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Are The Press Neglecting Games As Art?
Thanks to the Guardian Online for their article discussing whether the press are rating games seriously enough as an artform. According to journalist/researcher Matteo Bittani, "the games press in general is guilty of treating games as if they had no other relevance than being mere commercial products." He goes on to argue that: "Games are still being assessed by the same criteria of playability, graphics, sound and longevity as they were 15 years ago, causing the analysis to just boil down to 'technological determinism in full effect'." Is there any merit to reviewing games on more conceptual, artistic grounds, or is that idea overly pretentious?
Games cannot be considered serious art by the "mainstream" because most video games right now, by and large, are "technological determinism." Why? Because that's what sells games.
GameSpy just had that "Underrated Games" column, which included both Rez and Ico, two very hypnotic and "purposeful" games. It's pretty clear that the non-standard sort of experience that really captivates the player simply doesn't appeal to the big "middle-crowd" of system owners; people who only buy a few games that appeal specifically to their tastes. Very few people seem to be "hardcore" enough to want to experiment.
Games will reach that point, but they haven't reached it yet. As for pretentiousness... well, almost any art can be called pretentious.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
Why focus only on the Press, here?
Consider the recent Australian federal gov't's
response to an arts organisation giving a $25K
grant to the developers of a game that deals
with a very -current- news item (including
Refugees' Children in Detention, in very remote
centres, like Woomera, South Australia):
Strong scrutiny of the arts organisation &
that Au$ 25,000 grant.
PS The -free- Escape from Woomera game is due
any day now (eg, Oct 2003). 'can't wait...
There's a trailer, too:
http://EscapeFromWoomera.org/media/efw.mpg
... in Sweden we have two major gaming magazines, PC Gamer(sort of like PC Gamer) and Super Play(sort of like Edge).
PC Gamer is just for PC games, they only care about the games that sell.
Super Play is multiformat and gives high scores to games like Ico and Rez.
Guess which one I like the most... err... I don't know, I subscribe to Super Play.
I've always noticed that the sonic games were pretty artistic and creative, they were a success. I think it wouldn't be unfair to look at a game's artistic merit as well as the "traditional" stuff. I was just thinking about this earlier today actually.
I touch computers in naughty places
Is it any wonder the press uses the same scorecard?
At least for certain genres. . . For some games, things like mood and storyline matter a hell of a lot, for others not so much. For example, lots of people still say Final Fantasy 6/3 is the best one in the series, but it's far, far, far behind 7 on technical merit. Why do people love it so? The storyline.
The same goes for the adventure game genre - I've played adventure games with bad graphics and terrible game mechanics that were still fun to play because they were funny, or the storyline was interesting, or somesuch.
Even the Quake games didn't escape from this. Sure, on a technical level Quake 2 and 3 were far better than Quake 1. The graphics are better, the control is tighter, the weapons are more balanced. . . but there are diehards who still say the first one is the most fun to play, because it is the one that succeeded in creating a mood.
Heck, there's a subgenre that's entirely based on creating a mood - survival horror games. Some of these games (Silent Hill 2 comes to mind) would never have been good games had it not been for some excellent artists and 'scriptwriters' behind that game.
So yeah, I'd say that asking whether there's merit to rating games based on conceptual grounds is pretty asinine, considering that it's pretty well accepted as an important part of many games even if that doesn't make it into the itemized star ratings you see in a lot of magazines.
But then again, I'm not too sure that the concept behind a game and execution thereof should be rated in such a manner, because what one person likes conceptually another person will dislike. Such aspects of games deserve to be reviewed in prose, the way books are. Of course they already are, so I have no idea why I'm even bothering to talk.
Honestly, why people playing games compulsively need to validate the love for their hooby with spurious claims like this?
Games are an untilitarian product, and as long as this is what takes precedence over aesthetic values, games will rigthly continue to be classed as what they are: a passtime.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are some sites, however, that are treating games as more than just entertainment forms. I feel that Insert Credit is doing a fine job of analyzing games and gaming with a critical eye, as opposed to just writing trash like many of the other game-centric web sites do.
Actually, once I found Insert Credit I stopped visiting any other sites. It's clear from their writing that the contributors love what they're doing, and they're not just pandering to the lowest common denominator. Check out the 'reviews' of F-Zero GX or The Wind Waker to see what I mean.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
playability, graphics, sound and longevity
;)
Those are, after all, the key factors that make a game fun. As someone else noted, a good storyline and plot glue you to the monitor. I'd like to add interaction. That's what made Deus Ex or System Shock (IMHO) brilliant games.
