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Not This Again : Ebert : Video games can never be art
- Thread starter Jex
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Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
I would agree that games are not art (or at least that no game except for maybe Shadow of the Colossus has reached the level of art), but they certainly contain art (graphics, level design, story) and are culturally valuable and relevant for that reason.
However, I totally agree that there are no video games to rival the great films/poems/books/songs/TV shows.
However, I totally agree that there are no video games to rival the great films/poems/books/songs/TV shows.
BobsRevenge
I do not avoid women, GAF, but I do deny them my essence.
Flower is art, by my definition. It was such a gorgeous game, and the end was unexpectedly emotional. I loved it.Prince of Space said:
edit: Also, Braid is art as well, I just don't like it.
the truf. People don't understand (or let on if they do) that there is no one definition of art, which makes the effort of classifying something as 'art' or 'not-art' inane.icarus-daedelus said:
When people say art they usually mean high art, whether they know it or not - and there is a very good argument to be made that there aren't high art video games because there isn't a high art culture in the video game space.
Games have always been High Art.Deku said:
If you doubt this you need to discover why playing cards have pictures on them, not just numbers.
A Life Well Wasted says hello.Brobzoid said:
bafflewaffle
Member
99% of the stuff gaf likes is not art.
FunkyPajamas
Member
Three words: Gears of Wart.
The Shadow
Member
You have got to be kidding me. People think video games are an art form? What's next, stripping at a club? Performance art!
It's an entertainment medium. Nothing more. Get off your smug high horses.
It's an entertainment medium. Nothing more. Get off your smug high horses.
bafflewaffle
Member
some games do have some artistic qualities 
but when games are considered great by similarity to movies - "gta is oscar worthy" "uncharted is like playing indy jones" then there is a problem that most do not want to address.
but when games are considered great by similarity to movies - "gta is oscar worthy" "uncharted is like playing indy jones" then there is a problem that most do not want to address.
FunkyPajamas
Member
:lol Flawless victoly.Safe Bet said:
A work qualifies as art if its creator deliberately shaped it with the intent to convey a message, evoke a mood or inspire particular emotions in the person experiencing it. It's really that simple. How successful a given work is in accomplishing this is another question entirely.
People on the other side of the debate like to quote Miyamoto, who insists that games are not art, but he contradicts himself. When he talks about recapturing the experience of exploration and the sense of wonder we experience as children in his games, he's describing an act of artistic expression. He's creating art even as he denies it.
The real question now isn't, 'Can games be art?'. It's 'Where do we go from here?' Videogames are a relatively new artform. There's a tremendous amount of unexplored potential here, and we're still feeling our way. What other kinds of feelings and ideas can the medium be used to convey, and how? Those are the questions we should be trying to find answers to.
People on the other side of the debate like to quote Miyamoto, who insists that games are not art, but he contradicts himself. When he talks about recapturing the experience of exploration and the sense of wonder we experience as children in his games, he's describing an act of artistic expression. He's creating art even as he denies it.
The real question now isn't, 'Can games be art?'. It's 'Where do we go from here?' Videogames are a relatively new artform. There's a tremendous amount of unexplored potential here, and we're still feeling our way. What other kinds of feelings and ideas can the medium be used to convey, and how? Those are the questions we should be trying to find answers to.
BobTheFork
Member
Then what is the idea? I don't agree that a video game is an invalid way to convey that idea, so I think it's incorrect to say games can't be art. It's as valid as any other visual or auditory medium. Art aside, I stand by my point (I know you weren't disagreeing but clarifying), that there is no invalid medium of expression.7Th said:
charlequin
Banned
jdogmoney said:
If you buy into the gamer-asceticism mindset of "gaming is a medium defined purely by tactile interaction; audiovisual, narrative, and meta elements indeed should be ignored whenever possible" a little too strongly, it's easy to draw the (rather trivially erroneous) conclusion that all of videogaming is properly analogous to basketball or Texas Hold 'Em but not to, say, Dungeons and Dragons or interactive performance art.
Of course, much like Ebert's specific initial argument, any position of this type is always going to require treating video games as a monolithic field filled with products of ultimately similar qualities, rather than a field filled with products so disparate that the fact that they're electronic programs that one interacts with via a video/tactile UI is the only thing at all similar about them.
