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Roger Ebert On Why Video Games Can Never Be Art
Roger Ebert has long held the opinion that video games are not and can never be considered an art form. After having this opinion challenged in a TED talk last year, Ebert has now taken the opportunity to thoughtfully respond and explain why he maintains this belief. Quoting:
"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them. She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as 'being motivated by a desire to touch the audience.' This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is 'better' than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks)."
if competion in games isnt art Syncronised swimming or any other sport with is no more a sport than ballet.
Can't win at that. It doesn't fall under "a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film" either
At this point it's almost like he's desperately trying to find some way of defining "art" in a way that excludes video games purely because he, for some reason, NEEDS them to not be art.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that he's officially passed into hinging his entire worldview in relation to videogames as art on a "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I've never seen a person win a visual novel
"Roger Ebert On Why He's An Old Has-Been"
Games aren't art because you can -win-? That's a rather bleak and pessimistic view on art. If you aren't allowed to win... I guess you aren't allowed to lose either. The only winning move is not to play... curious.
If more people would rather watch Family Guy and South Park than read novels, does it mean Family Guy and South Park are better?
I bet movies had the same kind of arguments against them at the beginning: "Art is only for books and music, movies are not an art form".
Pinball games are closer to art then pc / video games.
And a lot of work goes in to the play field in them.
Art is anything that has the ability to inspire emotions in people. Some videogames certainly fit that definition. Few videogames currently have really artistic artwork, but good 3D immersion increases, not decreases, the emotional impact of artwork. Some areas of World of Warcraft are enjoyable just to wander through, e.g. the silence of the snow covered woods or flying on a Griffin. But then, I guess I believe that "art" and "play" are not mutually exclusive.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So long as the game is fun, who needs long-winded discussions about art? Also, many aspects of video games are recognized as gaming, such as pinball art, arcade marquee art, box art, penises drawn in Mario Paint, etc. The game itself doesn't need to be art to be worthy of serious scholarship.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Didn't the end of that quote just become "I know it when I see it"?
"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."
Tic Tac Toe? Generic FPS? Perhaps. But there are plenty of games that have either a unique artistic approach or interesting story that you can experience when you win. Heck, Final Fantasy 13 is almost exclusively a movie.
Has he never seen a "Choose your own adventure" book? Ugh.
Nuff said.
ICO is art.
Shadow of the Colossus, was also incredible but it did not have the emotional impact of ICO. However Shadow of the Colossus remains one of the most visually epic games to date, with a very insightful story... it misses the mark a bit but its there if you break it all down. Its an incredible game.
If art is something at which you cannot "win," than that nixes almost every reality show out of the pond right there.
I am OK with this.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
American McGee's Alice in Wonderland was art.
That is all.
I thought we were done arguing dictionary definitions by now. Is Roger Ebert just now getting on the Internet? Somebody tell him to go read archives Usenet for a few months to see if he realizes the futility of arguing such bullshit.
Anyone who knows art will tell you that something is art if people who know art say it is.
Seriously, there's nothing more to it.
That's it. I've had enough.
Rule 34 on Roger Ebert, in the style of The Filthy Critic. NAOOOOO!!
The reason games had any art at all is because a god like John Romero would choose a willing servant to convey the art as does John Carmack.
Examples of games that fail in the art category is World of WarCraft and Savage because the artists did not have a capable conveyance where the engine failed to prove the artistic atmosphere.
Quake 1 is art. Quake 2 and Quake 3 are just like all the rest: all fart, less than art.
One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Obviously he has never played The Sims or Second Life...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Are the rules of games art? Perhaps not.
Are games themselves generally composed of art? Yes.
Does applying rules of games to the art in games negate the artistry? No.
Is Ebert being a curmudgeon again? Yeah.
The average first-rate game contain a good book worth of creative written material, galleries of fascinating and provocative artistic images, and a couple albums worth of creative sound. These things are art - they give the game rules context that creates a story the player enacts... they are a play with a branching script, performed with audience participation.
If that's not art, your definition is flawed.
Ryan Fenton
Film critics have no idea what they're talking about, news at 11.
This guy has obviously never played Doom on the "Nightmare" level.