But I wouldn't call games "art". Yes, it's a long, costly and tedious process to create a game. Many people are involved, they contain novel ideas (I talk about the good games here). So I didn't mean that comment in any way to play down the quality of or the efford put into games.
What is art? Paintings/Graphics, Music, Movies, Theatre etc. are all passive: the artists (normally) wants to convey a message, and the consumer must see/hear the art to get it. In games, you are active, you shape and change the outcome by you actions. In a way, you are creating art.
And here lies the problem. Honestly, you cannot rate or judge art. One mans trash can be another mans treasure (got that one from blogger.org, I think). Some ppl like Britney Spears, others hate her, others don't care. Take a Van Gogh picture. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't - would you hang one in your living room if you could afford one (and you always can afford a replica)? Game magazines had to be ultimately reduced to demo magazines, since every person had to see the game itself before deciding whether it was good or not.
I hope I made sense, sorry if I didn't
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Games should be, and are, judged ultimately by only one criteria... is it fun?
Take, for example, "American McGee's Alice". Artistically, it was a tour de force. But it was plagued by mediocre mechanics and gameplay, and, despite the beautiful level design, the levels were like a "rail-shooter", there was only one path to follow. It got good initial reviews because of its sheer beauty, but people soon came to realize that it just wasn't much fun.
Artistic? Yes. Fun? Not really. So, as a game, it wasn't very good.
Long term sales are the best indicator of a game's quality. All intellectual pretension aside, the people vote with their wallets. Word of mouth will ensure the success of a game that most people find fun.
Art has always been a necessary aspect of video games. It's what seperates the good from the bad. What game is going to steal the most of your time, the simple graphics or the game that creates an atmosphere. This has almost always been present, right down the the "bip boop" of Asteroids. But let's pretend that the atmosphere means nothing - game design is still something that has to be tweaked. Cookie-cutter games generally don't do very well. You can't just make a first person shooter and have it be gold, it has to have the right feel to it.
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
I wish art was reviewed more like games. We have all this modern crap (and I'm not just talking visual art - we get modern, trying to do something new just to be an ass, works in music and literature as well) that everyone with some taste hates and doesn't connect with the people who view it at all getting rave reviews. Art is only as valuable as the people it affects, without good 'playability' it is worthless.
... a game like GTA3 will always have trouble to be seen as a work of art.
And if you'd ask me, I'd say GTA3 is a piece of trash, not art. So there.
It depends on the purpose of the game. If the overall purpose of the game is to be visually stunning and expansive, rather than focusing on gameplay or how fun it is, then yes it should be considered art by the media. However, it is rare for this to be the focus of the game. Books are considered art, however crossword puzzle books are not, because they are supposed to be games. The only game I can really think of that was actually considered art by some would be Myst. Back when Myst first came out, the graphics were incredible. While the game was fun as well, many people bought and played the game simply due to the wonderous visuals. The purpose of Myst was not just to be a fun game, but to be a visual masterpiece. That is why it was considered art as well as a game.
In my past experiences video games should be comsidered art. If you look at Half-Life 2, it took them 5 years to get where they are today, and it shows because of how great the game appears to be. Working for so long on something only to have it judged by standards created when Pong was God is not humane on the part of the developers. The process that games have to go through to get review need to be changed.
Traditional artists can't even decide what art is, so how can apply to that video games? We need another word here to describe what we feel but can't express. What I mean is that few would argue there's substantial difference between a movie like Pirates of the Carribean and a movie like Apocolypse Now. Likewise, there's something different about ICO as opposed to Madden 2003. If these were on a multiple choice test, Either POTC or Apocolypse, and ICO and Madden, and we were told to choose the most artistic, most people who probably vote Apocolypse Now over POTC, and ICO over Madden.
But the problem is that by terming something "artistic" we are setting it higher than that which is not. Let's not do that with games. There is a technical proficiency that is most certainly artistry, and whereas we may very well award an Artist Award to Grim Fandango over Quake II, obviously Quake II has more technical proficiency than Grim Fandango. Virtual Fighter 4 Evolution is artistic, yes, but it's a very fundamentally different kind of artistry than that of REZ. So, we've established a kind of technical artistry. It's a little more easier to evaluate than whatever is artistry type #2. In other words, anyone can easily say that a game like Mario 64 is more techincally artistic than a game like Superman 64.
