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But Is It Art?
Once again the ever popular topic of 'Games as Art' rears its head in a Gamespot editorial. Matthew Rorie talks the artistic and social value of games, and touches on comics and film to boot. From the article: "As of now, innovation in games is driven more by commerce than by any kind of noble artistic ideal. For that to change, and for games to be taken more seriously by people who don't play them, games need to become cheaper to make, they need to be made by more- diverse groups of people, and they need to be more accessible to nongamers. You could argue about the accessibility point, but the other two factors aren't improving, and they probably won't improve anytime soon. Most game companies seem to be preaching to the choir by developing games that will mostly appeal to people who are already interested in them."
Games can be artistic in style.
Art is art for the sake of art. Games are games for the sake of entertainment.
Next rehashed question please.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Yes, good games are art.
Likewise, a nice-looking car is a work of art. An iPod is a work of art. A thoughtfully-designed building is a work of art. The math test in which I expertly demonstrated that 0 = 1 is a work of art. The arrangement of boxes in my basement is a work of art. My mash-ups of Google Maps with Britney Spears songs are all works of art.
Lastly, this entire post is a work of art. Treasure it as if it were your own, but it's not; comments are owned by the poster, and you may not reproduce mine unless it is within the rights accorded you under the Creative Commons CC-NA-lk-OI-MM-5L-Z| license.
For more information, click here.
I'm getting tired of hearing how games need to change to meet some social ideal of the people pushing them.
I pretty much like games just the way they are, and seriously, if I didn't like them, and I really felt that something was missing from games, I'd just get off my backside and write a game I liked...
Why is it that when a niche happens to like something, someone always feels it's time to change the status quo to increase the appeal to people outside of that niche, at the expense of the people within it.
Sure, I don't like all games. But there are plenty to go around, and I find there are still lots of games that I do like... Even the commercial ones.
I'm in the choir and I like the sermon... Please leave it that way.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
For that to change, and for games to be taken more seriously by people who don't play them, games need to become cheaper to make , they need to be made by more- diverse groups of people, and they need to be more accessible to nongamers.
Isn't that what Nintendo has been saying for years?
In 5 years expect dozens of articles on mainstream websites mentioning that controllers are too intimidating to the average consumer.
Seriously, who cares? Is a car art? Is the ocean art? Is this post art? Just make me a fun game and I'll play it.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
So it must be sooooo easy to right a game then. Just get off your back and right one. HA. you know how much work and thought and time and money go into games. You insult the entire gaming community with that post.
If the games stink just dont but them, you are not going to be writing a game.
To Hell with the Queen of England!
and they need to be more accessible to nongamers
Shouldn't that mean that paintings, sculptures, and other forms of traditional "art" need to become more accessible to non-museum-going people? This is becoming less of a problem with the internet (and specifically sites like Google Image) but the full effect of traditional art doesn't get expressed to those who are not active in the artistic community (ie those who don't go to art museums and such.)
I'd say that games contain art. Some people would argue that code writing (at least the good kind) is an art. Surely some of the music scores and sound effects are art. The levels, characters, weapons, backgrounds, textures, etc. are art.
Games contain art. Games are entertainment.
Art museums contain art. Art museums are entertainment.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Yes, I know how much work and time and money goes into games. I was developing them commercially over 20 years ago... Back when you started game development with a soldering iron and not a keyboard. (Well, maybe with a cassette deck, if you were using a Spectrum or similar PC of the era).
And yes, I wrote and made things I liked, although my job was also to write/make/build games that appealed to others, and I enjoyed that too.
I guess that would have been when I was writing the sermon. And you better believe I made stuff to be as popular as possible with the target audience. And yes, it was a niche audience.
But Im not so arrogant to beleive that you need to be a high-value game developer to make a great game you (and others) enjoy. That would be insulting to people who have single-handedly written classics, or the smaller companies.
I don't need to write games, because I can find what I like already made, but there are many people all over the world who have a great idea that they'd like to play, but can't find it so they write it - The world knows them as "Independant Games Designers". My eldest son, at 13, is one of them.
The greatness of a game is in the gameplay to those who enjoy it...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
So true. Games have fallen victim to the "too many Crayons" problem that is now plaguing movies. Constraint forces creativity. An artist with a single sheet of paper and some charcoal can soar to new heights of creativity because the limitations of medium force the message to be spoken through the art not the tools. Movies can now just use 3D Animation and green-screening and post to create nearly any effect imaginable. Sadly, it cannibalizes the director's ability to convey artistic message. (see Star Wars: A New Hope vs Phantom Menace).