The game Passage is art in the form of a game if ever I've seen it. The whole damned thing is one five minute metaphor on life.
How is that not art?
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
I once won a velvet painting at one of those boardwalk games of skill.
And a lot of work goes in to the play field in them.
Oh and I suppose the coder who spends 50 or 60 hours a week creating a cinematic environment is incapable of creating art? Who says that art has to be a tangable thing. Oh... Wait that would be Roger Ebert.
One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game
If that's true, I have managed to make pretty much any video game I've ever played into art.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Ok, so this is art, but this is not art? WTF?!?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
The models, animations and textures? Also, what about the music. Does he not consider music an art?
Okay, so it's not art because you can "win". That's fine if you're the player. What if you're watching someone else play a videogame? It's kind of like watching a movie, and you can't "win" at it. So, then is it art? And if not, then why is a movie art?
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
It's dance, and an art. And yet, you can win at it.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
Is Roger Ebert really that dense?
It's like making the argument that a movie isn't art because you're sitting on your ass while watching it, whereas a painting you have to stand up for.
Art is not about the person VIEWING or EXPERIENCING - it is about the creator.
Clearly WATCHING a movie or PLAYING a video game is not art.
MAKING one, on the other hand, can be.
Considering his panning of Kick Ass because it was too comic book-ish and not chauvinistic enough, I think it is fair to say that Ebert has moved into Get Off My Lawn territory.
I'll hand him an example: Bioshock. Just because Bioshock has an end and ways to loose along the way doesn't mean it's not also an insightful, interactive exploration of Rand's philosophy.
The idea that there is Great Art and then everything else is a product of a limited view of culture that silences most people for the benefit of a few privileged voices. Video games explicitly acknowledge that the viewer contributes to the value of artwork, which challenges the view of Art as Universal Value, transcending the opinion of mere plebes. Since Ebert has vested his life in the idea that some people's opinions of art matter more than other people, specifically his, it makes sense that the idea of participatory art would be incompatible with his world view.
Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film.
So, it's not art, it's a 'representation' of art.
...what?
He's been pigeonholed in movies so long he refuses to look beyond his boundaries. Whether a story is interactive or not has no bearing on whether it is art. What makes it art is if the beholder draws meaning from it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Shh.
You know Roger, I think the only way to explain this to you is to use a movie quote, since thats what you are most known for.
"The first time someone calls you a horse you punch him on the nose.
The second time someone calls you a horse you call him a jerk.
But the third time someone calls you a horse, well then perhaps it's time to go shopping for a saddle."
How many times do you have to say "Video Games can never be art" before you accept that they can be?
Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
I cried in the first Mass Effect when one of my team mates had to die (go ahead and get the lols out of the way). The whole game was a more immersive experience, and a better 'representation of a story' than some plays or dances or films I have seen. Even though I could technically "Beat" the game, or "win".
So really, Roger, what you are trying to say is, its not that Video Games can't be art, its that when it reaches that artistic level, its no longer a video game. Am I following properly?
Seriously, what does it matter? It's all semantics anyway; it all hinges on how you define "art." Mr. Ebert has apparently defined art in such a way as to exclude games. He may as well have posted "Games aren't art because you can win games and you can't win art. Ergo, games aren't art because they are games."
I would say art is any beautiful act of creation.
So is a piece of music a work of art or is a performance of the work a piece of art?
Or are both examples of art.
What about the Golden Gate Bridge, the Handcock building, or the Parthenon?
To me the Saturn V, Supermarine Spitfire, and the Lockheed SR-71 are all works of art but I know an artist that disagrees because as she said, "their form is dictated by their function". I tend to see that as just working within the limitations of your medium.
Now I will say that I do not classify most video games as great art. In fact I would put 99.999% of them in the classification of commercial art but yes they are still art.
Now the big question is can any video game reach the level of what we call high art? So far the closest I feel we have come would would be maybe Myst for visuals, the works of Infocom in for writing quality, and honestly Tetris. As far and an abstract construct that really seems to resonate with everybody on the planet Tetris has got to be a stand out. If nothing else it has become a classic that I wouldn't shocked to see people playing 100 years from now.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Roger's argument is simply stated: games interact with the audience whereas 'art' doesn't.
