Slashdot Mirror
Are Videogames Art?
Angry Black Man asks: "The San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art is currently debating whether or not videogames can be considered a type of art. They are currently holding a symposium entitled "ArtCade: Exploring the Relationship Between Video Games and Art." What do you guys think about this? Also, if videogames are considered art than what stops other computer programs from also being considered art? Censoring videogames because of violence or even programs because of DMCA-type laws may be considered censoring art - something that many Americans have traditionally been very opposed to?" When Slashdot covered computer graphics as fine art, many of you agreed that it was. When asked about beautiful code, many thought so and gave their reasons as to why. Now comes a question about the combination of the two. Are computer games not considered art simply because of its nature as an entertainment medium, or can video games be considered art precisely because they can be thought of as combinations of graphics and code?
... if their creators believe that it is. Whether or not someone thinks my drawings are art, I think they are -- and that makes them art. They take skill to create, and I take joy in making them. That, I think, is art.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Video games are as much art as movies are. In fact, one of my hopes for the gaming industry is to see it mature - at least in some ways - into something similar to the movie industry, where there is room not only for the heavily-produced blockbusters, but also for more artisticly-inclined "indy" titles.
Art forms like video games tend to get mired in these sort of debates because they lack snob appeal. People figure that if it doesn't need an endowment, it's not art. People don't sit in high-rent apartments in an artsy-fartsy section of town in fancy clothes sipping spritzers and discussing the finer points of Q3, so it must not be art.
Science fiction has gotten mired down in this debate, as has commerical art of all forms, as did theater at one time. Good grief.
To me, it seems that computer graphics can definitely be art. But programming is more of a craft. It's about making something well. And just like a well-executed piece of furniture, a program's internal beauty is irrelevant to the users-- it's how it looks and how it works that matters to the people who use it.
Sure, computer games contain art. Their music and images often have artistic worth. But we want computer games that are well designed and skillfully executed, not artistic statements.
I'm a programmer, and I've got a lot of respect for the creativity and hard work that goes into computer games. But I see them as a craft, not an art.
Anyone know why this is a story instead of a poll?
Why do people agonize about whether particular things can be "considered" art?
... again, a matter of intention. If I make an object with a long metal prong flattened into a small, blunted, flat-edge blade that happens to fit into the slot at the end of a woodscrew, and declare that the primary purpose and my artistic intent is for it to be manipulated by human hands to express the beauty of simple machines by inserting or removing screws from objects, Fine -- it's art that happens to serve as a screwdriver. That doesn't make every screwdriver art.
If you consider something to be art, who the heck is going to stop you? Other people might disagree (hey, my thoughts on art may vary from yours -- so what?) but that's about the extent of it.
Now given that, I don't particularly agree that video games are art, *unless that's what the creator intended*, in which case I have no objection -- then it's art. IMO (which one one else has to buy), Art is *intentional* - accidental doodles, sunsets, plants, shadows, streams or functional objects might be artful, or beautiful, or even artistic, but things get too floppy for me if anything that happens to look nice, or that makes you think, is automatically "art." Not everything sculptural (Zhang Ziyi, for instance, or a Nagra tape recorder) is actually sculpture.
Having groused that practical objects which happen to be pretty aren't, I would say that the other direction is not quite the same, though. An artwork could have a hands-on function which rendered it a useful object
Maybe this helps to explain why I think the money given to the NEA would be much better given to model rocket clubs around the country, or never taken from taxpayers in the first place.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Forgive me if this doesn't seem to have much direction, but this is something I've thought a bit about. I'm a student at a private fine arts college, and I'm one of the few there with interests in video games, programming, etc.
Scott McCloud of "Understanding Comics" fame once wrote that art is anything not springing directly from man's need to survive or procreate. In that sense, well, playing video games could be considered an art, but making them stems from a creator's need to earn money, so he can eat, so he can survive-- not art. But there are other, easier ways to make money; the video game creator chooses to make games because he or she is good at it and (hopefully) has an interest in the field. He or she puts personal touches into their work and it's different from what anybody else could do-- art.
It's a tough call, this. Because since Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel upside down on a pedestal almost a hundred years ago and declared that it was art because he said it was, a sort of Pandora's Box has been open: we've got the most liberated sense of art there ever has been (an artist can do anything he wants and try to sell it, really) but we've also got cretins that feel art is simplistic and easy, because they don't understand the thought behind found objects or abstract expressionism or anything else to come along in the twentieth century.
I tried telling a friend while we were in a Renaissance history class about how it seemed to me that the development of 3D engines like Carmack's Quake and Sweeney's Unreal had some interesting parallels to the development of rendering techniques in Italian painting of the 15th century onward. The Italian painters started off with flat images, little depth, and distance was conveyed by placing objects higher on a picture plane-- it was the Wolfenstein era, you could say. But then artists like Giotto (if memory serves) came along, and started figuring out better ways to shade, to manipulate color, and to make objects seem rounded-- to actually occupy a space. The Renaissance of painting started, and it was like the first Quake. And so on and so forth.
Where are we now? Well, the technical craft has all but been mastered in video games; it's not photoreal, so games are somewhere around the middle-18th century, I'd wager. I can't wait until the technical aspect becomes so perfected that it becomes boring to the artists making video games; then the modernist era of videogames begins, and we can see just what kind of creativity these guys really have.
(A note on the above: I'm no expert in the history of painting or the history of games, so the paragraphs above are mostly meant to illustrate the similarities in the goals of the painters and the programmers. Anybody's free to correct me if I'm wrong.)
