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'Systems-As-Art' In Games
GameSetWatch has an interesting essay about the relationship between games and art. Matthew Wasteland discusses the difficulty in translating other artistic creations to video games, giving Moby Dick as an example. "If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab 'wins,' no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance." He then goes on to examine whether the logic systems and rules that define a game can achieve the status of art. "Distancing the work from the 'entertainment' of popular games is fine, but even the most artsy, obscure and difficult works must connect with an audience somehow. I am not sure a system of rules by itself is the best method to achieve that. If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?"
There are rules when reading music, or reading poetry. You don't read a book backwards, or watch a movie from the middle.
Games are not only going to be handicapped by their interactivity; they're also going to be handicapped by their setting. After 100 years science fiction still hasn't escaped its literary ghetto, and a large percentage of games incorporate science fiction aspects.
...that may not be true. For example, nothing says you can't have a game which forces Ahab to lose. See 9:05 from your favorite interactive fiction archive for an example, or for a more graphical one think about the original 'Postal'. You can make the *gameplay* the point rather than the ending, if you're good enough at it. It does, however, produce a stress on the gameplay designers which is quite different from that of the writer, and it is a mechanic which is not nearly as *common* as the twist ending in stories.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
While I would say that there are very few games that have noticeable depth as literature, that doesn't mean that's inherent in the medium.
For that matter, very few movies have as much depth as novels, even novelizations of movies explore areas that the movie simply can't reach, and that doesn't mean movies aren't art. Not all games are "play balanced", and not all books are "Moby Dick".
And speaking of Moby Dick...
There are plenty of stories where the ending would be just as satisfying and meaningful if you got there by a different path, or even with a different character. Getting there can even give you an appreciation of the trials of the protagonist that you wouldn't gain if success or failure didn't depend on your decisions.
And play-balance doesn't mean giving Ahab a chance to live, there are plenty of games where it's impossible to "win" one side, and the "victory conditions" are based only on how well you lose. There are even games where the story is almost completely fixed, and all you can do is spend more or less time exploring the scenery.
This is silly. What is art? Is Beethoven's 9th Symphony not art, simply because its meaning is decided upon by the listener and not by predefined plot elements?
If everything had to have a predefined "plot" in which only one thing could happen in order for it to be art, then things would be rather bleak indeed. One of the best things about art is that it can elicit different emotions and ideas from different viewers.
An artwork is some kind of media tapestry (a painting, a story, a play, or a game or device) that causes the participant to receive external stimuli that elicits a reaction that is meaningful in some emotional or intellectual way. I would argue that a magnificently engineered machine is a piece of art, or at least is so in the eyes of some observers. Who here hasn't look at some amazing code and thought it was just downright beautiful?
How can we not feel like victims of artistic inspiration as we read the fundamental theories of science? The artistry of these elements can be found in the elegant thinking of the men who gave birth to the ideas.
If this guy really lives in a world where art must be a novel that goes from point A to point B, then I'd say he's missing an entire universe of art. Art is multi-dimensional and unique to the person perceiving it.
Like all great artists, I did not read the article. I'm willing to take a break from my homework in order to spout off my casual, possibly ill-formed opinions, but not enough of a break to actually read something and check to see if I'm being a moron. =)
meaning or definition, or the lack thereof. Art is as much in the eye and sometimes ear of the beholder much as paintings, music, and movies. I myself cant stand art where they paint the obvious or paint splotches of nothing that look like a 5 year old created it, but hey thats just me. I cant stand music where the same drawn out chord is played over and over and over again ad nauseaum because the artist is talentless hack, but hey thats just me.
Ok so maybe its not just me but the point is art has no definition so can't we all just cut the crap and talk instead about the fact that some art is widely acknowledged because it can truly be enjoyable, or because people think they are truly enjoying it.
+5 insightful - who's your daddy
Video games can be considered as art. It is a form of media, which means that the medium allows itself to be judged as an artistic form. Video games are also an emerging form of media.
