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Fun is Fine - Toward a Philosophy of Game Design
David Kennerly writes "The Entertainment versus Art debate flares perennially. These participants may be having fun, but the dichotomy is uniquely inappropriate to games. By the end of this article, we may disentangle the faulty dichotomy. After reconsidering what we think we know about a game, fun, and art we may come to discover that Nomura and Costikyan are correct: 'If you were to write a Seven Lively Arts for the 21st century, the form you'd have to mention first is clearly games.' --Greg Costikyan"
art is one of the main parts of game design. i consider programming an art in of itself. the use of creativity to get to a certain point is art. just look at some of the games that have come out recently... FFX is covered in artistic creativity from the storyline to the environment.
We like music .... but the majority of us consume it rather than create it (bodily noises don't count!)
... same deal
... more of the same
... we still have world hunger. Children die of lack of clean water, polio, etc.
We like sports
We like art
The earth has never had so many people. So many of us are educated with so much knowledge that it would be unbelievable to people just a 100 years ago.
Yet
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If gaming is an art, I'd consider it at the bottom of the art ladder. I've bought and played many PC games over the years, and I even bought a PlayStation 2 after a friend bugged me enough to get one. I'll play a game on my computer for a day, if that, before uninstalling it. The graphics are fine, but I find the plot and gameplay severely lacking in every graphical game I've tried. Then it was suggested to me that I try Dark Age of Camelot and the Sims Online, that maybe I'd enjoy an on-line multi-player game more than the regular games. They were both dull, boring, and felt like more along the lines of watching paint dry than enjoyment. I uninstalled both and canceled both accounts within three days.
Since then, I realized that most, if not all, of the computer and video games made the past ten years or so are utter crap. I even sold my PS2 and all my games. I haven't played a graphical game in months. But yet, every day I come back to playing MUDs, which are text-based on-line games. Using a simple telnet client, I find more plot and imaginination in text lines than I do in stunningly beautiful graphical games. Plus, I find that they rely more on intelligence and ingenuity than graphical games, which seem to primarily rely on eye candy and a gamer's reflexes.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Alright, did anybody else cry when then got to the third level of Homeworld by Relic? You know, the one where um... something bad happens.. (no spoilers wanted).
Alright, I didn't actually cry, but for some reason it affected me alot more than most of those 'tearjerker' movies out there. Maybe I was just starting to really 'get into' what turned out to be a really awesome game.
Umm... I hope this didn't sound *too* pathetic...
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
Ive always thought most games were an art form, in their design aspect at the very least. I write areas and encounters for Homeland MUD and the sheer volume of unique descriptions of rooms, areas, NPCs, and objects that have been written be me and our staff is astounding. Each one is like a short story in and of itself. This is no different from the guys that toil for hours in order to create the graphical artwork for graphical games instead of text-based ones.
I also contend that the code used in these games, or any creative code for that matter, is a form of art. Especially if it's well formatted and commented!
I'd also go as far as to say that certain players of games engage in an artform. Surely it is art the way a top Quake3 player frags their foes. And it is art to watch from above as some of the players on Homeland use their strategies and skills to accomplish what they and I never though possible.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
This guy makes the mistake of equating "art" and "good." This is a common mistake among people who don't know much about art history and the art world. "Art" is a type of thing, not a value judgement. So, at best, his essay makes a case for making Good Games by taking inspiration from Fine Art. This is a totally different thing from suggesting that Games have a place in Fine Art ie: that Games are a type of Art. I'm certainly not saying that games are not Art, I'm saying that that is a completely different subject.
All in all, this guy's lack of understanding of the art world, and especially contemporary art, makes this essay just about worthless.
Art is something that should be thought provoking and challenging, right? Great art is that what makes you challenge your assumptions. It makes things interesting.
I once read an interview with Sid Meyer of Civilization fame. He said the way to make a great game was the give the user interesting choices. Great art does the same thing.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I read in a recent interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that he doesn't consider video games to be art. He considers them to be products, made to entertain people and - well - make money.
He drew a comprison to opera - long ago, opera was not considered art, it was made to make money. The operas had to follow the fashion or people wouldn't pay. It's only recently that we've started considering opera to be an artform.
Motivation is a key point here, however - in each of these cases, the 2nd part of the movie/game combination was made to simply cash in on the popularity of the successful predescessor. They weren't developed to stand on their own. Another one I'd add to the list is "Fellowship of the Ring". A perfect example of a "game" which is simply trying to march you through a storyline. *yawn*
That said, I didn't think the Tomb Raider movie was that bad. Good campy entertainment...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Funny, yes. True, no!
Maybe for you, personally, there was no art involved, but you take out what you put into it. Sounds to me like you were treating it like a job treadmill, like anything else you might put your hands to that you consider having little value.