But what of artistry type #2? Very basically, I think that it games in artistry type #2 have to communicate something in addition to or other than the sense of entertainment to be #2. This does not have to be something like, "Guns are bad" or some kind of hard culturally relevant message. It can also be an abstract sense, such as the one presented in REZ. Why do I think that Freedom Force is more "artistic" than Battlefield 1942, and yet I've had more hours of fun out of BF1942? Why do I consider Panzeer Dragoon Orta a "higher form" of entertainment than, say, CounterStrike, and yet I've enjoyed Counterstrike more?
It's this Type 2 Artistry that I'm applying as a definition to Freedom Force and PDO.
So...is there a word for this?
games have gotten to a point where its not about how cool the graphics look anymore. HL2 is implementing many of the things that were restricted to non real time 3d graphics. Technically, there are no limits.
I try to look at games less from a technical standpoint and more at how well it was directed. Does it have a solid story? Is there good art direction? Does the game try to be original and uniquie or just another game?
There are some technical aspects that still matter. If its to hard, or too clunky to play your not going to play it.
We will see what happens, but i think games need more credit than they do get.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Movies have become the archetypal Modern Art Form.
Games should say something about the world, like movies do! Games should have big-budgets! Designers should be treated like stars! We need an independent game industry, just like the independent cinema scene!
Horse-hockey! Well, I like the idea of independent gaming, but the rest is bull. Look at the movies that make the most money, they're *crap*. Look at the games that make the most, with some exceptions they're also mostly crap. I mean, the biggest seller last year, if memory serves, was a multi-platform Madden game. *Madden*! Yet another ANOTHER version of a game, video football, that's been remade countless times since the DAMN ATARI 2600/INTELLIVISION WARS. Madden itself got started in the Genesis era, two generations ago! How many football games are there per-gamer-capita? People are not buying these for healthy reasons. It doesn't make sense to pay $50 for the same game each year with an updated player roster and some minor additions.
Anyway, my point is that the efforts of the game community to push gaming along the Hollywood path are wrong-headed. They're copying the massivecrap, blockbuster-focused, take-no-risks Bad Hollywood instead of the smaller, more thoughtful, artistic Good Hollywood, which isn't really what we think of as "Hollywood" anymore.
The following is a list of ways that games are not like movies, and shouldn't be treated like them:
- Non-linearity. The best games are non-linear. The very best games make a mockery out of the whole concept of linearness -- how "linear" is SimCity?
- Focus on algorithm over data. The movie analogue -- well, there isn't one, movies are all data. "Data" in a game means pre-made level designs, monster placements, and static setting. "Algorithm" means focus on general situations more than dealing with specific situations. How to survive the three fireball-shooting demons at the end of this hallway? That's data. How to play an effective game of chess, given the almost infinite variation in situation that can occur from the initial state of the game? That's algorithm.
- Effort required. The fact remains that you can still make a game entirely in your garage, or living room or what have you. Even the equivalent independent cinema, which has had a small number of success story along those lines, required actors, and equipment, and editing tools much less available than your home PC, and film stock, and other stuff I don't even know what they are.
The emergence of the independent scene in moviedom, however, is something that would probably help us independent developers. Kevin Smith made Clerks for about $25,000, and it looked it, and then it went on to break out and get him a "real" career, but a good number of people (as shown by a Non-Scientific Slashdot Poll (tm)) still think of it as his best movie. Chris Crawford has gone on record somewhere (I don't remember where alas) as saying we needed something like that.
As for games needing to "say something about the world," well, how do movies say something about the world? If you think Independence Day was actually about humans banding together over adversity and finding a common basis then I've got a fish to slap you with. It failed on those terms because it was didactic, it was obvious, it told us what to think. Most games are like that, and most games will thus fail to say anything meaningful. Schindler's List isn't a good movie because it shows us that Nazis are bad. It's a great movie because it's about the mystery of Oscar Schindler, and it doesn't show us what happened inside his head to make him go from Nazi sympathizer to rescuer of Jews. Movies that tell you what to think are propaganda. Movies that actually teach show us something, and expect that we're smart enough to draw our own conclusions. Gaming may one day evolve a way to do this, but I don't think it'll be any time soon.
