Videogames as art [discussion]

Are videogames art?
Why or why not?

I'm looking for insights to quote in a paper I'm writing that needs various electronic "sources"...luckily an internet forum is one of those sources.

So...are videogames art?
Why or why not?

'Videogames' are not, but there are games that make a decent tilt at the title.

I'll post something longer later.

BlackSpy said:

'Videogames' are not, but there are games that make a decent tilt at the title.

I'll post something longer later.

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When it all comes down to it, art is 100% relative.

(Thank god my paper isn't argumentative...it's definitional.)

So why aren't even the 'lamest' videogames considered art?

I think yes, videogames are arts, as long as they show creativety and innovation. while not always exists, having a meaning or an idea that is presented in the game is a proofe that they (videogames) can be considered arts.

but it doesn't have to carry a meaning though, just like music, which are considered art

Videogames are definately art!
In fact, I think that videogames will come to be seen as one of the defining art forms of the late 20th century.

If a talentless twat like Damien Hurst can have some hapless farmyard animal killed and put in formaldahide, and the world hails it as art, then can anyone seriously doubt that a videogame IS art?

I think before this goes much futher people have to be concious of the difference between an artisan and an artist.

Creativity, innovation, skill are all to be found in the work of artisans - please don't consider it a put down. What makes an artist trancend the artisan is that they bring us a new way to understand ourselves or our world. They are not necessarily the most skilled practitioner of their craft, nor are their results necessarily the most engaging but they are able to transform the way we think.

You really have to challenge whether many videogames do that.

Is music concidered an art? Are drawings concidered art? What about cartoons, are they art?

A video game is a lot like a cartoon or a motion picture. You have legendary people such as Yuzo Koshiro creating breath taking music, and Yoshitaka Amano the artist behind Final Fantasy. Then you have everything inbetween. You put it all together and you have an interactive peice of art. Sure some of them are crap I.E. ET on 2600, the first Street Fighter game.

When you think of Art you think of the Mona Lisa or David. Then on the other end of the specrtum you have crap art like the Modern art which most of the time I don't concider art (lets splash some paint buckets on the wall and call it art, hoorah) Same thing goes for video games. People spent time on these crappy games but are not given the respect because they are crap, the same way I feel about modern art but it is by all means still called art.

Techno, that's an arguement about what has good and bad gameplay and graphics, you have to establish that good gameplay equates to art or that graphic design equates to art.

Yes, but only the Madden series.

Anyway, all videogames are quite useless.

Of course all video games are art, but just like art (i.e. - paintings, sculptures, etc) some pieces of work are good, some are not.

I think that you should instead ask yourself whether assigning to something the "art" / "not art" tag really makes any sense.

In the field of literature, for example, most contemporary theorists agree that there is no substantive distinction between a supposedly form of "high art", like Milton's Paradise Lost, and a note you just wrote to reming your wife that he has to buy more milk. They are both cultural products, and they may even be in intertextual relationship. For more info on this topic, see Roland Barthez's S/Z and The Death of the Author

Lovecraft0110 said:

I think that you should instead ask yourself whether assigning to something the "art" / "not art" tag really makes any sense.

In the field of literature, for example, most contemporary theorists agree that there is no substantive distinction between a supposedly form of "high art", like Milton's Paradise Lost, and a note you just wrote to reming your wife that he has to buy more milk. They are both cultural products, and they may even be in intertextual relationship. For more info on this topic, see Roland Barthez's S/Z and The Death of the Author

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Or indeed Joseph Beauys rather shorter statements of the same.

I don't believe it is a very helpful way to understand art, I find those arguments have more to do with sophistry than furthering our understanding.

In fact, I prefer to think of them as quite fine pieces of art in their own right, they change the way we think about our world and our place in it. If everyone is indeed an artist, and everything one does in art, what does that mean? What if even half of it is true?

All great fun!

Free Street Hoops mini marquee to the first person to introduce Baudelaire in a sensible way.

Does 'Art of Fighting' count as art?

BlackSpy said:

Or indeed Joseph Beauys rather shorter statements of the same.

I don't believe it is a very helpful way to understand art, I find those arguments have more to do with sophistry than furthering our understanding.

In fact, I prefer to think of them as quite fine pieces of art in their own right, they change the way we think about our world and our place in it. If everyone is indeed an artist, and everything one does in art, what does that mean? What if even half of it is true?

All great fun!

Free Street Hoops mini marquee to the first person to introduce Baudelaire in a sensible way.

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That's a fairly commonplace criticism of Barthes, actually. I would like to see which theoretical framework you would suggest instead.

Although I do not personally *like* Barthes (I advocate a via media between him and more classy, structuralist theorists), I do think that *some* of his arguments have indeed helped to develop literary theory, and hence, further our understanding of the literary res.

Always liked Baudelaire, btw.