Games are art just like movies are art- while they may seem, on the surface, to be churned out for nothing other than the big bucks, there are actually a lot of people who put there hands on these games who really feel like they're creating something great. Not just the artists, either- as another poster said, programming is an art!
Nothing to see here.
I love a deep and complex simulation, but I also love a good platformer. If you still have access to a PS2, try out Sly Cooper. It's possibly the best and most fluid platformer ever created. There's levels that I finished and went back to replay simply because they were that damn fun.
Other platformers to consider are Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter (both have upcoming sequels). It's just a different type of gaming rather than better or worse. To be honest, I have a job that is deep and intellectual, so I make no excuses if I generally seek out the lighter side of gaming.
I also like FP shooters, third person shooters, turn based RPGs, non-turn based RPGs, action RPGs (Zelda, Kingdom Hearts-ish games), puzzle games, SimCity like stuff, and whatever the hell Monkey Ball was. Above all else, I want VARIETY more than anything.
But, yeah, there are a lot of crappy games. There's a lot of bad movies and books and TV shows and whatevers. Nothing new there.
--- Ban humanity.
I don't know if you can really declare the definitive definition for an entire profession. Like everything else, it's a skill.
There are a lot of programmers who believe that programming is an art. Likewise there are many who favor a scientific aproach. It depends entirely on the individual, and your personal view of your profession governs how you apply your skill to your work.
Besides, don't "Arts and Crafts" go together?
Of all the games I've played, I think that Tetris bears the most similarity to a great work of art. It is first and formost a great intellectual puzzle, but it also mirrors the human condition. The game gets faster and faster, and everyone who plays KNOWS that they are going to "die" sooner or later. Yet we play anyway, if only for the challenge and the simple joys inherent to success.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Do you want plot and depth? Look in a book. If you want fun, innovative gameplay, try a game! Games should be judged on their gameplay first, and on their ambience second - and you have to look at the whole picture to see the game's true value.
As for your assertion that no good games have been developed in the last ten years, I advise you to consider the output of Shigeru Miyamoto. The man continues to create fun, engaging games. For example, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be one of the best games produced.
Art is creatively overcoming the limitations that the artist sets upon him or her self. It does not matter what the limitations are, but if the artist can successfully express more than what the limitations should logically allow, then I think it is successful art.
For example, if I had to convey the mood in the park next door to my house I could bring you here. But that is not possible. So, I can decide to express the mood in the park to you only via words, no sight, no sounds, no smells. Then I am a writer.
If on the other hand I choose the limitation of being only able to express in colors, then I am a painter if only through the medium of colors I can convey the mood in the park to you.
Or if I accept the limitation to be just using sounds, no sights, no colors, no smell, then I am a musician.
I can even choose to express the mood in the park by using only matchsticks, or some other arbitrary limitation. As long as I can overcome the "self" or "else" imposed limitations to convey more than what the limitations should logically allow, I think I am a successful artist.
I think gaming is the same way. By accepting limitaions on the medium of the computer screen, keyboard, joystick, the game attempts to transport the gamer into another world, another reality. If it can do that, it is succesful art. It is almost like movies where you suspend disbelief and enter the world of the movie. If you thought about it, all it really is just colored light flickering on a screen in a darkened room, with a bunch of speakers around. If with just these things the flickering light and sound can transport you to antoher world, it is art.
And so, Game Design is an art. Maybe coding by itself is not art, just like an artist can use artisans and craftsmen, but the game design aspect, I believe, is definitely art. It is art because it is able to creatively able to overcome limitations.
And using my definition of art, we can apply it to life too. The limitation of our lives is that they will end. The limitation of life is death, and so if we can live our life in such a way that we can transcend our physical death, our lived life itself then becomes art. So, I guess, in some ways I am saying the way we live our lives is the art of our life.
I understand that in a strange way I have come around to define just about anything as being possibly art, and so maybe I am taking away from the exclusivity of the art. But, not really. because for it to be successful art it has to transcend the limitation, whether the limitation is real or arbitary. Thus, though everything has the potential to be artistic, it becomes art only if it overcomes the limitation. And it requires creativity to achieve that, and not everything is creative. So, not everything is art. Whatever is left, is then definitely art.
Anyway, let me get my fourth cup of coffee. My head is spinning, and maybe if I could do something by overcoming that limitation, I could be an ... artist (?) (!)
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Half the crap that passes for art nowadays isn't art. I know people are "pushing boundaries" and crap, but when you get stuff like this passing itself off as "art", then the whole fucking concept of art doesn't mean any more to me than a bunch of industrially sealed cans of someone's piss. (Which a British museum paid $35,000 for.)