It's not a relevant question. We went through this in the 80's and 90's with comic books. Comic creators asking, "Why aren't comics considered art?" It's too broad a question, with too many players.
A creator can use any medium to create a great artwork. The medium is simply the form that artwork takes.
That said, most interactive entertainment (games) are not worthy of consideration as great artworks. Why? It's terribly complicated.
*There's the problem that games have never been, until recently, anything other than a commercial medium. Mods and the IF community have broken through that barrier with remarkable results. Still, people intent on making a living in games are constantly fighting forces (particularly in publishers) intent on duplicating proven successes while pushing innovation to the back-burner.
*There's the chicken-egg problem that comics had -- we don't make games for adults because adults don't play games. Well, adults don't play games because games aren't made for them. Well, developers (and very slowly, publishers) are starting to understand that adults are playing games now. One glance at the success of "The Sims" will tell you a lot about the age and gender of potential ("casual") gamers.
*There's the problem that games are a terribly young medium. Between 25 and 30 years old, depending on when you start counting. How long has oil painting been around? How long have people been writing and performing plays? How long have people been writing and performing music?
*There's the problem that creative individuals aren't being drawn to the medium. Or, dare I say, the problem that individuals who lack vision and ambition aren't being drawn to the medium. Folks who are satisfied to re-create the simplistic games that fascinated them as children, rather than explore the full potential of the medium. (Boy that one's going to get me in trouble.) I think we all fight this one within ourselves, and it's a worthwhile fight.
Will games eventually produce its own equivalent to the classics of literature, music, painting, and theater? Absolutely. It's in our hands (as creators and as consumers) to vote with our money, to give risky games a chance, and to foster an environment where creators feel comfortable taking chances.
"Are the press" makes you look like a redneck.
It is either "is the press"
or
"are the presses"
A government supported artist is an incompetent whore.
Art is suposed to reach us, if nobody wants to look at it, or in the case of games play them, then it's bad art, no matter how artistic the thought behind it. The purpose of any art is to please the artist and please the partron. As long as the games please the artist, either artisicaly, or financialy, and they please the patron, and they convey an emotional state, why worry overmuch about how third parties view them.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
That which is new and compelling generally begins on the "avant-garde", and appeals only to the fringe.
Eventually, that which is "avant-garde" becomes an accepted part of the mainstream art.
Gaming is kind of a peculiar situation, as it changes SO rapidly in such a small span of time, due to technological advances. A lay person might see art from a span of 2 centuries as being obviously related, but might look at Pong compared to GTA: Vice City and see them as in no way related (except for being "images onscreen that you can manipulate - which, in art terms, would be reducing the relationship to "paint applied to flat surface").
That which changed in centuries in eras gone past, and decades in more recent eras, now changes in mere years.
There are TWO issues here - people treating games as art, and game developers treating games as art. If the latter does not happen, then there's no reason to expect the former to. In today's industry, I would argue that the latter happens "sometimes".
Still, it's a trend. Both those that make the games and those that play them will gradually begin to see gaming as less of a diversion, and more of a substantial vehicle for something meaningful. These two will coexist, as they do in motion picture cinema (although, hopefully, gaming will fare even better than Hollywood).
It only took one Beatles to turn what was termed an "adolescent fad"- rock n' roll -into the most comprehensive music of the twentieth century, far outpacing jazz, classical and all other art-forms in its field with its depth and reach.
We're nearing photorealism in games- what's next?
What's currently known as interactive entertainment will become the most important art form of this century. It will continue to attract those who seek to push the limits of what's possible- usually the greatest artists.
Some people do consider intellectual aspects of a film fun, others do not. One person may find Citizen Kane an excellent movie with a great story and other may not be so interested in it. This is the same reason why one person might think trudging through the Myst universe for hours is fun, and another might only want to play a fast paced fps like counter-strike. The point is a game has to be fun for a person to play, but different people have different definitions of fun, and therefore another person's review of a game is worthless to you.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
Insert Credit is a nice site.
However, it really seems to focus on consoles.
Does anyone know of anything similar for PCs?
I've tried looking, but have been largely unsuccessful.