I can see his point of view :-/. It's narrow and elitist, but I can see it.
Clearly, Roger Ebert hasn't played Ico or Shadow of the Collossus. They are easily covered by any definition of "art" I can think of. I've seen very few movies that have as wide a range of emotion and give such an emotional connection as those two games.
(I went to Performing Arts for high school and I've been a musician all my life, so I feel like I can speak with at least a little authority on this.)
Building Better Software
There are much older definitions of art, like Schopenhauer's. He argues that artistic judgment is the disinterested contemplation of beauty or the sublime. That is a technical definition, but it basically means that art is free from your will, or desire.
If Schopenhauer is right and art is free from the will, then Ebert's idea is not so stupid, and has some intellectual pedigree. For, a game is the embodiment of the will, in that you want to triumph.
Then choose your own adventure books are also not art because there are rules and objectives (not dying/turning to the right page.) The way I see it video games are so rich in artistic material like graphics, music, narrative, etc., that they are art themselves.
You don't "win" or "lose" Heavy Rain. You experience it. It's even less of a game than Flower. I suppose Ebert could say that it has passed through being a video game, and gone on to being an interactive movie (hello Fahrenheit 451) -- but your skill, lack thereof, or intentional supression of it determines how the narrative unfolds. It's unlike most any other "game" you have played, and very moving.
That said, I fundamentally disagree with him. Art evokes an emotional response -- and video games do that in spades. From becoming an avatar in Ultima, to avoiding zombies in Resident Evil, losing Arith in FF VII, exploring your coldwar inner child in post-apocalyptic DC in Fallout 3 and discovering who GladOS is in Portal, video games do that. Denying such is just being snobbish.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Roger Ebert is such a big mouth these days.
It does sort of gape open since he had his lower jaw removed.
tend to not have pictures :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
He claims they are not art because you can win them. This must mean that you cannot win at art.
Clearly, Mr. Ebert has never consumed Powerthirst.
Whatever it is, it's notablog.
Tell that to the musicians, modelers, mappers, texture artist, people that make capture movements, voice actors.. then then that are not artist, because random critic on the internet that admit not having any idea about games has other opinion.
Is true that games are both craft and art, theres a "usefull" part. But that don't kill the art part.
A good example is movies, movies are too art, but are a mix of craft and art.
I don't even understand how a movie critic can't do the comparation of movies.
-Woof woof woof!
Paper Mario isn't art? Silent Hill isn't art? Pikmin isn't art? Dead Space isn't art? Fable isn't art? There's so many games that have an amazing art direction. So, just because that art is placed in an environment that sets goals, it isn't art anymore? Pikmin would be the exact same experience if we replaced it with Atari graphics? Silent Hill would be just as scary if Pyramid Head was nothing more than a capital T chasing your character that looks like a Y?
Can the artifacts please either die or off or evolve? Please? It's really hindering the progress of the new generation when the old generation is brainwashing the current generation into believing crap like that. Sheesh.
Disclaimer: Yes, I know that many of you are in the current generation. I'm not talking about people who get it; I'm talking about the average 'Murican that believes whatever Fox News spits out.
Clearly what Duchamp meant was that it's all one giant pissing contest.
He sounds like he feels that art is to be seen and not touched. He claims that "One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome... I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them'. These have rules, points, objectives and an outcome because they are interactive. A story, a novel, a play, dance, ect... these aren't interactive. They are for the most part a static object (object so to speak). I don't feel that art should only be seen and altered only by the artists themselves, but should be accessible and alterable by everyone since to truly be 'touched' by something needs more then just observation, it needs to be able to reach a connecting point with the public. Games allow you to interact and be touched by them. Many games have stories that become more emotionally touching because of their interaction. While it's more of a cliché now, the story of FF7 and death of Aerith become more that much more because of your interaction with her. If you read about her as a novel she didn't appear truly as often enough to gain as solid of an emotional bond with her as you had been able to in the game. But because you had been able to interact with her and choose basic questions/answers with her, this allowed her to become more 'real' then a novel ever could have.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
At the University of North Dakota we recently held our 41st annual Writers Conference, the theme had a strong focus on New Media. Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop and Mark Amerika were a few of the authors that had come to the conference. The concept of a video game being literature was one of many things discussed.games being literature was one of the topics discussed.