Tellaerin said:
And this is really the source of that problem. Miyamoto is one brilliant game designer whose own work touches on maybe 15% of the possibile space of video games. He doesn't work on games where an element of artistic expression is particularly relevant (or he tries to get people to peel that element away when he does), so to him it doesn't exist, even though throughout the industry there are people taking lessons learned from games he designed and using them in games that are built around gaming as an expressive medium.
The Shadow said:
There's no reason why stripping can't be performance art, as long as the stripper performs with the intention to convey something to her audience, and that intent shapes her actions.
The problem here is that you (and a lot of other people posting here) seem to think that 'art' is some high-flown thing, sole property of the cultural elite. It's not. Get that idea out of your head. Art is all around us.
Tain said:
He's wrong about that, too.
To qualify as art, a thing needs to have been created and shaped with the intent to convey a message or emotion. That message or emotion doesn't need to be particularly deep or profound. Michael Bay's movies, for example, are intended to excite the audience and get their adrenalin flowing. And that's art, just like a treacly pop song is art, or a crude painting on the wall of a cave. All were created with the intent of evoking something in the people experiencing them. As I said earlier, how well they succeed at that (and how deep, nuanced or profound those feelings are intended to be) are other questions, separate from the question of, 'Is it art?'
BravoSuperStar
Member
The Shadow said:
So many people in here just don't "get it". SMH.....
Safe Bet said:
Perhaps, but I'm not debating whether or not games are high art. Some of them are, and some of them aren't. Certainly they can be - there's nothing inherently preventing it. But what I was trying to get at is that people have very narrow definitions of what does and doesn't constitute 'art'. Artistic expression isn't some ultra-rare thing, and 'art' in the broad sense isn't required to be deep, refined, or nuanced. The question of low vs. high art is another debate entirely.
civilstrife
Member
Ebert's definition of art seems to exclude theater. How unfortunate.
Is a play no longer art if it strays from the playwright's authorial intent? An extra pause or an unexpected smirk of an actor is all it would take to send the audience's imaginations reeling in any given direction.
What happens on stage on any given night is the amalgamation of a playwright's script, the director's artistic vision, the actor's interpretation (in that moment!) and the imagination and participation of the audience. In short, it is almost entirely unpredictable. Theater is the art of setting the proper circumstances and boundaries in which the action (and art) comes organically and in the moment. Such is also the case with video games. Perhaps tellingly, such is not the case with film.
Is a play no longer art if it strays from the playwright's authorial intent? An extra pause or an unexpected smirk of an actor is all it would take to send the audience's imaginations reeling in any given direction.
What happens on stage on any given night is the amalgamation of a playwright's script, the director's artistic vision, the actor's interpretation (in that moment!) and the imagination and participation of the audience. In short, it is almost entirely unpredictable. Theater is the art of setting the proper circumstances and boundaries in which the action (and art) comes organically and in the moment. Such is also the case with video games. Perhaps tellingly, such is not the case with film.
Flachmatuch
Member
As long as it's a form of creative self-expression, anything can be art, but video games, as they're made now, are overwhelmingly not self-expression in any way (although some of their parts are), so they're not actually art. Not even close.
It's not a really good debate though. Once there's a game that's on par with what's generally considered art, people will recognise it, but right now, trying so hard to prove that our favourite pastime is somehow more than pure (and awesome) entertainment just makes people look completely stupid. When you're saying Flower or Braid is "art", you're implicitly comparing them to stuff with achievements like Faust or the Iliad or Citizen Kaine, and in this case the comparison does indeed become pathetic.
As for the argument that video games have had no time to develop, I don't think it's a really good one. The development of any human creation doesn't mainly depend on the physical passing of time, but on human-time, the amount of time individual people have put into it. Games don't develop just because time passes, they develop because people put work-time into them, so that's what counts most imo, and in that respect, games have been doing pretty well. They're just way too difficult to make, even Flash games require some technical knowledge, and I think that's probably a huge barrier.