Art is a joke. People use the term to describe things they don't understand and think are cool for no apparent reason. True art, like sculpture, paintings you don't have to be high to come up with a meaning for, orchestrated music, good writing, poetry that rhymes, and isn't just someone pulling stream of consciousness shit out of their ass and wiping on a piece of paper for you to read...this...THIS is art.
Unfortunately, art's been so diluted by utter crap that the public uses it to describe any and everything. "Look at that goal!" screams the unwashed mass, "That is art!"
No, it isn't.
Don't get started on that, "well, it's art to me" shit, either. If that's all that it needs, then Everything == Art, and the discussion is still equally useless because there isn't anything that can be claimed to not be art.
The only Art is see anymore, if the guy who works across the hall from me. He isn't a game, and games aren't him.
This insistence on attempting to pigeonhole crap that someone throws onto celluloid, canvas, hard disk, etc. is such bullshit. There's no such thing as art as a separate entity from everything else that people create. Art is strictly a matter of opinion, and since everyone's opinion differs, there can be no definition. Video game renders are as good as anything that some sweaty old man smeared squished plant matter all over.
This is just more of the same ignorant elitist shit that keeps that stupid art vs. pornography debate alive and kicking, frivolously pissing away time in our courts. If you create something and someone else likes it, then good on you. If they don't, throw that crap away and try again. Its bad enough that we've gotten so fucking stupid as to require the government to tell us what we find acceptable and what we don't; we sure as hell don't need these jackasses wasting anyone's time by trying to elevate their chicken scratches to a higher level of being through some arbitrary decision to promote it to the mystical realm of ART (cue angelic choir).
Shawn
Because you gotta bitch
Is 100 year what you consider to be lasting? In that case how about James Joyce (Damn near makes the 100 yr mark Ulysses 1922).
Or how about Seneca? It's argued that his plays weren't even meant to be performed.
Greek society *hated* Euripides, but now is a favorite among modern scholars.
How about Bernard Shaw? Can you *be* more didactic? For god's sake Nothing happens in his plays.
Sammuel Becket hasn't had enough time yet...but I guarantee he will.
Of course, you can't forget Checkov.
do you really think Bertolt Brecht is not going to last, sure it's been more like 50+ for him....but he's still around and going strong and has shaken modern theatre to it's bones (look at Angel's in American--definately not-"intellectual art" for an example of Brecht's wide reaching influence).
Or are these not "intellectual to you?"
Is William Blake and Henry David Thoreaux intellectual?
How about Ezra Pound and e. e. cummings?
Joseph Conrad? Jesus crist he'll philosophize for half a damn novel about Lord Jim's intentions&judgment... but he's still around, isn't he?
How can you, as a *English grad student* say this? Sure if you define "intellectual art" as that which merely purports to be intellectual, but without any merit... then yeah. It won't last. But there's a word for this, and it's not "intellectual art". It's called pretentious.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Well, let's see...
Joyce, for all his being the greatest novelist of the 20th century, is hardly touched outside of classes looking at modernists. And generally, if you're reading Joyce, you're reading some short stories at this point.
Seneca is not read outside of classics departments.
Euripedes, while not necessarily popularly acclaimed, was writing for popular festivals all the same - I have trouble calling him intellectual. Also, of little interest outside Classics departments.
Shaw, again, while didactic, was a tremendously popular writer in his time. Don't confuse your tastes with the tastes of the time. Checkov, likewise.
Brecht is important in theatre, but his impact outside of that is minimal, and his impact in theatre is primarily as a theorist.
Beckett will be reduced to Waiting for Godot - by far his most readable and popular play.
As for your last set of examples... have you noticed how poetry as a whole is dying out in the academy? As is popular to dryly point out now, it's the only form with more practitioners than readers. Pound's star fell fast after his fascism. e.e. cummings doesn't show his face past high school much. Blake and Thoreau are probably your two best examples, but I wonder how anti-popular they were.
The "canon" as it were is busting rather largely. "Classics" are hardly read in universities, especially not those considered to have the best English programs. The field is splitting largely between popular culture people and theory people, with those interested in historical periods increasingly focusing on "minor" texts of the period instead of the canon.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
I think there is a distinction between entertainment and art that lies in the interaction of the person with the artwork, not in the artwork itself. Games are required to be entertainment and have the potential to be art.
An entertaining movie/game/book/whatever stimulates the imagination as you consume it, pulling you in to a temporarily vivid world. But if it's only entertainment, an hour later you're hungry again. Art, OTOH, remains with you, changes you somehow, provides you a hook to hang future thoughts and emotions on.
Sure, if you play a game for X hours, you'll dream about it and find a thousand ways in which it is a metaphor for the events of your daily life, but how rich is the metaphor? how flexible? Does the extension of the game into your psychic life narrow your field of view, or expand it? If the game is multi-player, does it encourage social interaction along the single dimension of the game's progress, or does it provide a jointly formed framework for exploring many dimensions of social interaction?