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
Direct quote from the audio of the article.
Doh!
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
A corollary to this is that Ebert can never be taken seriously.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
But if they made two endings and and a way of picking which one to use somewhere in the middle of the movie then it is no longer art, but a "mere" game?
Or does it take two branches? three branches? forty branches? Before it becomes a "game" and hence not art.
If repeated attempts to achieve an end is core to the definition of a game then art is a game an artist must win, and, to win, must play and play and play. If making art is a game then the end product is at least the outcome of game play, if not game play in the same vein, as much art, especially challenging art requires many attempts to understand the work. If art is defined as something sublime that requires no attempt at understanding and came whole and untainted to the artist's mind then that's not art, that's just bullshit.
ideopath @ play
As an arty type I think games do contain art, and some games have alot of geninune artistic integrity (mostly found in Indie games but Portal I think has artistic merit). I consider games like Miegakure and Love to very much be Art, if in their own way.
If Ebert was saying games are not and cannot ever be Fine Art I would be inclined to agree. Although I would elaborate in saying only commercial big title releases fit this. Once could use game technology to create an art installation, you see. Interactive art is not art? Is that what he's saying? A games interactivity due to rules and goals does not by definition exclude it from being Art. I would go further to say usefulness does strip anything of being Art.
I have pottery by a local artist that I use to serve food on, is it no longer art because it's useful?
Would there be justification for me saying Ebert doesn't not really understand Art, or is immersed in a world where Art has a different meaning (film etc)?
However game devs, script writers and content artists spend too much time playing game and watching movies, not reading enough books and digesting enough genuine Art and Design media. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but this phenomena is self evident in the games industry compared to other digital media including web design where some serious Art really does go down.
They just don't get out in the real world enough, with a sketch pad and pencil and study anything. I can't think how many times I see a outdoor open-world game environment that looks like it was designed by someone who hasn't gone outdoors to actually look at some geology, indeed the average level designers understanding of geology is evidently below high school level. Even just poking around google earth for 10 minutes would helped.
Definitions of Art are important here. But putting some work into and showing understanding and interpretation is a huge part of it, communicating this in any form is Art. Art to some extent exists for no other reason to perform this communication. This is something games can do. Indeed games are a potential conduit for Art.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Winning the game is simply another name for the ending. You could call the inexorable resolution of a conflict in a movie 'winning' as well.
I challenge him to play Half-Life 2 and not call it 'art'. You *feel* for the characters; you experience their universe, and you see their struggle. The cinematic in Dr. Breen's office at the end is fantastic, in a scripting and acting sense (yes, I know they're computer models but still).
Mr. Ebert, I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine the movie "Toy Story" was ported to the PC (actually not far-fetched). You are Woody, and you play through the movie. If you don't follow the script substantially correctly, you die and start from your last good location. By the end, you have effectively recreated the movie. If we grant that the film itself is art, why would this 'game' not be?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Come on. Who does not share the sense of elation at the end of something like Rocky, or when the Ring falls into Mt. Doom? How is that not winning, it's giving you the same feeling of relief and finality that closing out a good game does.
Movies are all about immersion. Books are all about immersion. Games are just giving you another way to get immersed in the story. Even games that theoretically have no story, have one created just by the act of you playing it - a million small triumphs (and thus stories) accumulated on the path to victory. You swap stories about games just as you would really profound or exciting scenes in movies, the only difference is that you had an even more personal experience with the game.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
cried in the first Mass Effect when one of my team mates had to die (go ahead and get the lols out of the way).
lol
No, actually, not lol. Anyone World of Warcraft player who actually bothered to play out the entire Battle of Darrowshire quest chain, and didn't get misty-eyed at the ending, is a soulless undead thing.
It's a game. But it tells an affecting story. If that isn't, to the slightest degree, art, then nothing is.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
there are plenty of games that you can't win or lose if you look at indy game sites you come across them every now and then. there are also plenty of ways to win at art, competitions etc. This man is an idiot, his reasons are arbitrary, why are we even discussing this?
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
A game, novel, painting or dance routine all have some sort of direction. Objectives, rules and outcomes are for a game what paint is for a painting.