How long did it take society, and even more so the high and mighty art critics, to judge someone like Monet or Picasso and consider it art? At the time it was viewed as rebellious and demeaning to concept of "art".
Every medium has its problems. Photography for instance, introduced the concept of "the original" and what people most often saw, the copies. The original was the negative, whereas what most people saw was the photo produced from the negative. The fact that the copies were what most people judged disturbed the idea of considering photography an art. Yet today, photography is studied and is most definately considered a form of art. Video as well has had its problems, on whether to consider video as simply a mashup of sounds and a series of photos, or to consider the elements as a whole and judge the final product as a separate art form.
Video games introduce a new element. There's interactivity. That's where the art comes in. The audience participates within the performance, and that demonstrates the true art form.
There are no rules for art. A study of art demonstrates that the artists that leave the "rules" of what is currently considered art will be looked upon as progress. All art attempts to accomplish is to show further insight into our nature. Video games demonstrate this exceptionally well, as they utilize both performer and the audience, instead of directing a one way message.
they are working on a few games in where they are integrating what you could call art into games. More experimental than anything. I'm keeping an open eye for when they release their own version of the red riding hood story, the Path.
Tale-of-Tales.com:
The Graveyard
The Endless Forest
Yah, yah, mod me down if you think this is offtopic. Personally I've found their work linked to art the most. I can think of many other games, but for some reason they came up in my head at the moment.
By that definition, dance is art. Dance has highs and lows, can entertain, incorporate a story, and bring spectacle. If these little swans are art then so are these little morons. If we want to argue that the first is art then the same applies to the second, even though there is a pretty big quality difference.
For the players of games, each has their own Citizen Kane. Maybe it is Halo. Maybe it is Super Mario Brothers. Maybe it is WoW. The particular game does not matter - some people hate the movie Citizen Kane and no game is loved universally. The point is that games have highs and lows, can entertain, incorporate a story, and bring spectacle - just like every other medium considered to be 'art'.
Let's get past this dumb debate and move on to talking about the merits of the great games. AND! while we are doing that, let's avoid trying to compare games to other art forms directly. It would be insane to compare Citizen Kane, to the Mona Lisa, to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. That is part of the reason games are having trouble getting their art credits: Art is art and comparing it to other art only detracts from the appreciation of what is.
if you want to see an artistic game, one that stretches the imagination, and imprints its message artistically, look at Braid.
now there's a well written game.
I guess its important also for a game to carry a message (or anti-message) in the first place.. as all art does.
If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?
Yes, and instead of paintings, we should just have coloring books, which give you rules for how to get the same image by coloring within the lines.
If you're one of 15,000 charging orcs and then run into a single foppish elf who has time to preen as you charge him down, face it, you're "#$"#%ed.
MMORPGs do a lot of play balance vis a vis the other players, but play balance versus the system is making absolutely, positively sure that the system loses the overwhelming majority of encounters.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?"
Yes, they can.
Techmo Superbowl is Moby Dick. Where, if you pick the Raiders, you play as The Whale. QED. Where do I collect my prize?
On a more serious note, play Madden for a number of years in franchise mode. Wait till Kevin Everret or Rae Caruthe or Sean Taylor or now Richard Collier gets auto-picked up by your team.
Can rules alone be art? Many think D&D's rules are, or the rules of insert random RPG here.
Movies are considered art, both for the pieces that make them up, and the whole created from them.
Games can contain all the pieces a movie has, and then some. (Accepting text input, gamepad input, reacting to a camera)
The only way it can be said that games cannot be art is if interactivity inherently is in conflict with what art means. But isn't a good argument art? Why should only statements be considered art and not questions?
Also, it's a little silly to say, if there's a choice, the choice IS the art, not the delivery. Both the choice presented AND the delivery are art. Just because you can't take it all in in one go does not make it non-art. (If anything it adds depth)
Now you might state that not all pictures are art, some are just craft, just as not every bit of woodworking is a carving. Some games are just cash-ins not meant to serve any artistic point. (Most any NES movie game) Compare to Ico which shows the art of discovery in exploration. How can I move beyond here? Compare Okage which questions the authority of a creator and the accuracy of labels, including those which are happily acknowledged. Compare the original Sonic Adventure which was fluff plot-wise, but which explored bouncing back and forth between reasoned exploration and over-the-top speed, typically requiring little skill in the speed sections. Any pattern based boss battle has art in the pattern, the desperation before discovering the pattern and the revelation in parts of said pattern.