For whatever reason this seems to happen every time constraints are lifted on art. Back when it was damn difficult and the tools we're very primitave we were given radically different and ground-breaking games like Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Toobin, Galaga, Joust. Short of the fact they all use a joystick and buttons, they're about as completely different as you can get. Now we have Quake 4, Doom 12, Unreal Tournament 60. There's about 3 types of games, and 500 knockoffs of those. The drive to create totally new paradigms in gaming is almost gone. DDR is probably the most recent thing I would classify as truly new.
Of course the second big problem is that game authors (rightly or wrongly) simply want bigger final dollars for their creations as opposed to higher profits. This is capitalism, and that's okay, is just means that a highly succesful niche game is less desired than a watered down whack-a-mole that sells to the unwashed masses. The concepts, themes and functions of a video game or movie will continue to be steered by whether or not it can make it onto Burger King cups and Dell Holiday catalogs.
So as much as the summary is very correct, we need specific, niche games. And while I do think there's some real "new money" to be generated in a lot of untapped small fields, I don't see how it can happen in the current environment. Braindead WoW makes money, and money is what everyone wants above all else.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
All three of these problems are being specifically addressed by Nintendo with the Revolution.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
The problems that the writer of this article is fumbling around are the same problems with all of mainstream culture. The companies, investing so much into the product, cut out all the art for as much marketability/functionality/sales as they possibly can. The games are too expensive to make well, so there isn't a corresponding indie genre for the people that really love games.
Yes, because movie studios and art galleries don't want to make money. Painters and directors have absolutely no commercial hopes for their creations. I know all the professional painters I know aren't trying to sell their paintings.
Like movies are cheap to make? Yeah, I mean, I can scrounge up a couple hundred million in a weekend. Paint, canvas, they cost money too. More than you'd think.
...and paintings need to be made to be more accessible to people who don't look at paintings, movies to people who don't watch movies....
Look, I'm not saying that it isn't possible to improve the game creating/playing community or something, but are they art? Yes. That it can be expensive, commercial, and that it has a limited audience has nothing to do with the question whatsoever. Art can be all of those things. Good art can be all of those things.
Novels are art, right?
Some RPGs have novel-sized plots.
This is what Dictionary.com has to say about art:
"High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value."
Games seem to fit this description as well. Half Life and Doom are wonderful aesthetically.
Other games even have literary merits.
Case in point: Earthbound/Mother2 (warning, tsunami of text)
Mr. Rorie seems to have rehashed one or two valid, but overplayed notions, and spun a whole pile of fluff around it.
Yes, game content, gameplay and themes have stagnated a fair bit over the past few years. We all know this and it's been said before, but say it again, gotta demonstrate you're worth whatever they pay you.
The notion that games are too hard to make is idiotic.
Parallel to movies: one can make a movie, by oneself in one's basement, but it will most likely look like you made it in your basement.
Movies made by small teams on small budgets, while maybe lacking the "polish" of the Hollywood blockbusters, can still be charming, engaging, and tend to be more likely to "break new ground".
Big Hollywood blockbusters generally rehash existing plot structures, character archetypes, etc... and generally "play it safe".
Same thing with games. It's driven in large part by executives fear of risking huge budgets on "unknowns". This companies are generally risk-averse, and it shows in the games they make.
"[games] need to be more accessible to nongamers. You could argue about the accessibility point..." Actually, this is the only point he gets even close to right, but I'd say it's more of a content issue, and should be "[games] need to explore new subject matter and themes to appeal more to current nongamers".
Finally, given gamespot's propensity to overrate big-name games (8.5 for Doom 3???) I'd considered them to be contributors to the problem. They contribute to the overhyping of big-launch games without much innovation, and barely mention the launches of smaller more fringe games.
Gee another 'insightful' and 'revealing' article about the games biz. Pity it's all obvious, banal and tedious drivel...
I just came back from a trip to my local Wal-Mart where I watched, for the first time, some guy play the new Xbox 360 on a demo machine. Despite the fact that (oddly enough) there was no one else but me and the player to admire this machine, I was totally impressed by the vivid graphics of the "Call of Duty" demo I saw, and can therefore conclude that it is possible for video game design to reach the level of "art".
I was playing an old "Battlefield 1942" game only yesterday on my laptop, and to see the dramatic changes in the graphical details, the lighting, the virtual human movements, the AI, etc., in Xbox 360 is a mesmerising experience. As the saying goes in the movie industry that "great special effects do not necessarily make good movies, great stories do," the same is perhaps true in PC/Video gaming. When playing games or watching movies, people want to be surprised, pleasantly, by dramatic twists and turns, and be immersed in the story, and in the case of video gaming, the advancement in technology does help, because as the CPU power increases and memory chips are cheaper to manufacture, the games will become more life-like, and it definitely requires artistic temperament to code and render the facial expressions and body movements of those virtual players that are the gamers' alter egos.