What you think qualifies as art is of no relevance. Neither are the author's intentions. It can still be art to somebody else. (However I would argue that an author is necessary for it to qualify as art.) A (de)formed block of concrete in the middle of a square somewhere is not art if it simply invokes the word "art" in your brain, however it is art if it makes you think about something different, something more than the concrete and the square. It's a highly personal experience and cannot be defined by categories.
A lot of art seems to be produced even though winning or loosing is involved. Just check out music competitions or drawing contests.
Games can be a rich expression and some of the results are certainly art.
Who is this guy, and why should I care what he thinks?
At various points of time in history, art critics disregarded new art forms now common. This includes music, painting, sculpture, photography and cinema.
Not ALL games are art, but some games WILL be art. Most movies aren't art either.
With games, the art will be in the interaction. Not just telling a story, but letting the gamer create and discover the story himself by playing. A movie might communicate it's message by showing it to the viewer, a game could communicate a message by letting the gamer experience it.
Currently the technology behind games makes it prohibitive (though not impossible) to create games-as-art, but at some point in the future it won't be.
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The Legend of Zelda...for instance...along with about a million others. How can this guy comment on something he knows nothing about. That would be like me commenting on ballet.
He wrote Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, universally considered one of if not the worst film ever made. You might as well ask some one that's tone deaf to say what is music.
Ebert is a movie critic. As such he has a vested interest in keeping people interested in spending their eyeball time on movies rather than "diverting" it to other passtimes, such as video games. This constitutes a conflict of interest whenever he attempts to analyze those passtimes.
Again, Ebert is a movie critic. This means he thinks movies are something more worthy of his attention than other passtimes. This can be expected to produce a subjective bias whenever he attempts to analyze other passtimes.
While this may be his actual honest and informed opinion, rather than a conscious attempt to promote his own subject matter (and thus his career as a critic) or an unconscious bias manifesting as a denigration of other art(or not)forms, I am inclined to take what he says about video-games-as-art with a large salt lick. (The same one I used in the '50s through now when blithely ignoring the mainstream literature establishment's constant criticism of both science fiction - which has an opposing ideology - and graphic novels / "comic books" - which bear the same relationship to written literature as theater does to storytelling.)
I am reminded of the TV show episodes during the rise of various things perceived as competition to network TV - cable, internet-based conferencing (netnews, blogs, ...), and again video games - which attempted to tie video games to crime, drugs, death, etc. (For example I recall one particularly pathetic (and low budget) cop show (involving "The San Diego Chicken" as a major character and witness) where the murder was committed by an executive of one of two cable companies involved in a bidding war.)
I hope Ebert is not sinking to this level.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It was always impressed upon me (heavily) that the term "art" was bidirectional.
If the observer thinks the piece is art, then it is art.
If the creator considers it art, then it is art.
My guess as to why these brash and controversial statements are surfacing has two words: Rotten Tomatoes. With the proliferation of social media, anyone can be a film critic. The quintessential movie critic days have long since passed, and there just isn't place for Ebert anymore. He needs to let it go, get out on his front porch and tell kids to get off his lawn.
Just my $.02.
there have been a lot of great posts on why VGs are art, but this is my favorite so far.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
I wonder if he would differentiate between the game's mechanics and the presentation of the game. From TFA:
Perhaps chess--that is, the set of rules that describe it--is not art. But I've seen chess sets that are very likely art, to the extent that fine sculpture is art. Likewise, artwork in various collectible card games can be beautiful, and the artists who create it often paint the original works on large canvases with oil paints. In this case, the art is more tightly integrated with the game than a fine chess set is integrated with chess; although the mechanics can stand alone, many people wouldn't play if the games were just numbers on cardboard.
Video games go beyond a set of mechanics. In many cases, the graphics and the music are undeniably art. Graphic designers are often trained as artists, and I know a composer of video game music who considers himself a real composer. Could a video game stand alone without these things? Probably not. The game is too tightly woven together with its artistic assets. It becomes just as meaningful to say that the game is the art as it is to say that the game uses the art.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I think Ebert might possibly have a point if we were stuck in some 1980's arcade but we're not. There are numerous video games which demonstrate artistic / stylistic qualities and there are numerous video games that demonstrate a plot. It is quite absurd to say games can never be art because there are plenty of examples that say otherwise and the list keeps growing by the day.
