Slashdot Mirror
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"
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!
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.
1. Read headline
2. Make reasonable comments on the headline, saying "I disagree, here's why".
3. (Score:5, Insightful)
4. read posts pointing out that you actually probably agree with the article.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have realized that the author agrees with you that nice graphics or an involved, non-interactive plotline do not make a good game.
thank you,
Bryan
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.