Also, it's not really easy to say what opportunities the video game form gives to artists. There are of course a few concepts that work better in this form, but overall, it's not an easy question, and I don't know if there really are topics and themes that can be obviously best approached with video games. Most of these topics would fit movies equally well or even better. The choices you can make in video games and the complexity of possible outcomes actually limits artistic freedom, unless you focus on the rules governing the world and the behaviour that emerges from these rules, which is imo not something a lot of people are interested in.
So, overall, right now, we don't know what topics fit the video game form the best, tools are often not artist-centered but focus more on technology, making games requires specialist knowledge and/or loads of resources and there aren't too many games that are "obviously" art.
It's not a really good debate though. Once there's a game that's on par with what's generally considered art, people will recognise it, but right now, trying so hard to prove that our favourite pastime is somehow more than pure (and awesome) entertainment just makes people look completely stupid. When you're saying Flower or Braid is "art", you're implicitly comparing them to stuff with achievements like Faust or the Iliad or Citizen Kaine, and in this case the comparison does indeed become pathetic.
As for the argument that video games have had no time to develop, I don't think it's a really good one. The development of any human creation doesn't mainly depend on the physical passing of time, but on human-time, the amount of time individual people have put into it. Games don't develop just because time passes, they develop because people put work-time into them, so that's what counts most imo, and in that respect, games have been doing pretty well. They're just way too difficult to make, even Flash games require some technical knowledge, and I think that's probably a huge barrier.
Also, it's not really easy to say what opportunities the video game form gives to artists. There are of course a few concepts that work better in this form, but overall, it's not an easy question, and I don't know if there really are topics and themes that can be obviously best approached with video games. Most of these topics would fit movies equally well or even better. The choices you can make in video games and the complexity of possible outcomes actually limits artistic freedom, unless you focus on the rules governing the world and the behaviour that emerges from these rules, which is imo not something a lot of people are interested in.
So, overall, right now, we don't know what topics fit the video game form the best, tools are often not artist-centered but focus more on technology, making games requires specialist knowledge and/or loads of resources and there aren't too many games that are "obviously" art.
Flachmatuch
Member
Tellaerin said:
I think there's some difference between simplistic manipulation of emotions and art, because in this case, every piece of advertisement, efficiently engineered for emotional effect (ugh sorry), would be art. I think there's a difference between, say, a very well done, psychologist/focus group based life insurance ad and "real" art, otherwise every piece of propaganda, manipulation, lie would be "art". Seeing how well they do this stuff, they could be considered pretty good art too. They also often try to exploit the most profound, deepest emotions...so basically, I think you're totally wrong. Manipulation is manipulation, not art, and Michael Bay is not an artist but more of an engineer.
civilstrife
Member
Flachmatuch said:
Bullshit. Any developing artist would find this statement incredibly offensive. Art, being a combination of medium and message, can take many forms. Whether or not a particular piece of art is any good is another story entirely. My solo performance piece may not compare to Shakespeare, but it is certainly art.
John Dunbar
correct about everything
Flachmatuch said:
No, you aren't. Whether something is art or not is judged by its own merits, not whether it compares to the "great" works or not. Also, calling a single game art does not mean you're comparing it to an entire medium (as you imply by saying "stuff with achievements like Citizen Kaine[sic]".
Flachmatuch
Member
civilstrife said:
If you're making music, or writing books, or painting or whatever, you know what you can achieve with what you're doing, you know what you can aspire to. My point was that the game genre has nothing to show for itself, nothing to aspire to yet. If someone actually does bring up Flower etc (which actually happened with Ebert), it becomes pathetic. Sorry.
As for the "combination of medium and message = art" thing, think about it a bit. Every piece of communication is art if you accept this definition, which makes the word completely meaningless. I don't really understand why people want that.
Flachmatuch
Member
John Dunbar said:
We're talking about whether video games can become art. Of course I'm looking at them collectively. My point was this: movies have Citizen Kain (sorry), and if all video games have is Flower and Braid, that comparison (which is practically what was offered to Ebert afaics) is indeed pathetic. There are no comparable achievements with games as with literature or movies. I have worded what I wrote badly, but I don't see how this is such a contentious issue. If you claim that X is art, people will ask for the outstanding achievements, if you have none, the claim will lose strength, at least until we have more than a first approach definition for art.