He's arguing with someone who is actually correct that games are art. Here's how he handles this debate:
"Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Branch Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery."
Ok, note the important thing: because games require you to actually play them to appreciate them, he's essentially describing a painting that *he has never even seen*. He's making the conclusion that the game is not art *based on screenshots*.
Really. Super really. He's as qualified to judge whether or not this game is art as my damned dog is to preside over the works of Michelangelo- meaning, he'll ignore that which is on the ceiling, and he'll pee on whatever he can reach.
"Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game."
For the unfamiliar, we have " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game) ".
Firstly, in chess, if you are practicing or playing by yourself, taking back a move is one of the things you do to explore the gamespace more thoroughly. Only in a competitive multiplayer environment does time manipulation become something different entirely. He's suddenly gone from exploring a world into cheating. Not related. Plus, the game isn't just a regular game that has time manipulation, as he would again discovered *if only he could type it into google*. Seriously, here's from wikipedia:
"Time and Mystery introduces objects surrounded by a green glow that are unaffected by time manipulation; for example, switches will remain flipped even if time is rewound to before the action occurred. Rewinding can thus be used to change the synchronization between objects that can and cannot be rewound, the basis of many puzzles in this section.[15] This theme is also used in later worlds to denote objects unaffected by the player's time manipulation."
Ok, so, he doesn't know what he's talking about. This isn't "taking back a move" at all. This is something he has never heard of and doesn't understand.
And his third:
"We come to Example 3, "Flower" (above). A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is? "
I don't know man DO YOU? You haven't even TRIED this game out.
What a tool. Seriously, this is like refusing to acknowledge sculpture as art because all you have seen are pictures, or dismissing photography because you heard someone describe how a camera worked and then you were like, wait, does the exposure speed matter? WHY DO YOU NOT SAY NOT ART LOL. Or as I mentioned before, dismissing paintings having never viewed them.
Old man is old.
YES, marvellous argument there Roger. Your genius is showering the world with joy.
Apparently there are no rules to reading either, or watching a film, or dancing, DANCING.
Is he serious? Really?
I'm almost thinking he is doing this for a laugh, just for hits. (literally and website hits)
He must have one hell of a hatred for games, for god knows what reason.
If I can pick a chapter on a DVD, does the movie cease to be art?
If I then pick between two alternate versions of the movie does it cease to be art?
If I can pick chapters of different versions, does it cease to be art?
(etc)
If I push UP-DOWN-UP-DOWN-LEFT, does it cease to be art?
Since we can demonstrate a continuous isomorphism from movies to video games, by the continuum hypothesis, we must conclude that movies are not art to begin with.
Well put.
I think if he were to admit that video games are art, that would make him the definitive critic of the SECOND most prevalent/biggest/whatever 'art form' industry on earth, since I recall reading that video games have eclipsed movies in global sales/profits/whatever.
To me it sounds like a semantic argument based off of pure ego.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"Those aliens are gonna pay for messing up my ride!"
That's art. Screw you, Ebert! You magnificent bastard,
Perhaps he is comparing the quality of art, meaning he thinks the art in video games is not as high as that in movies. I might not agree with him but I do think he has a point. If the propose of the art is a game, you can afford to sacrifice the art a little. This is kind of like google making a word processor, with the purpose of attracting eye balls to the net instead of trying to revolutionize word processing.
a very poor definition of art. I have seen many installations that respond to the watcher. There was a great one at the MOMA in NYC where you walked down a hallway and the projection changed from a springtime scene to one of fall/death/winter/armgeddon like landscape as you moved. This work is nothing more than an interactive game with no way to win (this is the point I think he gets caught up on, a game must have a way to win, and points, etc). The difference between this work of art and a more complicated game is the context (in a museum) and the limited play (all you can do is make it run fowards or backwards in "time"). I respect his views, but I think he needs to play some games and experience some art outside of film (a form of art I DO think games are approaching)
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Silent Hill 2 should be consistently raised as a prime example of video games as art. Whether or not you can even "win" the game is questionable - you can arrive at some conclusion your actions have guided you to, but even the "good" ending is the conclusion to a richly plotted and genuinely moving (and sometimes bowel-movingly frightening) story. I feel strongly that the player's interactions make the story more personal, more frightening, and ultimately more impactful than a similarly plotted movie.
