Vinci said:
You do realize this sounds a lot like my earlier description of games (adjusted for the sake of this discussion) as 'toys with artistic elements,' right?
Well, my view of this thread looks something like this:
- Roger Ebert doubles down on an incredibly stupid and disingenuous thing he said a while back
- NERD RAGE!
- Arguing!
- Some people might make some seemingly reasonable points but effectively in support of the initial point with which I am arguing
- Fair elements of these points are given short shrift in favor of disputing what seems to be the underlying disagreement about fundamentals
- Partial consensus is potentially forged way later after muuuuuch arguing
:lol
The issue that I have with this, is that if games are not judged upon their own standards but are instead coerced to behave in ways contrary to their original basis of creation (gameplay and toy elements) and instead imitate (often poorly) other forms of media in order to win some blue ribbon as ART, then the ribbon-givers can politely go fuck themselves.
Well, I agree with this completely, which is why I can often be seen talking shit about transparent attempts by game-creators to mimic (badly) the expressive form of film, but I think there's two levels to it.
With film, the early problem was imitating theater too closely. The nature of theater -- single-location, auditory focus, abstract -- is nearly opposite the wide-open, visually-oriented, concrete nature of film, which meant that early films that hewed to theater aesthetics were deeply flawed. This sort of thing happen with games now too and it's a big problem.
But at the same time, there
did ultimately turn out to be a higher-level fashion in which films and plays were comparable -- they each had to use very different tools, and often cover very different material, but they both had the ability to express things in a way unique to their own medium. And once film found its own sure footing, it was even able to go back and intentionally choose elements of theater to borrow and use them
in an appropriate context, like the whole "Greek chorus" element in
Mighty Aphrodite.
(And at the same time, what most people think of as "films" are is still quite a bit more like theater, ultimately, than the medium could have allowed for -- abstract and non-narrative films, documentaries, etc. are all directions that some filmmakers have worked in, but "most" films are semi-linear narrative works taking place in a recognizable setting.)
What your suggestion states - in essence - is that the best games (not simply Tetris), generally speaking, would not qualify for consideration as art because they're too 'toy-like'?
Again, this is where I can't stress Interactive Fiction enough. Your typical contest-winning IF title is just text (a well-understood medium),
plus interactivity -- but that interactivity is central to the experience and to the expression within it. Something like
Spider and Web constructs an elaborate fictional world using text -- clearly not an innate strength of "games" by any means -- but it does so as the framework to engage the player in a demanding and thematically rich situational exercise whose entire purpose is a specific form of interaction: providing a plausible story to an interrogator. It really can't exist as anything but a game; it really doesn't have a purpose at all except to be an interactive and challenging experience, which I think is clearly a game "thing." But it does so in the context of a narrative story without which that interaction literally has no meaning.
What movies would you consider to be examples of art in filmmaking?
This would be a hard list for me to actually compile for you. :lol I would agree that many of the, perhaps, most standout examples really go balls-to-the-wall with the use of purely filmic techniques and visual language that are separate entirely from what any other medium does (just to pick an easy-to-think-of superficial example, look at the way something like
Hero or
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover uses color expressively) but I don't think adaptation of techniques from elsewhere necessarily reduces the artfulness of a work --
Sin City managed to be a pretty astonishing* work despite actively drawing on comic-book techniques and images in its storytelling,
Fight Club managed to craft an effective film out of both a novelesque storytelling conceit (constant yapping-at-the-mouth narrative recollection voice) and an intended-for-print "twist," etc.
*I hate Frank Miller so I don't want to say anything
too nice about him here
But if the act of roleplaying, the interactions of the players consistent within specific rulesets, are art (from your manner of thinking) then why would Tetris not be?
Off the top of my head, the act of playing Tetris is not expressive; one doesn't
typically play Tetris in order to expose emotional or symbolic meaning to other people, whereas many (by no means all) instances of tabletop roleplay are indeed intended to do this.
Now it starts to get into a philosophical murky area even
I'm not necessarily comfortable wading
all the way into, but once you move from "playing solely for oneself without expressive purpose" into "playing, either for one's own satisfaction or that of an audience, in a consciously (or even subconsciously) expressive fashion" then yeah, I think art is creeping in there. I'll say the dudes who choreograph actual dance routines whose footsteps happen to fit a DDR song routine, or the people who make cute, humorous videos of themselves achieving some ludicrous self-invented goal in a game, set to music and presented to amuse the viewer are making "art," sure.
EDIT: And again, I don't even see this as a continuum with "art" at one end and "toy" at the other, just a field where elements of both are present. The game of Tetris includes elements of art (whether or not those are the most interesting elements of the game to discuss); the playing of Tetris always potentially involves the evocation of art (even if most specific instances are too pedestrian to talk about in much detail), it's just a matter of different relative levels, just like some films may be rich in visual symbology while others largely steer away from it but it's still fair to say "film is a medium in which visual symbology is a key element."
'Being more like art,' for games, based on how this thread reads... entails mitigating the elements of games that set them apart from every other medium and celebrating elements from other media instead, even though any attempt to do so will likely come off (and it does) as cheap imitation.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I'm mostly a let-a-million-flowers-bloom kinda guy on this. I don't want people to pre-emptively reject the potential for games to be expressive works, but I feel no compulsion for all games to become such works (then how would I play Guitar Hero and Puerto Rico!?!) Like, there are people who wanted every film to become non-narrative or whatever too and I can still appreciate the elements of non-narrative film without thinking everyone should've dropped Hollywood films to follow their example.
is art but, the value of it can be argued indefinitely.