Sun and Fun
Games are art on various levels. Some are white trash scribbles, others works of the masters. Look at the scenery in a lot of your RPG style games, those are artistic works. Do not forget the in game movies either. And we can never forget the musical scores, which sometimes sell even better than the games. Games can tell a story much like a novel or movie, they can show us new worlds like a painting, and we can hear songs that move us like a recital. The only thing seperating them from "art" may be the interactivity, but there are other artistic mediums that allow one to interact as well (But may the person or persons that invented kar.. kara.. you know what be beat witha microphone)
"I found no people for killing time, so I found time for killing people" - "Time for People" by Atomship
For that to change, and for games to be taken more seriously by people who don't play them, games need to become cheaper to make, they need to be made by more- diverse groups of people, and they need to be more accessible to nongamers. You could argue about the accessibility point, but the other two factors aren't improving, and they probably won't improve anytime soon. Most game companies seem to be preaching to the choir by developing games that will mostly appeal to people who are already interested in them.
Yeah, well, games made by games companies aren't games made by more diverse groups of people, are they?
Dude. Stop looking for innovation amongst the corporate whores. There ARE plenty of people out there making wacky freeware things. Some of them use flash. Some of them use game maker. Some of them make atari roms.
You can't on one hand complain that more different kinds of people need to make games, and then claim that only the one kind of game-makers count!
It is not hard to write a game. I just wrote a random number guessing game, took about 8 lines of code.
The latest and greatest games from big budget companies are harder, sure. But still, the foundation is there.
PS, use the preview button next time.
"Art for art's sake"? What's that supposed to mean? Artists are doing their stuff to worship God, to make money, to get laid, just because they can, or some other reason.
The article implies that art necessitates wide viewership. What percentage of the earth's population walked through the Sistine chapel before the camera was invented? (A: very small number) How many great works of art have spent their existence on the wall of a private collector? (A: very big number) What a clueless idea!
Or the idea that a large number of people need to contribute to make something an Art. Yeah, the majority of Roman citizens had time to carve statues. Along with the majority of middle ages serfs painting icons. Stained glass workers, architects, novelists, movie producers, etc. etc. etc.
Then there is the notion that something is horribly wrong with games because a great number of them are similar in story and play. Guess what, literature has had genre's and has had them for decades if not centuries. And there are still people writing romance, western, spy, mystery, etc. and getting published. Just because the history of computer games has always had "its never been done before" as a selling point does not mean that its an industry requirement.
There's always the cry "art for art's sake" and since there's the analog in game form, I think that the games-as-art question was answered a long time ago with titles such as Rez and Katamari Damacy. The later of the two titles I thought was even more interesting when the creator admited in recent interviews as someone who doesn't play games outside of the office.
Although it's obviously a better product when gameplay triumphs, I really liked the "style" that the Katamari titles brought to the table. The scripts might have been obtuse to the extreeme, but I really liked the oject and world designs. You could spot them on a screen across any room.
If you can create a visual identiry - then you've essentially got art (amongst other criteria)
That is the most idiotic comment I have read in a while. That is like saying "hey, I can use a hammer, I must know everything that an architect knows." If all you know is how to make a random number guessing game then you know nothing about how to make games yet.
Do you know what polymorphism is? Do you know how to use Huffman compression on your files? Do you know how many polys is acceptable for a character model that is used in the background of a level? Do you know how to use recursive functions to do A* path finding thought a level? How about even displaying a circle to the screen, do you know that?
There is a lot of work that go into making games and it is a very challenging field to be in and your comment is very insulting.
Why hasn't this been marked troll yet?
Games are just like any other type of media. Some of it is art, some of it is craft, and others are just there for entertainment.
I don't think all game should be considered art. I don't think there is a way that would be possible. You're not going to play a game of Madden and have it challenge you're beliefs. Some games are just be made for the sake of entertainment and the creators of those games are not trying to create art. There is always going to be an audience for those types of games and the industry needs them.
The closest relation to games would probably be the movie industry. Many movies come out every year but very few of them could truly be considered art. Most movies are just meant to bring people into the theater, engage them for 2 hours, and let them go. The viewer was entertained but nothing really happened. The movie didn't change them in any way. It didn't challenge them, it simply entertained them. But every now and then, there are movies that really standout and leave you thinking afterwards and still entertain you in the process.
This is what I want to happen with some games. I want there to be more games that when the player finishes they are left thinking afterwards (in a good way). There are a few games out there that I do really believe are on the edge of becoming art (some of the Final Fantasy series, Eternal Darkness, the Metal Gear series, the Longest Journey), however there is still a long way to go before games can be accepted by the general public as art.