...if you don't believe that a rulebook can be a piece of art, please see any of the published DND rulebooks. See amazon for case in point. I'm aware that wizards.com has the rulebook online as plain-jane; a large part of the reason that I buy DND rulebooks obsessively is because of the amazing artwork within. Truly recommended if you have not seen.
ID-10-T is a way of life
You freaking idiot. No one ever said rules are art, and no one ever said that games are purely rules. Cowboy Neal is disgusted. He is so disgusted he can't even pump blood to the various organs in his body. Goodjob you killed Cowboy Neal.
If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?
LISP is poetry. But then, I suppose that art is in the eye of the beholder.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
There are many games where you can't "win". From the original Tetris to Simcity, or even the Sims.
Or, think about never-ending multiplayer games, like WoW. You can't even "finish" the game, in the sense you can finish a book.
Because none of the many lists of best novels include any science fiction, westerns, or mysteries.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
...at least for me.
Most people in the video game industry, and many people who write about them for a living, hope for games to be taken seriously as art or literature.
I've been a programmer in the game industry for 11+ years now. I don't recall ever wishing video games to be taken as seriously as art or literature. I love what I do, but I have no illusions about creating "art", at least as this author is defining it. To me, "art" isn't some lofty goal - it's a department.
I take professional pride in creating the best game I know how to. For me, the best part of this job is knowing that someone is having a blast playing the game I had a small hand in creating. If someone wants to call that art, or a toy, or even a game, that's fine by me. As long as they had fun playing.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
100 percent of the people who didn't finish reading Moby Dick don't think about fate and destiny versus chance. They haven't read the ending to care. At every point in the book, you as a reader have the choice to stop reading. At every point in the game, you as the player have the choice to stop playing. Failure in a game creates struggle where none would otherwise exist; only art critics choose to ignore the obvious intent of the designer. Your death in Shadow of the Colossus is not some statement about the implausible odds of success. By adding that challenge, it serves to place you in the lead character's role. You are a warrior, who's risked death in combat against beings of colossal scale, and you innately understand the gravity of it all.
A set of rules does not define or exclude art, there's no human element. But two people playing by a set of rules introduces humanity, and the actions they take may say something about themselves or ourselves. Portal is basically super duper excellent, and art. Despite you being the only human in the game, there is engaging dialog that serves to manipulate your own emotions, and that power comes from the struggle you undertook.
Of course, the ethics of video games is so overwhelmingly violent and the plot so irrelevant that people just skip the plot entirely.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I stumbled across this game a while back, it has a very interesting design philosophy. Basically the guy tried to create a piece of art where the message is conveyed through gameplay alone.
The Marriage
Insomnia.ac has this topic covered pretty well actually.
I say leave it to artists.
I don't think most gamers really care what artsie people think.
The Moby Dick example is weak, it's just a case of a work of art that wouldn't translate well into another art form. Big whoop, you can find tons of examples like this between any two art forms. Besides works of art are best when made for the art form they were intended for, and not "ported" between art forms. If all you want in a game is tell a story just like in a movie or novel maybe you're on the wrong art form.
Games as an art form has, just like any other art form, unique advantages, mainly the huge advantage of being more "alive" than any other art form in that it changes depending on your actions and reactions, i.e. it's interactive. Of course you can try to tell a scripted linear story in a game, but in order to use the full capabilities of the art form you'd rather make a story that depends entirely on the actions and decisions of the player. Linear scripted story games are somewhat like a movie in which you'd play a part, you have a certain degree of freedom in what you do but ultimately the story remains the same. Of course it can make up for great games, but it's an under utilisation of the possibilities.
