Slashdot Mirror
Sci-Fi Writer Considers BioShock's Artistic Merit
The LevelUp blog considers an article on the Washington Post site, where their tech columnist did a little experiment. He set Science Fiction author Michael Dirda down in front of Irrational's BioShock, and asked him to consider the game's artistic merit. N'Gai has himself some interesting commentary about the article, which raises a flurry of question on its own: "Dirda, to use his word, doesn't know the 'rhetoric' of video games. Me: I've spent so much time playing video games over the years that I'd forgotten people aren't born instinctively knowing how to 'circlestrafe' a monster ... 'I could lose myself in this, in some ways, easier than in a book,' he said. Dirda said the game showed him that video games 'obviously have artistic value' and will likely become more of a recognized art form. So: Is BioShock art? 'I would hesitate to go that far,' he said after a short pause."
The question is not whether video games are or aren't art.
The question is why, oh why, are artists in other genres so utterly threatened by the concept that it might be.
I mean, just look at the constituent properties of games.
Games have music of all genres, and nobody denies that can be art.
Screen shots from many games could probably be snuck into your local modern art gallery. Nobody denies imagery can be art.
They went to a sci-fi author! Certainly a science fiction tale can be art.
If you combine all three of the above -- well, you end up with a movie, and nobody denies that cinema is an art form.
Even if you take away the controlled progression of experiences -- well, welcome to architecture. Was Frank Lloyd Wright not an artist?
I think the bottom line is that a lot of people who don't play games, but do pay attention to art, don't want to imagine that they're not trained to appreciate a particular art form. Better to deny its potential as being art at all.
The real question is -- why should gamers care?
As far as I can tell, the man is a book critic. The write-up makes it seem as he's actually written sci-fi books?
I think it really comes down to how you define art. I personally will consider a lot of things as art that most people wouldn't, things like games, graffiti, and even source code. If you look at things like music, movies, and images you'll notice one thing in common. They all show or inspire emotions. I think that is how art should be defined. So why would a game, which quite often inspire emotions like fear and victory, and many games have quite elaborate and emotional stories, not be considered an art form?
Just my opinion though.
http://blog.heavensdomain.net
Why is Michael Dirda labelled as being a science fiction writer?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The real question: is it *good* art? Nobody will deny that a painting or a novel is art, but 99% of all of them are crap. Good art provokes a response- you think about it and remember it later, and not just because you managed to frag some noob thirteen times in a row. Video games for the most part have not reached this state. I can only think of a few that merit the title "Good art" that tell stories that are interesting enough to reach that goal.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It does that, too, but someone recently commented that it's not art if it can't make you depressed. While that's probably the most fucked up definition of art I've ever heard, games -are- capable of it and fit even that definition.
Anyhow, just like everything else in life, something that only makes you happy gets boring pretty quickly. There needs to be some balance of other emotions to contrast the happiness, or it won't be appreciated fully. In the end, you should walk away happy, but the path to getting there needs to have a full range of emotions.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Quickly moving away from? It's sitting exactly where it always was. Perhaps Doom was a bit more accessible, but most games since have pretty much just been Quake over and over again.
Michael Dirda is not a science fiction author. He's a literary critic. Which the submitter probably should have known if he'd read, like, the very first sentence of the article: "On a recent Saturday morning, I headed over to the house of Pulitzer Prize-winning Post book columnist Michael Dirda with an Xbox 360 under my arm."
From the third paragraph: "But [Dirda] is a sci-fi fan and an open-minded fellow, and I was curious whether BioShock's story would be compelling enough to draw him in."
Did a quick Amazon search of his work, and the only things I noticed were essentially books about reading itself.
Just sayin'.
I think that the final assessment, that they picked the wrong person to do this because of a lack of familiarity with games, is dead on.
Why can't someone get a better reviewer to do this? Cory Doctorow? Orson Scott Card? Bruce Sterling? Dan Simmons?
I'm a bit confused as to why, if Dirda's 16 year old son finished it, why didn't he ask for help? Seems to me this implies he really wasn't that into the experiment himself. Surely there's directions someplace on the basics? RTFM?
I think the real challenge is to get some serious "artists", be they of books, music, movies, or whatever, to play the games and give their impressions.
A better analogy for the person they picked would be to take my grandparents (who can barely use the MS Works that came pre-installed on a computer) and ask them to do a review of OpenOffice vs. MS Office 2007. Without the basic minimum skill threshold, the whole thing is tainted anyway.