Barthes? As in Roland?

Pfft.

BlackSpy said:

I think before this goes much futher people have to be concious of the difference between an artisan and an artist.

Creativity, innovation, skill are all to be found in the work of artisans - please don't consider it a put down. What makes an artist trancend the artisan is that they bring us a new way to understand ourselves or our world. They are not necessarily the most skilled practitioner of their craft, nor are their results necessarily the most engaging but they are able to transform the way we think.

You really have to challenge whether many videogames do that.

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You make a good point---but it carries shades of your personal opinion. What definition of art requires it to change/transform the way we think?

Lovecraft0110 said:

I think that you should instead ask yourself whether assigning to something the "art" / "not art" tag really makes any sense.

In the field of literature, for example, most contemporary theorists agree that there is no substantive distinction between a supposedly form of "high art", like Milton's Paradise Lost, and a note you just wrote to reming your wife that he has to buy more milk. They are both cultural products, and they may even be in intertextual relationship. For more info on this topic, see Roland Barthez's S/Z and The Death of the Author

Click to expand...

Again, fortunately my assignment is not argumentatitve---it's a simple definitional essay, wherein I define art and subsqeuently explain why videogames fit into that definition of art.

My real underlying argument [which, in a way your post supports] that transcends the work I'm doing on this essay is that art is beauty, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder [cliche, who cares]...this is only going to come up IF my professor critiques my in-essay definition of art as too wishy washy, of course.

Lovecraft0110 said:

That's a fairly commonplace criticism of Barthes, actually. I would like to see which theoretical framework you would suggest instead.

Although I do not personally *like* Barthes (I advocate a via media between him and more classy, structuralist theorists), I do think that *some* of his arguments have indeed helped to develop literary theory, and hence, further our understanding of the literary res.

Always liked Baudelaire, btw.

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He has moved things along, but like you, I see him as a means to an end rather than an end. Very handy for shaking things up but not much good at putting them back together again.

Baudelaire is good, but he's a bit like Umberto Eco in that I'm never quite sure whether he is joking.

Depends on your definition of "art".

Video games as a whole may not be true works of art as in paintings, musical compositions, etc., but they contain genuine art in visual or aural form: In-game art, beautifully crafted sprites, soundtracks and all that stuff.

In the early 80s, video games became very influental for many genres, mainly the music biz. A lot of songs came out at that time that had some sort of a vg-related theme, for ex. "Pac Jam" by Jonzun Crew. Specially the electronic and electric funk scenes adpoted many elements of the vg industry and used them as some sort of electronical sign of the times, as the bleepy white noise of the dawn of a new era. The Cyperpunk idea stems from that time as well, and even Hollywood reacted to it and came up with movies that now are major classics of the genre, such as Tron or War Games, tho the latter is only marginally vg-related.

Back then, many small vg developers had visions of a more artistic approach to the whole thing but were limited by technology and money, then home computers and consoles started showing up in ppl's living rooms and thus provided a basis even for one-man game developers to make their visions come true. Huge talents like Jeff Minter wouldn't have been able to release off-broadway titles like Revenge of the Mutant Camels if there would have been no VIC-20 or C=64 markets that weren't as commercial in the first few years as the arcade biz, yet Minter clearly had more intentions than "just" programming a cool game, he always was fascinated by what all these platforms he worked on provided in terms of an artificial approach to sound effects, in-game music, background pics, sprites, etc.

So, even if most games aren't art, some of them always have inspired artists to form, compose or design something new that in turn had strong influences on game designers.

Jeff Minter's games would be examples of the past - a more current example is the Wipe Out series. The Designer's Republic stuff in it clearly is more than just a question of correct palettes and textures, the visual and aural elements of these games actually are a vital part of the experience and true works of art - just watch the intro to Wip3out.

I would have to say yes as video games contain formal elements(Line, light, color, texture/pattern, shape/volume, space, time motion, spontaneity/chance/improvisition) and composition principals(Balance, rhythm, proportion/scale, emphasis, unity/variety, media/material) of art.


Art is artificial and is a representation of life.


Movies are art and some videogames are like interactive movies.

Kid Aphex said:

You make a good point---but it carries shades of your personal opinion. What definition of art requires it to change/transform the way we think?

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It's just the definition of art I carry around in my back pocket if you know what I mean. Also, if you don't require something more fundemantal of art then there is nothing to distinguish a piece of art from a piece of craft.

It's very broad, you can fit it to any human endevour, whether it is Hyerdral sailing the Pacific in his reed raft or Michealanglo painting the Sistine Chapel, which is convienet in that it lets you treat a very wide range of activity as potential art (including video games) but it is also very restrictive in that the number of things which can be recognised as meeting the transformation requirement are very few.

It can be something as slight as a Turner seascape changing the way you think about sunrises or something as significant as Swift's A Modest Proposal changing the way you think about what makes a person valuable.