Multiple outcome stories are a step in the right direction, but still an under utilisation of the possibilities, considered games allow you to experience a story that wouldn't occur twice, the "full possibilities" I'm talking about would be a game which would last more than 10 hours in which the whole story would depend on what you do (kind of like real life if you will) and not be a bit scripted. At the end of it you would have experienced a unique story that only your memory would allow you to remember. Of course that's theoretical, it wouldn't be easy to make a game which would allow you to experience very memorable stories, but all the art of it would lie in the algorithm(s) that make up the story, and just like classical story writing it takes a talented writer. Because that's what art is all about, talent.
You just got troll'd!
If you start thinking of video games as possible translations for other arts, you're missing the point. Same if you're trying to make your games "artsy". What makes an art an art is the quality of the different works through original and skilful use of the defining materials. A masterpiece in one art category is not guaranteed to become a masterpiece when translated into a different category; actually, most of the time, it doesn't become one and when it does it ends up having its own identity (Kubrick's films for instance, which are all based on books but are all fore and foremost Kubrick's films).
Games making the best use of the core principles of video games are the ones more likely to become works of art. It will not be the ones using movie-like cut-scenes, or novel-like plots, or a famous soundtrack, it will be the ones that look, sound and, more importantly, feel like real video games. That GameSetWatch article questions if video games have already had their Citizen Kane. In one review I wrote in 2001 for my website, I said Super Mario Bros. was the Citizen Kane of video games and was the turning point when games (at least console games) elevated to art.
You may disagree this one specific game did it, but what's important here is when it happened; gaming didn't wait 20+ years for polygons and realistic graphics to become an art unlike what some people would like us to think. Games are art when they were/are true to themselves. Incidentally, there's one word of the video game vocabulary where we hear the word "art", it's pixelart. Again, this isn't about games looking like movies -- and bad ones most of the time -- it's about game's inherent qualities and true nature.
That's part of the beauty of Shadow of the Colossus, say--for many definitions of "win", you simply can't win.
It's called Dungeons and Dragons. You may have heard of it, as it was what the geek community did before computers. Role-playing (D&D, Shadowrun, etc), and it has many forms. The fact that a set of rules can be backed up by other forms of art (visual design, audio, etc) does not make it less viable or less pure an artform, it just adds a different layer to it, in the same way that the recording of audio and addition of colors changed film. In literature, the "set of rules" is quite common, and in fantasy and sci-fi writing it can actually be the entire point of the book (Asimov's Robots and Foundation series', Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth, Orwell's 1984, etc). As such, it is not only art, but also a very deep philosophical tool.
The only point you can make against such a thing being art is that it requires direct participation, so perhaps "performance art" would be a semantic middle of the views.
...you would play as Ishmael, Ahab and every other member of the crew would still die just like in the original work, and at the end of the game, despite all the player's hard work, the last scene would be Ishmael alone in the ocean floating on a coffin right as the Rachel comes to the rescue.
I'm not trying to shoot down the whole idea he's going for but I do think a game can be art, even art that resembles literature. But, I'm not sure if anyone has succeeded in doing that yet.
I do think games have reached some level of being "art." I consider the sculptures and paintings of ancient Egypt art. They are extremely formulaic. It's a numbers game to figure out the proportions. And many of the sculptures fit those proportions beautifully. Does that mean it's not art? Or is the beauty of the initial formula and the precision of it's execution enough to count as art? I think the latter.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
A big difference between games and common examples of art is that games strongly interact with the viewer/player. A painting is static -- it might change the viewer but the viewer doesn't change the painting. A symphony is written -- it may be interpreted differently by different orchestras, but the audience listens passively and does not influence its future.
A game in contrast is all about interaction. It may have some beautiful graphics and music, but if all you do is watch and listen then it's just a movie. To be a game you must impose your own will on the game and the game must respond. This makes games more akin to machines. They are designed by a creator, both mechanically and aesthetically. Then the player/operator sees and holds and uses the machine.