Bill
Some of you think that no one denies that movies are art but you are wrong. Many believe that most movies are not art and that only some movies can be considered art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film
This is important because if you consider that all movies are art, well if you film your vacations you have a storyline (your vacations), you have characters, you have different backgrounds, you have emotions, etc. So why shouldn't your vacations be considered art? If I draw a square with a pen is this art or not? If not then why is this art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mondrian_CompRYB.jpg ? If you look at dadaism (here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg ) can this be considered art or not?
Before arguing about games being art or not, we should start by arguing over what is art.
So: Is BioShock art? "I would hesitate to go that far," he said after a short pause.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
Yes, of course, Any game that has solid enough writing that you care about characters or the world has that ability. For me, Planescape: Torment, Sanitarium, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 (death of vampire villain Bohdi "No! It's mine! This life is mine!"), and FF7 are just a few examples that come to mind.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Haven't played Bioshock yet, but I'm constantly reminded of Deus Ex as I read or take classes. As I read Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy recently, I was reminded of characters, lines, or episodes from that game at least half a dozen times. Several times, my experience with the game has helped me to more quickly grasp an idea, or to make connections between it and others which I might not otherwise have made.
I don't know of any other game like that, not even among the other plot-heavy games I've played (Thief series, System Shock 2, a whole host of RPGs). Mind you, this is a game that I re-play every 1-1.5 years or so, along with a couple of others (Fallout1/2, notably). There are a ton of throwaway lines and little references that relate to all kinds of aspects of philosophy--especially political philosophy--and, to a lesser extent, to a variety of other topics. Once you've played the game a bunch, and assuming you've got some level of familiarity with political philosophy, you start to see Rousseau in Tracer Tong, Nietzsche everywhere (obviously), Aristotle in the AI, etc., and minor aspects of those and other philosophers scattered about and woven into the storyline.
Or, you play the hell out of the game in high school, and later end up seeing Tracer Tong in Rousseau, the AI in Aristotle... heh.
It's not that many games (like Bioshock) aren't art on the level of many quality films and novels, it's just that with things like literature, you can fall back and say "This author was the greatest there ever was!" Since "mainstream" culture is familiar with great books (or at least knows they exist even if they've never read any), no one thinks about all the terrible ones out there when they talk about the medium as a whole. I have no qualms in saying that most video games are better than, say, a Nora Roberts book. I would argue that there are quite a few games on the level of an Orson Scott Card or a Robert Jordan novel. We just haven't seen one on the level of Hemingway yet, and until then, people outside of gaming will never take it seriously.
Conversely, we also need to realize that we don't need them to take it seriously to appreciate the art inherent in some titles. It is they who are missing out.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
Very few people are going to object if you call "Les Mis" art. But is Harry Potter art? Certainly, it has been read by more people then most all other literature. But it is a story written primarily for children (nothing wrong with adults loving it) that is more about entertaining than challenging the reader. Fantasy and sci fi has always struggled to be recognized as art. It takes a move like LOTR to show that fantasy can be as good as movies like the Godfather or The good, the bad, and the ugly.
This is part of the problem with video games. Like Harry Potter, they are in a fantasy world and the art snobs perceive it as being geared towards children. But I have found few other things in art that moved me as much as Aeris's death in FF7. And I think I am not alone in that. Really, the old generation that didn't grow up with video games will have to die off before video games get the respect they deserve.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Actually, Bioshock is a damned piss poor rebuttal of Objectivism. Mind you, it tries so very hard, but it happens in a closed system with a hard limit on resources that has already been reached. Any remotely intelligent economist could tell you that it was already fucked, no matter the economic system. Add in the fact that extremely life-altering changes were introduced in an astonishingly rapid fashion, and any two-bit hack could tell you bad things would go down. Not to mention that from a scientific standpoint the discovery of the uses of ADAM happened entirely too rapidly. Genetics takes time to make understandable changes as there are so very many options. And without modern computers I fail to understand how they were even supposed to understand how to make those changes. Gaping plot holes abound. A much better rebuttal of Objectivism is simply this: Given that Objectivism expects around 95% of citizens to be almost completely rational in deed if not thought, it is doomed to failure in a world populated by humans.
That's:
Voldimort is Harry's dad!
Sirius Black is People!
Those Damned Dirty Muggles blew it all to hell!
Harry rides the glass Hallow-svator up to where Mr. Dumbledore can show him the whole Horcrux-factory!
Ron gets shot in slow motion to the music of Samuel Barber as the rest of them fly away on a giant broomstick!
Harry-Six rips off Voldy-One's gorilla mask, to reveal his own face!
Who is John Cabal?
Amen to that. Check out Zero Punctuation's review of Bioshock. He does make some damn spot on right remarks about the game.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1394-Zero-Punctuation-BioShock