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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...
... 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.
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.
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.
Some people consider painting a passtime; others consider it an artform. It's all context.
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.
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).