Can an automobile be art? Can an MP3 player be art? Can a computer be art? If yes, then the definition of art does not require it to have a plot. A great game could qualify through a combination of appearance, mechanism, and relevance.
The Computer is your Friend! If your security clearance is ultraviolet or greater, we can discuss play balance in Call of Cthulhu as well.
... but some games just have all the elements that come together to make a truly artistic experience. Oftentimes, these games are not commercial blockbusters, but are relished by the community or a small loyal fanbase (Okami is the best example I can think of off the top of my head). Then, you take a game like Shadow of the Colossus. The creator had a vision on exactly what he wanted when he made that game, and all elements flow smoothly from one to the next. From a storytelling perspective, the plot is highly subjective. If you asked 10 different people what their synopsis of the plot was, you would probably get 10 different answers. Once again, this was by design, as the director has said he wanted to keep anything "definitive" out of the story and let the player fill in all the holes by him/herself. If anyone asks me if I think video games are art, I will loan them my copy of Shadow of the Colossus and tell them to play it all the way through; THEN we can talk about video games as art. I do think however, that games can be completely devoid of artistic merit. That also doesn't mean that the game isn't enjoyable or fun. But you can definitely tell when there is a vein of artistic vision running through it; it makes the game something completely different than anything you've ever played before.
Basically, he looks at rule-based systems as a form of rhetoric, a method by which to artfully and effectively communicate ideas. Just as Melville had a point to make about life in Moby Dick, so too Bogost talks about how you can use rule-based systems to communicate in similarly effective ways through the rule-based systems of video games.
I bought it a few weeks ago and am partway through it -- so far it is really good.
If you're not interested in shelling out $$ for the book, you can get a free paper from MIT Press Journals entitled "The Rhetoric of Video Games", also by Ian Bogost.
That's why so few books port well to games, and why so few games port well to movies. When we are being told a story, it usually is interesting because the protagonist screws up and has to cope with the consequences; we are interested in how the screwup comes to be and how s/he copes with it (or doesn't). With a game, it's largely a continuous stream of "gotta get it exactly right", with screwups either being almost immediately terminal, or forced on you deus ex machina.
"Romeo and Juliet: The Game" would suck, despite being definitive great literature. Watching/reading the story, we are engaged by how others destroy themselves in their pursuit of an ideal. Thrusting ourselves into the game, we do not enjoy experiencing the same story arc first-person.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
When you want to demonstrate futility you don't make a game that's winnable, you make a game that will prevent any attempt of the player to avoid the fate (and you better do it in a way that seems natural, like the world wants to stop the player character, not just invisible walls and stopping the game script until the player does whatever stupid thing is expected!). You control all parameters of the simulation, put them to use! This probably works better with less blatant forcing, e.g. a friend of mine had an edutainment game about energy saving that would instantly kill the player with global warming if he turns up the heat before closing the window and things like that. Too many people lack the subtlety required to make a work that has a message without being so blatant about it that the user gets annoyed and with simulations you need even more subtlety.
Of course you can fuck up and leave a bug in that destroys your message but enough people fail at that with static media too, they simply forget that action X contradicts supposed aesop Y.
Also a game has the advantage over a rulebook that it does not reveal everything to the user, rules can remain hidden to surprise him. That comparison is as stupis as complaining about movies and plays because you could just as well publish the script.
Of course IMO art must not fail at the primary purpose of the chosen medium if it wants to be worthy of the title and for games that's interactive entertainment. For most other media it's various forms of static entertainment, for paintings it's being placed in the living room so the owner can use it as a status symbol... Too many people argue a work is art because of secondary qualities (e.g. the graphic style or story on a videogame) when its weakness is the primary quality of the medium (e.g. weak gameplay that feels like they just added it because they were contracted for a game instead of a movie or gameplay that's disconnected from the rest as if they had an idea for a work of art and an idea for a cool game and wanted to make both at the same time) and IMO that does not deserve to be called good art. Choose the right medium for what you want to do, don't add cookie-cutter gameplay that railroads the player just so you can show your pretty FMV cutscenes, make a movie right off the bat! Oh, wait, most of these praised "games" would be considered B grade or worse if they were put into the proper medium and compared with the other works in that area.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Wasn't the hook of that movie that the scenes were arranged in a different order?
