless, then a screenshot of a game can be art, but the actual game cannot be art.
 
I surprised that someone like Ebert can't formulate a better argument. I'm not surprised that some of you certainly can't.

GhaleonQ said:
Another weird thing: he complains about people suggesting "this game and that game," as if there were an inexhaustible supply of suggestions. He doesn't play video games, however. He just reads Wikipedia summaries, watches a gameplay clip, and reads 1 or analyses. He could easily exhaust every good and bad suggestion in a week so he'd never feel the need to comment again. Why doesn't he just do that?

He's trying to refine his argument. He knows that he's holding a very indefensible position.
 
Deku said:
I'm only really saying that Ebert does have a point.

But... he doesn't have a point. :lol You've just used what he said as a place to start in having a point yourself.

To effectively argue a meaningful position on this issue -- the topic you yourself raise, on the relative value of the player's interaction with the game as a setpiece vs. the design of that setpiece as an expressive act -- one would have to have a working understanding and knowledge of games as a medium and how they function, which you do but Roger Ebert quite clearly does not.

OuterWorldVoice said:
To me, it isn't even a question. Of course games are art. And this I suspect is where gaf's outrage comes from - is the instinctual knowledge that it's obviously art.

More or less. Ebert's statement is so blindingly ignorant (and this is coming from someone who thinks Roger Ebert is a hell of a writer who's had many fantastic things to say over the years) that people get all worked up about it because it's just so freakin' wrong. It's like if someone started a thread here that tried to patiently and condescendingly explain to everyone else on GAF how to unlock Sheng Long in Street Fighter II. :lol
 
Dresden said:
Who knows if games are art. We still find it difficult to define what art truly is, and what definitions we have are still subject to change.

"Meh" is the best answer I have for this. Who cares? Just play games for enjoyment, just like how people told stories for fun, how epic verses were composed and committed to memory, how some dude sitting on a rock thought to himself, "hey, that girl I like would look totally swell as a bulging rock figure!"

I'm not sure why people get so passionate about this, on both sides of the spectrum. Games don't need to be validated as art. Maybe general acceptance of the industry as something above just commonplace entertainment will happen one day. Until then, who gives a fuck. Play what you like and stop trying to justify thumb-twiddling as an artistic endeavor.
I don't really see anyone getting passionate or feeling like they have to justify a hobby of theirs. Just people pointing out how dumb/short-sighted Ebert sounds.
 
charlequin said:
More or less. Ebert's statement is so blindingly ignorant (and this is coming from someone who thinks Roger Ebert is a hell of a writer who's had many fantastic things to say over the years) that people get all worked up about it because it's just so freakin' wrong. It's like if someone started a thread here that tried to patiently and condescendingly explain to everyone else on GAF how to unlock Sheng Long in Street Fighter II. :lol

Pretty much. He's never ever going to yield or change on this; it's just not going to happen. Some things you just have to let go and say 'uncle'.
 
As a fine arts student, even I don't know what art is. No one really does. But one thing that always comes around is this idea that if a created work can move you, or if it can teach you about the world or yourself, or whatever... if it expresses an idea that you naturally gravitate towards, then yeah it can be art.

So, video games as a whole may not be art, but I've played a lot of games that I do consider art. Do games make us think about more than high scores? Games have been doing that for a while now. Games, like cinema, serve many purposes. Ebert comparing video games to chess is missing the point entirely.

One thing I'd hope for is that gamers stop giving him so much attention. Just because he's an accomplished film critic doesn't mean he's an accomplished games critic. He has almost zero experience with gaming, he has no interest, and that's really that.
 
charlequin said:
But... he doesn't have a point. :lol You've just used what he said as a place to start in having a point yourself.

Not really. I've always appreciated gameplay as the magic glue for games. And I really only mentioned it as a middle ground, as it really is being the only reasonable candidate for 'art' in games. The OP if you didn't notice was quoting Ebert's response to a number of games brought to his attention and him shooting them all down. But he did not address gameplay, he addressed the other points raised which is consistent with what the rest of the thread had been doing.

Most of the other responses were ragging on Ebert about minutiae, and if you choose to play on Ebert's playfield he really is right. The individual elements of a game, including the oft described 'experience' are not art. They can be artistic, but they are not art.
 
Porridge said:
As a fine arts student, even I don't know what art is. No one really does. But one thing that always comes around is this idea that if a created work can move you, or if it can teach you about the world or yourself, or whatever... if it expresses an idea that you naturally gravitate towards, then yeah it can be art.

So, video games as a whole may not be art, but I've played a lot of games that I do consider art. Do games make us think about more than high scores? Games have been doing that for a while now. Games, like cinema, serve many purposes. Ebert comparing video games to chess is missing the point entirely.

One thing I'd hope for is that gamers stop giving him so much attention. Just because he's an accomplished film critic doesn't mean he's an accomplished games critic. He has almost zero experience with gaming, he has no interest, and that's really that.
Define "move you".

If it is just about being mentally impacted or emotionally stirred than every game, even if it is just high scores, can be art.

I don't think there is a game out there that people feel nothing playing. Maybe its frustration, maybe joy, maybe satisfaction but it is all emotional response.
 
TruthJunky said:
This thread feels like a high-school "philosophy" class. So fucking painful to read. My god.

God, I know.

There's so much meaningless bullshit in this thread. It's really awful.

This is what happens when people get really worked up about a question that doesn't make sense in the first place.
 
Tain said:
God, I know.

There's so much meaningless bullshit in this thread. It's really awful.

This is what happens when people get really worked up about a question that doesn't make sense in the first place.

Why are there always people who say people posting in random threads are "worked up"? Are the people in this thread posting in all caps or insulting each other? It's just a discussion like any other, and if they weren't posting here, they'd be talking about the new NPD numbers or whatever. It's just shooting the shit on a forum.
 
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