But then there's the commercial aspects of the video game industry. A lot of games are made for money. It's much like the film industry, I think, where you've got some works that are obviously done to make a buck (the latest Schwarzenegger flick) and then some that are done for the passion of the craft (Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, to name a few of the better of the younger generation, and so on). But it'd be impossible to say that there is no art in the film industry, just because it's driven by money. It applies the same way to video games: Miyamoto's "Pikmin" is art, the new "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" probably is not.
So where am I ending up with all of this? I don't know, I suppose it's all just food for thought. My personal feeling is that video games certainly are art, and it's nothing but snobbery from the elitist old guard that says they're not. You've gotta get with the times.
Code is the paint. Video games are the art.
The difference between art and craft, as defined by my college English department, is as follows:
-Art forges new ground and manifests new ideas
Pros: Can be the most interesting creations
Cons: Often misunderstood, too strange, or
just meaningless
-Craft repeats what has been done before in new combinations and perhaps with a new twist
Pros: Gauranteed to be decent; based on a
previous success
Cons: Gauranteed not to raise eyebrows; based
on a previous success
Obviously this is not a clear-cut distinction - one could easily find border cases in any medium which is somehow considered art. However, it seems obvious that craft cannot exist without art of some degree; in order to copy an idea, the idea must have been created new by someone once.
We can easily find computer and video games that seem to fall well into either catagory. Art would be a game that broke new ground and was unlike anything that came before it, like Wolfenstein 3D, or Lemmings. Craft would be a game that did what has been done before, with little creativity (Spear of Destiny, or an add-on of new Lemmings levels) or a lot (Half-Life). Once again, it's easy to find border cases, like each new iteration of the ID 3D engine, which were full of new ideas but based on the same old one.
We can see, though, that even if most or almost all computer games fall into the Craft category, and even if some are border cases (they eventually fall into one of the two categories), that the medium as a whole is an artistic one. Craft is simply a word that means uncreative art. Just because it lacks snob appeal doesn't mean it isn't aesthetically pleasing.
Since all computer and video games have no purpose other than to entertain, the medium must be considered an artistic one. Craft does not exist in a medium without the potential for art. The quality of the art, and whether or not it is ideal enough to escape the title "craft," does not, even in the cruelest cynic's video-game-hating eyes allow its dismissal as anything less than poor art. We may notice that the assertion that the art is poor is a qualitative statement, which is in the eye of the beholder, but that the asswertion that it is art at all is a quantitative one and bears no argument. Cogito ergo sum - if someone thinks it's art, the harshest blow one can deal it is say it isn't very good.
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Video games are also art in other, more subtle ways. Just as artists celebrated "pop art" by enshrining elements from everyday life in their works--such as the famous painting of Campbell's Soup cans, or the countless works which used the pixellated dots of the print medium--so are videogames a celebration of their times and the aesthetics of the time.
Take the vector graphics of many early arcade games--they reflect their times, and have their counterparts in films of the day such as *WarGames* where the computer Joshua plays through scenarios on giant vector screens at Norad; they are an enashrinement of the technology of the period, and embody it. Take the vector game Star Wars, and show it beside clips of the same actions that occur in the Star Wars movie, and you have a pop art statement as interesting as any made by the great pop artists.
How about Dragon's Lair as an attempt to express something in a medium that wasn't entirely adequate, resulting in a quirky experience that transcends the limits of the medium even for its shortcomings?
The very design of arcade game machines and game consoles is art, much as authentic furniture from the fifties and sixties is prized today for its aesthetic qualities. Such furniture was designed to be entirely functional, not as art--yet it embodies a style and spirit which is today viewed as a certain artistic style, just as the art nouveau reflected in turn-of-the-century Continental signs and gates and baubles, or the art deco reflected in common household decorations of the twenties and early thirties.
The same sort of art can be seen in these functional bits. Look at the extreme angles in a Defender cab, the sweeping design of a Star Wars cockpit--as worthy of being called art as any art deco figurine. Or, how about setting up an exhibit to contrast the design of home consoles, from the 70s inlaid fake woodgrain and brushed metal of an Atari 2600 to the functional boxiness of a NES to the sleek black of a Genesis to the colorful GameCube.
The games themselves can be displayed in a similar manner, with demos running to show the simplicity of Pong's attempt to represent tennis in a 2d world on through Star Wars' attempt to represent the cutting-edge 3d technology of the film through simple vector displays on to the ever more complex and imaginative titles which left simply trying to recreate reality in the 80s and went on to create whole new worlds and fantasies--the Mario of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers as a simplified representation of the hero saving the princess; Pac Man best expressed by the hunger which his Japanese creator in interviews says is the driving (pizza-inspired) idea behind him; Doom's attempt to put the player in a post-apocalyptic world as the protagonist, whereas films have always kept the viewer as a third party to the action; Quake 3 or UT's realism, while portraying the same post-apocalyptic sort of dystopia; the dizzying multi-axis world of the Descent games; Tomb Raider's attempt to make everyone an Indiana Jones; House of the Dead, in the words of the judge who recently struck down a local ban on violent arcade games, who noted it has creativity and even instills a positive message of protecting the innocent by attacking the evil; Duke Nukem and his countless fan levels as the epitome of masculine stereotypes; Discworld the videogames as concrete visual implementations of the world created by the Discworld novels; etc. etc.
To distill my longwinded claptrap: yes, videogames are obviously art.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Take a good computer game, rip out the story. Place that story in book form. If that book in any way can be considered art (or literature), why isn't the game art?
Games don't speak for the human condition or mind? Go play Sanitarium or Planescape:Torment or Deus Ex.