Why is it that articles like this always seem to come out of gaming industry media outlets? This one in particular annoys me for a whole host of reasons, beyond just spending way too much time discussing the lack of cultural acceptance for comic books (or graphic novels).
First off (not counting the comic books), video games or rather interactive multimedia computer simulations are just a content medium, a channel for presenting information to a viewer. This channel includes anything that passes through it just like any other medium. How people categorize this content varies but I think its safe to say anything intended specifically to entertain the viewer can safely be called art. Again, the same goes for entertainment on any other content medium, like movies, music, and yes, even comic books.
Anyone who argues otherwise siting specific titles as being "NOT ART" is expressing a personal preference generally based on whether or not they are entertained by a particular title. Those same people then usually try to force this personal preference on everyone else as some form of fact. From there is gets complicated and increasingly more annoying. For example an extreme but sadly common example is pornography, some may say a picture of a simple nude statue is art while at the same time a PlayBoy centerfold poster is not art (personally I would even argue the human body is a work of art and should freely be displayed as such, and indeed I would include everything from flashing breasts to modeling). Same is true of violence, if a character in a movie kills in the heat of passion (and its moves the viewer) its art while some would say a movie that depicts people killing for fun to be "NOT ART".
So yes, it is art.
Second, cost is a minor factor. The movie theater analogy was extremely poor. People seeking to pay per play in a theater type arrangement go to an arcade, they don't run out an dump $500 on a gaming system and a few games. Games are reasonably priced for the volume of content you pay for (that says nothing of quality) and at least for consoles you can get more functionality out of the few $100 you had to drop on equipment to watch movies at home.
Third, play time in context to introducing people to video games is a problem for most titles. This says nothing of game demos, independent games (including "interactive fiction"), and the huge range of non-3D games (most of which are short). Web based games on portal sites are also becoming more popular.
Finally (before I get replies just telling me to shutup), the game industry is broken but I think 'natural' industry changes and market pressure will slowly resolve most of the problems. This will also result in an ever widening range of game content becoming available. The main problem with content today is only small independent developers and hobbyists are willing to risk their time and resources on anything but a sure bet product. A large part of the solution will be advances in development technologies such as new versions of 3D Game Studio for small developers, open sources development resources for hobbyists, and procedurally created content generation for the big developers. It goes well beyond just engines, development tools, and the range of content but thats a subject for another article (by someone who can describe it far better than I can).
I'd also like to note that I'm back, I have posted a comment on here in years but now I'll be contributing my two cents a little more often, at least for a while.
Note: Sorry if this is redundent with any other replies, took me a while to write this.
-MegaBurn
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." -Plato
You say that he cannot know how to make games if all he knows is how to make a random number guessing game. To be pedantic, you admit that it's a game, he wrote it, and therefore you must admit that he knows how to make games. Maybe it's not going to be a great hit with your type of crowd, but he might find hours of fun with it.
Now to pull apart your fantasy of how to make "games."
Polymorphism is method of programming. Not every language uses it. But not every game is even a computer game that needs a computer language. This particular argument I will not repeat, though it is valid everywhere.
Huffman compression is a method of lossless compression. Not every file needs to be compressed. You could use bitmap sprites and other uncompressed files. Or even use an off-the-shelf system that does not require you to know anything about it, neither in the creation of the file, nor the use of it.
How many poly's are acceptable is totally dependent on your graphics engine and machine you are running it on. This might be something you would have to be aware of if you used someone elses software, but if you wrote your own, it would be totally up to you. But this also assumes that you are making a graphical game. Lots of people like the old text based games.
Path finding is only necessary for certain games where there is some AI that needs it. Not all AI needs it and not all path finding even needs to be recursive.
A circle to the screen would be a basic function of a graphics engine, yes. But again, if you're not making a graphical game, it is totally unnecessary. Again, you could also use third-party software. In which case, the method of getting a circle to the screen is very different. How to do that in the engines made by Epic, Valve, id, Blizzard, etc. is very different, though usually it is fairly simple, and could be easily learned, even if you wanted to go make your own engine.
There is a lot of work that goes into making all games, correct. But then he never said he would get up and write it in a few minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. And he didn't say which types of games he liked. Maybe he likes the old text-based MUDs. In which case, it would take a while to write a simple game, but would require none of the elements you have mentioned.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Play Psychonauts, and then try to tell me that games aren't art. Sasha Nein's level alone should qualify.
The fact that I know the name of the person who made it should prove that, art or not, we're treating games as though they are art, with artists gaining acclaim for their work.
"But Is It Art?"
Nine times out of ten, if you find yourself asking that question, the answer is "yes." There is often doubt about what is art, but there is rarely any doubt about what is not art.
It's up there with questions like "Is this a dumb idea?"