I have a higher bar for the term "interactivity" - any shoot-em-up can absorb you and provide you with choices which impact the game, but a richly interactive game will also keep on interacting so that after the pixels have faded from the screen or the last stone has hit the Go board with a satisfying thunk, it will contnue to generatively engage you on multiple levels.
To define art in terms of what you consider traditional forms, such as painting and sculpture, is to cut its balls of. Art is the combination of skill, intuition, and creativity to show people something, usually about humans, or how the universe relates to humans. Nothing less will do, and nothing more is required. The medium you choose to express yourself must fit the meaning. The reason for much of the dreadful "modern art" hanging in galleries is due to people trying to use traditional artistic media (such as oil on canvas) to express things it is not really suited for. Usually, when I walk through those sections of a museum the message I get is merely the artists frustration at trying to express what is certainly a very real feeling to them onto a 2 dimentional canvas.
On the other hand, non-traditional media are frequenly much better. For instance, the industrial sealed can of excrement is (at least to me) a statement about how we are frequently commercially driven to the point that we would buy almost anything if it were packaged in a nice way and well marketed, even a "turd in a can". The fact that a museum in fact paid a large sum of money for it only makes it more delightful.
Another example of modern art I heard about recently was a goldfish swimming in a blender, the idea being to force the people seeing it to confront the power they have of life or death (ie, they could switch on the blender and kill the fish). The great thing about that is that it engages the observer much more directly than any painting can. In fact, without a person there, it is just a fish tank.
To me, you sound like an old rich curmudgeon who was taught way back when you were a kid that certain things are art and certain things are not, and are unwilling to reconsider. Free your mind.
I disagree with both the style and the substance of your argument.
"I find, as a graduate English student,
[As if this status had any bearing on your expertise in the subject at hand? Get off it! You're probably not even aware of how obnoxious and pompous this is, so I'm telling you here. If you were my little brother I'd smack you in the back of the head for trying to use this to manipulate others' perceptions of your credibility.]
"...that I can't really think of any generation or era where the intellectual art has really lasted well."
[Try harder: Dostoevsky, Pynchon, Delillo, Escher, Picasso, etc.... if this is the kind of thing you meant by 'intellectual art'. If not, please define it.
Good luck.]
"The popular stuff tends to be what survives,"
[Actually the quality 'stuff' tends to survive. Look at recent American jazz music history: Miles, Coltrane, Ellington and Mingus are remembered and celebrated, as they likely will be for centuries. Who can name the 'Kenny G' of the 50's? I can't even cite proper counterexamples, precisely because pop trash falls by the wayside the moment the fad has run its course. As with music, so it is with literature and other forms of art. (Shakespeare may be a notable exception.) Those who maintain the legacies of Art History, Music History, and Literature are generally interested in preserving the best works in their fields, not the ones that were most popular at the time.]
"...largely because it was actually designed for people to enjoy, rather than praise."
[Huh? Are you really claiming to know the design motives of a given game's developers, and to be able to categorize them accordingly? So what is an example of a deep, contemplative game designed for the purpose of garnering praise? What a ridiculous proposition.]
"...basic tests of art, which is survivability"
[Art by whose definition? There are countless phenomenal but temporal works of art which defy this weak attempt at limiting what is called 'Art'. As for game technology change leading to extinction of playable games, so far MAME and similar emulators, combined with an increasing interest in preserving and archiving older hardware and software, suggest the opposite. Feel like playing Joust or Pong?]
Ok that's enough said.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Art
is what stops
your
thoughts,
makes you see
the world
in a different light
and perspective.
Nobody can own
Art belongs to everybody.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Very nice post. I'm glad you expressed yourself here.
Beauty is very good Quality, so it is completely dependant on the viewer and the viewer's current state besides the object and it's state.
If you (or other readers) haven't taken read it already, I suggest Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
8-PP
no. not at all..
:-)
Be careful what you say and how you say it! "no. not at all"?? Am I completely off?
art is creation through creativity of the mind
EVERYTHING can be said to be creation through creativity, if you don't believe in a bigger thought than man-mind, you might restrict this to "everything man-made".
However, alot of creation is accidental, or not something done out of love and estetique. Lots of creativity can go into the creation of office-spaces, but that is the "Art of creating lots of office-spaces", not the kind of art we're talking about.
So the very term "Art" is relative, as everything in this world seems to be. So discussing it can really be a pointless excercise in ignorance, because the language is not rich enough to express the totality to make it absolute.
Also, Art does not exist without the observer. So Art is relative to the observer too. To minds usually have different opinions of what is Art, what is important in art, and they also have different defintions of art! But still they argue as if they talk about the same subject!!
Mind-boggling?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/