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Are Videogames Art?
Game Politics, as always, has some meaty thoughts on offer. Today they're revisiting the perpetual question, 'Can videogames be considered art?'. They touch on the words of Roger Ebert, and discuss a recent piece on the subject in the Sydney Herald. From the article: "Brendan McNamara, game director for Team Bondi, makers of the upcoming film noir PS3 game L.A. Noire, has no doubt his team is creating art. With a project plan that includes 170 pages describing cinematic moments, and 1,200 pages detailing interactive events, the game has a Hollywood-like budget of more than $30 million. 'We control the delivery of the information ... We give players a setting and a framework, we control what they see and do. So how are we not authors?' McNamara wonders if video games are stigmatized because they are a mostly commercial venture. At the same time, he believes that being driven by sales is a good thing." What is the Slashdot opinion? Are games too different from other form of expression to be considered art? Is Shadow of the Colossus comparable to Leaves of Grass or Citizen Kane?
There is a very fuzzy line between design and art. What qualifies as art is mostly in the mind of the creator. Usually, design is done for a practical purpose and art is done to express something within the artist. Of course, it is possible to do both at the same time. Consider the 'found art' phenom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_art Even stuff that wasn't intended to be art can be if it is presented right.
Concordia University in Montreal has a Computation Arts program. It's about making art on the computer. The graduates find jobs in the video game industry. http://design.concordia.ca/
So the answer to the question is: sometimes.
Also, there is an aspect of timelessness to art. Quoting Ebert (and his main argument)
The video game age is very young, and this perception will inevitably change as it matures. I'll encourage my kids to play Final Fantasy and listen to Nobuo Uematsu.
A great piece of music is still a great piece of music, even if it's only a dog that ever listens to it. The situation and atmosphere (e.g. supermarket enviroment) are external variables which affect the enjoyment of said music.
Oh and John Cage's music 4'33" in my opinion is completely neutral, offering nothing or bad. If you could put every theoretical piece of music on a multi-dimensional tree, then the 4'33 would certainly occupy an important place in that tree. However, it lacks any of the enjoyment that can be gained from good music. I think it's a gimmick in that sense, and the any enjoyment people derive from it comes from another source (the silence may inspire them to a pleasant memory etc.).
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The great thing about that particular radio3 performance is that the 'dead mans switch' on the transmitter distribution network decided that the silence was a fault and began playing cheesy lift music half way through. :)
I think cage would have loved it.
Let's define art.
Art: The products of human creativity. (Source)
Art: The expression of creativity or imagination, or both. (Source)
Art: The formal expression of a conceived image or imagined conception in terms of a given medium. (Source)
With these definitions, I consider video games to be art. I always have considered them art. They are simply an expression of human creativity. Being on an interactive medium only adds to the art.
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Pong is most certainly art (moreso than many other games).
... the whole thing coming together and having a significant impression upon the user that makes it artistic.
It is that achieves a satisfactory experience through the user's experience that is much more than one would expect when looking at all the pieces individually (sound, graphics, interface).
You could have a massively hyped game with great individual assets (think Daikatana), yet the composition and feedback loop with the user is decidedly lacking. Some character models could be very artistic, but the whole combined product is forced; dead.
Pong is the opposite and it succeeds with the sparse resources allocated to it. That is what I believe makes it a work of art. It is the precisely the unity of design, mechanics
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Actually, that's incorrect. The piece is NOT named "4 minutes and 33 seconds" as everyone likes to point out, the name of the piece, as Cage titled it, is "Silence". But the naming of the piece, for the program's sake, is to be the intended duration of the particular performance. I've read his performance notes for the piece, 4'33" is never included anywhere in them. It just so happens that the first performance, which was done in 3 movements by a pianist, btw, happened to be 4 minutes and 33 seconds long, and appeared as 4'33" on the program, and many people missed the point. It has been, since, performed in many different durations (all in 3 movements).
Cage loved to explore bounderies. All his music was extremely structured, even if it's result was indeterminate, one of his prerequisites for this piece, and why he requires that the title reflect the duration, is that the length be decided BEFORE hand. He approached the piece as if it was (and it is) a very serious performance work, and didn't want it to be trashed by amatures going for a cheap laugh. One of his definitions of art, even in his most post-modern efforts, is that any work follows conscious bounderies, even if these boundaries is "has no bounderies at all", but in the case of "Silence", one of those bounderies is "must have pre-defined duration".
I believe it to be one of the most "important" (notice I do not say "best") works of the 20th century, as it has spurned more controversy and more debate on the its relivance as a piece of art, than probably any other musical work. Is it an aesthetic work? Interestingly, it is intended to be. In his notes, Cage describes the audience being made to listen to themselves, their conglomerate breathing, their heart-beat, the sounds of airducts in the wings, the work is meant, partially as an aesthetic look into the "sounds of the full concert hall", and is meant to be interpreted as much. There are many different layers of interpretation of the piece, with "silence" refering to a complete vacuum, or an actual quited space.
That said, the deffinitiong of "audience" is not very set in stone. I will challange that any piece of art needs an audience, but I'm not sure if that audience need be conciously attentive. I just finished writing the music for my the local six-o'clock news, it's intended as a diversion, something to accentuate an intro annimation and punctuate the importance of the newscast. Is it art? I don't know, I think is both art and not art at the same time. It has a purpose besides it's pure musical aesthetics, but MANY forms of art have outside reasoning. MOST music is narrative, and tells a story (even a good 50% of classical music), some of it is political, philosophical, or in otherways, intended to try to sway some kind of position out of the audience. How is that different from trying to sway consumers into buying merchandise (I've done music for advertisements as well, btw)? I usually try to only tackle writing music for merchandising that I actually put some stock in. I like doing music for PSAs, because I usually believe that they're a good cause to support. But other times, I just like doing music to a commercial I think it's aesthetically interesting, and artistic in it's own right. I'm in an interesting position where I can decide what spots to write for and what not to.
My point is, I think art is much more expansive than most people like to make out to believe... usually their just superimposing their own aethetic sense on what they think is good and bad. Good and Bad are not part of the defenition of art, as in, there is such a thing as "good art" and "bad art" (from the audience's perspective), but their both art. Kenny G is bad art, mall crap is bad art, IMO of course.
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