Hollywood comments on the world around us? Some movies do, most of them not made by Hollywood or made by directors who work outside the schmooze-fest circuit. If you want socially conscious entertainment, you will have to look to late 60's to late 70's science fiction, starting with Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick. That was social awareness with a vengeance. I think what she's referring to is observational humor, something that was in standup comedy long before TV picked it up. For now, you will not find socially aware games entertainment outside of, say, Deus Ex or Grand Theft Auto. As for treating a console as a cultural object like the TV, it is only a matter of encroaching ubiquity. Soon enough you will all be as tired of the "idiot machine" as you are of the "idiot box."
*There's the problem that creative individuals aren't being drawn to the medium. Or, dare I say, the problem that individuals who lack vision and ambition aren't being drawn to the medium. Folks who are satisfied to re-create the simplistic games that fascinated them as children, rather than explore the full potential of the medium. (Boy that one's going to get me in trouble.) I think we all fight this one within ourselves, and it's a worthwhile fight.
:)
There's the problem that people mistake complexity (as in anti-simplicity) as a requirement for good art.
I may be reading into your words a bit (we probably need an actual game example), but doesn't a game design that has the ability to captivate a child suggest it has some kind of basic power that is worth paying attention to? Plenty of 'adult games' in meatworld also have analogues in children's games - sports, theater, music (sing-alongs, etc.), and card games, for example. Theater may be a much more intricate (and expensive) form of the child's 'dress up and pretend' game design, but it still follows the basic principles and the goal to explore an element of the world.
I think innovation (as commonly discussed) is massively overrated in gaming, especially when it comes to discussing its ability to be art. A painting isn't art most of the time because it is innovative alone - it is enough that it is just a 'good painting'. Likewise, you don't invent a new language every time you write a poem or a book, but I think that is what a lot of people are suggesting when they talk about innovations in gaming. Early game types like shmups or side-scrolling platformers have seen only a fraction of their potential as an artform, but are already being (figuratively) thrown in the fireplace by publishers and gamers alike because they are "just not innovative enough".
New features and 'wrinkles' are certainly welcome (how about a shmup where one player assembles the level on the fly using some kind of interface similar to a card game?), and I think they are the real innovation we want in gaming. Not brand new genres or game styles (that don't even work/play as well their ancestors) every year, which is what so many gamers mistakenly complain they do want. Most of the time they certainly don't buy from the developers that do just this.
The tools (game types) we have already developed are amazing - there is no harm in using them a lot more!
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Truth hurts.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The second thing.
Many gamers have "grown up" and are now adults (or at least close facsimiles thereof), capable of appreciating the artistic component of a video game.
In a semi-related note, is there a yearly "awards" type thing for games? Like "best direction", "best programming", etc?
MORTAR COMBAT!
Okay, cool.
:)
There's the problem that people mistake complexity (as in anti-simplicity) as a requirement for good art.
I'm not asserting that innovation is necessary for good art, but it is necessary for a medium to grow. I probably didn't balance my original statement carefully enough, because the position you're arguing against is more extreme than mine.
Of course there are elements that "adult" entertainment shares with "children's" entertainment. Good storytelling is good storytelling. If you've mastered tension and release, you're already three-quarters of the way there.
But what I was getting at specifically in that point was the difference between a good Dr. Seuss book and a good David Mamet play. Seuss is making great art, but it's less likely to appeal to adults than the Mamet play. Yet I've worked with many in the industry who, because the game industry hasn't yet seen its Mamet, just want to reproduce an experience that impacted them at some point in the past.
or rather the development of a game..
heck, if you can scrape together a good-looking, good-sounding game on a sane budget that's actually FUN -- well that's an art form right there!
This whole subject, is quite simply, bollocks.
Some games - in fact, most games - are more like sports than they are any other medium. FPS, RTS, Beat-em-ups, Racing games, and obviously sporting games. That's fine by me, I don't really consider these games as "artistic", and they're generally not deep or meaningful. They exist to be played, and to entertain - which is exactly what they do.
However, there are other genres that are a lot more similar to films and books, such as adventure, and possibly RPG. Games like Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey are much more "artsy", essentially letting you interact with characters, and telling you a story.
My point is, for games to be considered meaningful and artistic, they generally have to have a little less involvement. A little more pre-scripted sequences. Art is one persons creation, you don't "interact" with art. You observe it, enjoy it. You maybe find meaning in it. Street Fighter 2 is not art.