Backwards, yes. The idea was the main character lost track of all his recent thoughts every 5 minutes or so - and so successive scenes would generally fill in information that altered the interpretation of the preceding scenes. (So kind of a fractal Kaiser Sose deal...)
It's kind of a lame gimmick, and it makes the movie really hard to follow - and the overall premise is pretty ridiculous. But there was one bit in there I enjoyed...
Basically the scene starts with the main character frantically digging through a room, when suddenly a woman outside catches his attention. She comes in, upset, beaten, and tells him that some guy did this to her and she needs help getting rid of him, etc.
In the next scene it's revealed that the woman was just in the room with him a few minutes ago - before he arrived she went through the room removing all writing materials. IIRC she taunted the main character dude about his memory condition and his dead wife, prodded him until finally he hit her, then she left. He realized she was manipulating him and started searching for a pen and paper so he could write this crucial bit of information down - and then as she came back into the room he forgot all this...
The rules that made Memento work were, to me, an interesting experiment... Though I'd say once is plenty of that. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
The Moby Dick example is really just a tired rehash of Roger Ebert's contention that games cannot fundamentally qualify as art, since the author doesn't fundamentally control the outcome. My answer to this has always been: nonsense! Maybe a group of people getting together to blow each other up in Halo has no aesthetic merit, but that's irrelevant to the broader question of whether game designers can and do exert control over the outcome of the systems they create.
The average JRPG, for example, involves a limited amount of player control over the technical aspects of character development, but that won't usually affect the outcome of the overarching story in any meaningful way. Similar to the Moby Dick example, there's no way in, say, Final Fantasy X for Tidus to survive at the end. The Half-Life series has a pretty constrained, cinematic style of gameplay, as do, frankly, the majority of story-driven titles on the market. System-type games with truly limitless potential outcomes are probably in the minority, and are usually experimental titles where the system/ruleset is really the main event (Spore, et al).
>.
I beg to differ:
The Library of America is a non profit publisher of the best in American literature, classics published in handsome hard cover editions.
The editors quite clearly do not believe that genre fiction is beneath their notice:
Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Ubik
Philip K. Dick, Five Novels of the the 1960s and 70s: Martian Time-Slip - Dr. Bloodmoney - Now Wait for Last Year - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - A Scanner Darkly
H.P. Lovecraft, Tales: The Call of Cthulhu - The Colour Out of Space - At the Mountains of Madness - The Shadow Over Innsmouth - The Shadow Out of Time - and 17 other stories
Here's the thing: a big part of his argument is based on what happens to the story of Moby Dick if you make it interactive - either you stick to the events of the book, making the player's ability to impact the world just an illusion, or else you open up the story, giving Ahab a chance to win, which defeats the message of the book.
What the article author ignores is that, first, different media are well suited to telling different kinds of stories. Where a fixed, sequential novel might excel at emphasizing the inevitability of fate, an interactive game could deliver an alternate message, showing people how their decisions allow them to make their own fate. (Moby Dick, then, may simply not be a good story to turn into a game...)
Second, if the game allows you all kinds of freedom, but you still ultimately die facing the white whale, doesn't that deliver the same message of inevitable fate that the book does? Or what if Ahab's choices are to run away (but still be tormented by the memory of the white whale) or confront the whale and die?
Anyway, the whole notion of "high art" (or Art with a capital A) is a bit overrated. The notion that games must establish themselves as a viable medium for "real art" is just a red herring... What's really going on is that some people don't take games seriously or think of them strictly as a bad influence... Those of us who feel otherwise are attempting to justify our opinions by asserting that games are art. But this ignores two important facts. First, even if they are truly art (and I believe they are - why not?), "art" does not carry some magical self-legitimizing power. The rights of artists to express themselves freely are not won easily. Second, (and this is the point that I think is important to realize, and one of the reasons this "games as Art" thing is an Ackbarian trap) there's no reason we should have to specifically legitimize games in the first place. The fact that we get drawn into such debates means this point is already lost.