It takes me just one single sentence, to refute whatever arguments ever were brought up, are brought up, or ever will be brought up against games being art:
Games are by definition the superset of all art forms ever created.
That’s all you need to say.
Films are games minus gameplay/interactivity. Books are just the story part of games. Any classical form of art (paintings, music, sculptures) are just the aesthetic part of games. Toys are (part of) just the gameplay part. Sports are also mostly just the gameplay part.
And (tech/demoscene) demos & co. for example are the technology part.
Now what Elbert? There in no way you gonna ever be able to refute this, because it’s physical reality. Like gravity.
Does it sting? By the way: Who made you a judge of good art, or art in general, anyway?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I saw the headline for this story and thought, "Ah, yes, Ebert has waved a red flag in front of the Slashdot audience."
If you play a lot of video games, you're probably not a disinterested observer either. That doesn't mean you'd be wrong to say that video games are art, but I'm inclined to take all of the smoke and fury in this discussion with a pinch of salt.
I play video games only occasionally, but I still play pencil & paper RPGs. Are they art? I enjoy playing them, but the fact that I enjoy them doesn't mean I consider the games themselves to be art. Other gamers may not agree with me, but if art truly is in the eye of the beholder, then there's room for both opinions.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
He's not a game critic. He's a MOVIE critic. He's watched trailers of games and commented on them with the perspective of a movie critic. Did he play portal? Did he play Braid? Did he play bioshock? Did he play WACO? No.
Now i'm going to play the part of the snob. Even if he did, he's unqualified to judge them. Roger Ebert does not understand the vocabulary of gaming. He hasn't played enough FPS to judge the waco game as an experience beyond you run and shoot people.
Not that i'm defending the waco game as art. i've never played it myself. I don't go into it thinking the point of the experience is to shoot people however. shooting people is common place to gamers. to someone who has played a number of FPS games, they are likely not paying much attention to the fact that they are shooting people. Someone who doesn't instinctively control an fps is likely to spend more time trying to figure out how to move, how to shoot, than to absorb any kind of message or mood the game is trying to convey.
Having gone to art school, i know that art snobs think the knowledge you bring to viewing the art is important in critiquing it. Having a thorough knowledge of principles of design and color theory is essential to being an art snob. Games have their own vocabulary and history, and if you don't posess it, you are just a schmoe saying, "i could have put a red square on a black canvas."
I wonder what he would think of Chess and Go, two examples of non-video games which have an incredible amount of subtlety to them, probably much more than many so-called art 'masterpieces' out there. From simple rules, come profoundly complex gameplay.
Even some video games have at least a degree of this kind of complexity. Examples include maybe Settlers/Populous, Lemmings (original), and Speedball 2. To a lesser extent, Stunt Car Racer, Outrun, Strider, and even good old Asteroids or Pacman.
(Sorry the latest games don't do it for me, though I haven't looked properly tbh, so I'm sure there are a few gems.)
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
The software itself may be a work of art if created by a sufficiently talented artist, so skilled in the art of software engineering.
In a same way, a bridge, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or Iron Bridge may also be considered a work of art because of the artisans who designed them.
Conversely, walking over a bridge or powering up a jet turbine is in itself, not an art. Similarly, executing software is not an art.
However, in the same way that a skilled pilot may create art in the sky with their aeroplane, a skilled gamer may create art in the way that they play a game.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
the point of art is a way to invoke an emotion feeling or change your perspective on the world. its a way of communicating thoughts feelings and ideals through the use of a medium. i have to admit not all games do this but there are multiple games that i have played through and where able to experience deep emotions and some have even gone so far as to change the way i look at things. id also like to state that yes i think games can be art. second id like to state that in some cases it can be a better medium then the others because instead of just sitting there observing the authors thoughts and ideas you have to submerse your self into them. its like your put into the game creators mind and you experience first hand everything. the reason why we strive to collect art and literature is because we find an enjoyment in it, and its able to expand are views into the edges of possibility. games accomplish this very well.