It is a personal take on what art is, but I think it is a pretty serviceable one. I also think you could get a videogame or possibly 'videogames' to shoehorn into that bracket.

Are videogames art?

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Nope (or, at least, not yet).

Why or why not?

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Artists are people that challenge, change or otherwise alter a person's perceptions and influence their way of thinking through their creation. Their Art reflects and extends into the real world in a physical way through the people who experience their work. They create Art.

Entertainers deal in blind escapism where you escape from your reality, learning nothing about yourself or your views. It neither reflects nor comments on your world, but seeks to create its own. They create Entertainment.

This is the criteria with which we judge all Arts (literature, poetry, film, paintings, etc, etc). You're either a great piece of fluff, or a great piece of Art (or a terrible piece of garbage). Video games are a different breed altogether.

By definition alone, all video games are escapist entertainment, so there's no room for the Art argument to come into play. You'll learn no great truths playing a Final Fantasy or Sonic, but hopefully you'll have a lot of fun. Super Mario Bros. 3 is generally considered to a be a work of Video game art, not because of its challenging ideas or insight into the human condition, but because it plays perfectly, the level design is amazing and its so insanely addicting you'll keep playing it long after your thumbs have turned into bloody nubs. You're escaping your world to romp around in Bowser's.

Now, the format itself is not without hope of ever reaching that "Art" title, but it's highly doubtful it ever will for a couple of reasons:

1. They're toys, essentially, and have been from the start. Do you hear people asking if "Monopoly" is a work of board game art? No? Maybe because it sounds as stupid as "Super Mario Bros. 3 is a work of video game art" does to non-nerds.

2. It's HARD to make a video game from scratch, and to do it yourself and do it well you need to have a multitude of skills, many of which are as far apart from each other as possible. Most works of Art are from a singular vision, not from teams.

3. Video games are completely, 100% run by corporations who have one thing in mind: money. Name one piece of artwork that can truly be called ART that was made solely to make a buck. I'll wait...

4. Those same corporations want to sell these games, which means they have to always work towards the lowest common denominator. Art is created when the artist looks inside his or herself and wants to express something. Video games are created the opposite way: Looking at which way the market is swinging, and trying to aim for what the consumer will want.

So, no, video games are not Art, and the way it's looking, it's not going to be for a loooooooong time.

ART is something that a collective majority of snobs or intellectual (or both) has decided to label as "Great" to the rest of the world who would otherwise probably not either see it themselves, or wouldn't care in the first place. No one's going to argue that the Michaelangelo's painting at the Sistine Chapel isn't art versus some guy drawing a Bukkake'd picture of Blue Mary, from a game non-gamers wouldn't even recognize, but ART comes in many forms. The very process of a good game within itself is indeed ART in the broadest sense of the word. WHY? Because it's an interactive work that takes the talents of different people... Artists, Programmers, Musicians, Graphic Artists etc. Thus while this may not win you any brownie points in your Term Paper K.A. just show the head man THIS picture... THIS IS INDEED ART!



It's not totally trashy, but it's a mixture of an artists' work that's been montaged together to form a cover that jumps out at you. It leaves something to the imagination of the game within, especially if you haven't played it. And hot women have been used in snobbish pieces of ART throughout the ages as well. People consider the MONA LISA a piece of art, but to me it's just a painting of a homely chick.

MERCENARY X99

Games are unquestionably cultural productions that interact and inter-penetrate the realm of the social. I'd argue that there are very few games *as such* that deserve any substantive analysis, although many games constitute the core of a specific set of social phenomena that *do* warrant analysis. I'm not sure that "art" or "non-art" really poses a substantive problem, because it's not particularly rigorous as a term for discussion.

I'd say that the question video games pose relates more closely to analysis both of consumer culture and of the social life of the "core" imperialist powers, at least in the simple sense that under the social conditions of an advanced capitalist mode of production, relations between people increasingly take on the form of relations between things. Anyone who's played a two-player video game, or played online, is directly familiar with the social effects of the rising organic composition of capital.

Zeekade Zarathos said:

Artists are people that challenge, change or otherwise alter a person's perceptions and influence their way of thinking through their creation. Their Art reflects and extends into the real world in a physical way through the people who experience their work. They create Art.

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Sorry but... WRONG

art·ist ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ärtst)
n.
1. One, such as a painter, sculptor, or writer, who is able by virtue of imagination and talent or skill to create works of aesthetic value, especially in the fine arts.

2. A person whose work shows exceptional creative ability or skill: You are an artist in the kitchen.

3. One, such as an actor or singer, who works in the performing arts.

4. One who is adept at an activity, especially one involving trickery or deceit: a con artist.

Almost anything can be concidered art depending on how you observe it. Hell, a pice of shit could be a pice of art.