Bow-ties are cool.
What is an "athiest"? I imagine it is someone who is "the most athi," but I don't know what that is, either...
art is described by rules, not determined by them or created from them. Rules do not generate art. The greatest artists have not been bound by rules as a framework, but have taken the rules as a way to describe what *has* been done then doing something original that forced the public to adjust and re-create a new set of rules as description.
games are games.
"If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?" What, you don't think Dungeons and Dragons was a work of art?
Saying that because games and books are very different is a horrible argument against games as art. Games are unlike books, in that they allow the player a choice, where as books interact with the reader only to the extent that the reader may decide the unimportant details. The key power behind gaming as an art-form is this interaction, and while I hate to bring it up again, Bioshock takes steps in the right direction. The choices you make have an influence over the outcome of the game, and that, to me, is a much stronger way to present an idea, since it involves the choices I made, then rewards or punishes me for them. Unfortunately, games are expensive as hell to produce, and they won't make it as a form of art since they aren't accessible to everyone who would like to write one. Anyone can publish a book or paint a painting, or even compose a score. Not everyone can produce a videogame. Maybe that's where the "higher art" bias comes from.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
While most role playing game books include some non-rule filler, the bulk of such books ARE a collection of rules. How your character advances, abilities/actions you can take, combat resolution, loot. D&D, in particular, is notable for this. While there is a default world, the idea is that someone else (the DM) creates their own world in which to apply the rules. While the default D&D world is certainly a creation, the rules themselves are as well. They shape the way you think about the game world.
Now, more recently game rules tend to be more of an engineering affair, I imagine -- beta testers, etc. But, when you look at some of the very earliest D&D resources (e.g., the little pamphlets that made up 1.0 and such -- not that I was old enough to have them, but I saw them at an old DM's house ;)), they're basically nothing but a list of monsters, rules for conflict resolution, and tables of results/loot/etc.
I think one could consider the creation of that ruleset art, in some degree.
If games are made out of rules, paintings are made out of brushstrokes. Nevertheless, an ordered list of brushstrokes isn't the same as a painting. And similarly, a rulebook isn't the same as a game.
Rules are simply the material used to build games, and in both a good game and a good painting, one stops thinking about the materials used and is captivated by the emergent properties of the whole work.
Do you know of Searle's Chinese Room?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
"If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab 'wins,' no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance."
Nethack is Moby Dick
As a longtime fan of Moby Dick the novel, I would have no problem with Moby Dick the game, even if it allowed a way for Ahab to win or for Starbuck to jump ship and invent coffee. Not only are the novel and the game different art forms, they are different creations -- just as a film "based" on a book or a play is a distinct creation, and I don't expect it to adhere faithfully to the original. I just want it to be good. (My favorite Macbeth film is Throne of Blood, which takes great liberties with The Scottish Play, but wow I love what Kurosawa and his gang were able to do.) Others of course feel differently. They may feel that the spirit of the original is violated if the follow-on work in another medium messes with the script, or leaves out things they deem important ... and I must admit being rawther bent out of shape, myself, at the ending of the LOTR III film.
But hey, that's what a creative commons (or for that matter a creative culture) is all about: people being inspired by or borrowing from the work of others, to create their own things that are cool and new. And since the White Whale, unlike a certain Mouse, is not locked up behind a chastity belt of IP, I say: have at it, mates.
I posted this once in here already, but I think it's important for nerds as a whole to get this.
What sets a truly great piece of art out from all the rest is the intention of the artist when it was made.
The reason the vast majority of science fiction and video games will *never* be high art is because the intention of the artists usually are: 1. To Entertain. 2. To make a buck.
As long as that's the intention of the industry, it can be a *very* cool bit of software/writing/painting, but it won't be high art unless it defines a movement other than a fan club.
Art is how history remembers a culture, and while we have some small bit of high art coming from geekdom, most of what history will remember us for - is a cash cow for entertainment.