Not all films are art - in fact MOST of them are not. Same with games.Flachmatuch said:
In the end something being art has nothing to do with whether you or anybody has the opinion that it is good. IMHO. It being art is something other than it being good or bad according to an individuals opinion.Flachmatuch said:
The reason why Flower should be considered art is simple. It uses what is unique to the medium of gaming (interaction) to create an emotive effect and deliver a message that is not explicit. It is not an experience that could be created by any other art form - since the interaction is intrinsic to the delivery of its message/emotion.
That is essentially what art is - the delivery of a non-explicit message/emotion through qualities unique to the medium. This is why films could be considered art (they haven't always been, they have been just as dogmatically denied the title as much as games are now). Games cannot be considered their own art if they mimic films and don't use features unique to the medium. This is why Flower should be considered art and Call of Duty shouldn't.
civilstrife
Member
Flachmatuch said:
Wrong again. Under your model, there would be no such thing as artistic innovation. Not to mention that many forms and individual pieces of art exist solely a response or backlash against "established" art.
Flachmatuch said:
The art community deals with these questions constantly. It was a major theme of the 20th century. From Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal, to canvases painted white to John Cage's silent conerto 4'33. Art is inherently fluid and organic and any attempt to tie it down or restrict it's definition is usually tied to some fascist regime.
Flachmatuch
Member
deepbrown said:
The difference is just that it's pretty difficult to find a video game that has any serious claim to being "art", and even its highest aren't really that awesome. Of course the possibility is there, it's there even if all you do is draw pictures in the snow with your piss. That doesn't mean much though.
Emotional manipulation can be (and usually is) easily found in things that are not art - in propaganda, PR, advertisement. There must be something else to art than just the ability to manipulate emotion. I think it has something to do with integrity and honesty, but I may be wrong.
who cares if videogames are art or not ? the formal classification of art does not make a piece of work worthwhile. it is the effect the piece has on the life of the creator and the user that determines if the piece of work was worthwhile or not. there can be paintings, novels or pieces of music. that are without a question being classified as art by formal criteria but yet bring nothing to the table that could affect anyone. the same is with true with games. there are games that are pretty much standardware that will be forgotten in a few month. then there are games that affect millions of people in some way or form and will be remembered for a long time. now is it really that important to determine if those pieces of work are art ? i believe that the fact that those exceptional games already have affected people in their lives fortifies that work as something valuable enough to be held equally to art even if some formal criteria and tradition forbids some people to call it art.
*throws hands up*
fuck it, I'm done with this conversation. Makes me too full of RAGE.
Games are a medium which art can and has been created, and will continue to evolve just like any other medium be it painting or film.
I love Ebert, but in this regard he's being obstinate and willfully ignorant.
fuck it, I'm done with this conversation. Makes me too full of RAGE.
Games are a medium which art can and has been created, and will continue to evolve just like any other medium be it painting or film.
I love Ebert, but in this regard he's being obstinate and willfully ignorant.
charlequin
Banned
Flachmatuch said:
Ludicrous.
Flachmatuch said:
Kane.
Also, from the invention of motion pictures until the time a singular auteur could create Citizen Kane, it took over sixty years. Even the most generous measurement of video gaming's history (starting in 1948) would still put our medium at best on par with that, and a more reasonable one (starting from SpaceWar!, say) would probably put us almost ten years behind.
Flachmatuch
Member
civilstrife said:
It's true, I don't think there's too much worthwhile "artistic innovation". It mostly comes in when the basic form loses its strength, its power to reach people and its role in society. After a while, it has to sink into itself, it becomes detached from the world and you get "art for art's sake". It happens when artists have no conviction, no belief, nothing to say, just technical knowledge and a wish for uniqueness and individuality, which is mostly pointless because it becomes so superficial (not saying that some innovations aren't actually positive and invigorating).
Yeah, I know this, and I still think that it's a symptom of "art" losing its social role and becoming a technical, inward-facing, masturbatory pastime...and I don't think video games should "aspire" to that. I definitely prefer the no-nonsense propaganda stuff like MW, which does at least fulfill a social role, it can easily be compared to the huge Catholic churches designed to impress and strike fear into the hearts of European peasants in the middle ages.
I don't think there was mention of "emotional manipulation" in my statement. I said the delivery of emotion or a message/idea through features intrinsic and unique to the medium, without being explicit.Flachmatuch said:
Just like a piece of modern art - the message in Flower is not explicit. It is explored by the player and delivered through the gameplay interaction. It is exactly like a video installation in an art gallery - but it can be interacted with. It has a core message and it is delivered through the medium for the viewer/player to explore/deliberate. There really is no question that it is art, because it would very happily sit in a gallery. Is it GOOD art? That's a matter of opinion.
The reason why Ebert says it isn't is because he hasn't played it - and he made his ignorance on what the game actually did in his paragraph on the game itself.
Flachmatuch
Member
charlequin said:
Show me the self-expression behind focus groups then :-/ Most games are made to make money, and that seriously limits any such possibility.
Whatever, I can't do anything that'll make me look less stupid anyway
I'm not sure that the actual human effort invested in games so far is really smaller. Lots of people make games, and there's a pretty large industry behind it, not sure it's smaller than Hollywood was at the same relative time. Things don't develop because time passes. Things develop because humans invest effort in them.
I AM JOHN!
Banned
Tagquote goes here.lyre said:
Flachmatuch
Member
deepbrown said:
I thought "delivery of emotion" meant that you wanted the receiver to experience a particular emotion, which is afaics equivalent to "emotional manipulation", but I might have misunderstood that.
As for Flower, I don't know. I don't want to say it's not art...but imo it is indeed a bit pathetic if it's one of the games closest to art.
Flachmatuch said:
Art is something that was crafted to evoke emotion in the person experiencing it. Not all manipulation is art, but art can certainly be created with the intent to manipulate. That doesn't automatically disqualify it from being art. (Old Soviet propaganda posters are the first thing that comes to mind, and I'm certain you can think of other examples.) If there is some fundamental difference, it's mainly one of intent on the part of the creator, which isn't always easy to know.
So I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
Flachmatuch said:
Art is communication. Specifically, it's the means by which we communicate emotion. It allows us to evoke feelings in someone else so they can experience them firsthand. What I don't understand is why people want to make 'art' into something more exclusive and pseudo-profound than it really is.
Flachmatuch
Member
Tellaerin said:Art is something that was crafted to evoke emotion in the person experiencing it. Not all manipulation is art, but art can certainly be created with the intent to manipulate. That doesn't automatically disqualify it from being art. (Old Soviet propaganda posters are the first thing that comes to mind, and I'm certain you can think of other examples.) If there is some fundamental difference, it's mainly one of intent on the part of the creator, which isn't always easy to know.
So I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
I'm pretty sure you're right with the creator's intent stuff. Showing integrity when you have none is pretty difficult though, so I think it's not completely unknowable.
This is pretty close to what I think too. I think there's more to this though...I mean, sometimes you do "deeply" understand that the person whose stuff you're reading was really alive and similar to you, and that feeling is pretty profound, and I think that might have something to do with art.
No idea...because I don't think simply saying "I'm sad" is art, even if my mom becomes sad when she hears it (to demonstrate that effective communication has taken place hehe).
charlequin
Banned
Flachmatuch said:
The bugbear of financial motivation erasing the ability for artistic expression is like high-school material. Nobody seriously considers this to be the deciding factor of the artistic validity of a given work.
Flachmatuch said:
Do you even live in the 21st Century? Art done got democratized, man.
civilstrife
Member
Flachmatuch said:
What can I say? Go to museums, theaters, operas sure. But also go to fringe solo theater performances in some guy's loft. Go take part in interactive art installations. Read the short stories of unknown, developing writers. Art doesn't need to be famous to be good.
Flachmatuch said:
Art for art's sake doesn't really exist. Art is not and can never be detached from the world it inhabits. Sure, it may not reach many people if it becomes incestuous and closed off from the world at large, but it's still art.
Flachmatuch said:
Well you've placed yourself (and this is not a bad thing) among a very particular group of thinkers. You're approaching art from a utilitarian, left brained standpoint. Art, however, is the domain of the right brain. It deals in associations, imagery and poetic use of communication to convey meaning. It accesses the ethereal, the unquantifiable and the unspoken. It does not need a purpose. Our need to ascribe a purpose and label to things comes from our analytical, data processing left brains. Very useful in day to day life, but not in art.