You can win everything, a game is just the most obviuos embodiment of this construct, or the other way round you can make everything a game. And the difference between art and non-art is that non-art is lack of intention of the creator and lack of perception of the audience, everything else is art.
cb
But playing a game can be making/performing art, too. (Live performances, not so popular. But recording demos,yes? or do real games not have those?)
"Art" is an experience. Gaming, movies, books, paintings, etc. etc. are all art because they are experiential. Just because you "win" at the end doesn't negate the whole experience. In fact, "winning" at the end of a game is usually a bigger and better experience than movies and thus more artful. This is why the statement
>>Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
is more like sqrt(-1). When you play a game, what else is there other than the experience of playing the game?
Ebert says: Art is to be passive. This is just not true.
This is just another leotard speaking about things he knows nothing about. He is really just exposing his ignorance. We should just take it as that.
OK Ebert, it's time for you to stop trolling on the subject of video games being art or not; you've already made up your mind.
Everyone has different ideas on what art is. Here's mine: art is how an artist expresses something. As long as the artist is genuine in their attempt at expression, that's art. Video games met that criteria long ago.
Of course the medium of video games will change considerably over the next 80-90 years just like it has for medium of film. I doubt anyone could look at the video games of today and accurately predict that future.
(insert witty/esoteric/dumb quote here)
Roger Ebert has dropped to the level of a simple-minded college freshman. Arguing whether phenomenon X is or is not art is a fool's errand. Anything, without exception, can be "Art." The problems are 1) "Art" is not definable in any precise, all-encompassing manner even without taking cultural issues into account, 2) perception of something as art or not-art is culturally dependent, and 3) perception of something as art or not-art is subjective and varies among individuals even within a well-defined shared culture. It is a pointless pursuit.
This is a lot like Intelligent Design, whose penis-envy vis a vis science motivates them into trying to disguise spiritual and magical-religious concerns as science. They are not merely wrong, they are pursuing a meaningless, unnecessary, and ultimately pointless goal. Science and religion can easily coexist because their concerns are fundamentally separate. Likewise, anyone's notion of "Art" can coexist with anyone else's because any two individuals will practically always have some amount of intellectual and aesthetic divergence. More often than not, the divergence is quite significant.
CG Pin-Ups?
The reason he doesn't think it is art is because he is not looking at it from the perspective of the artist, but from the audience. People who make games are artists. We arrange elements of a game in such a way as to make the audience enjoy it. In the same way that a great poet arranges words on paper or a painter arranges paint on canvas, a programmer also arranges words and digital paint to create an environment. It does not matter that a game has rules or can be won or that there is an ending - those elements simply go beyond the ability of most classical art. Even still, when you read a murder mystery book you typical ARE put in a position that you can 'win' by figuring out the ending of the story before you read it... Like realizing Bruce Willis is dead in the Sixth Sense. Having a purpose does not make something not art. The design on a yogurt cup is art, but it is designed in such a way as to make the yogurt more appealing, it adds emotional elements to an otherwise emotionless cup of yogurt. You no longer eat the yogurt simply for the nourishment, you eat the yogurt because the packaging tells you that eating the yogurt will make you happier. The reason I feel the need to make the claim that video games are art is because I make video games, and I am an artist.
-Bill
Actually he's clever, but he's not explaining himself. Is chess art? I'd say no. Is a board of chess and the chess pieces art? I'd say yes, they could be.
We are made of cells and yet humans are not cells.
The final product doesn't necessarily share the characteristics of its parts. Simply look at chemistry for tons of examples.
Now, everything in a game could be art, but does it mean the the game itself is always also art?
How many dental offices have you seen with the term 'dental arts' on the sign?
I don't want an artist working on my teeth, I want a dentist!
If you haven't noticed already the term art has been so misused that it doesn't mean anything anyways.
Why not be satisfied that video games are video games? Why can't things just be what they are?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The act of game making involves many of the same elements of story telling. It involves many of the same elements of visual arts. That there are rules that define an environment or how to operate the created circumstance is an aspect that mirrors life in that there are rules to life... as art often does.
If games are not art, I simply do not understand art.
For me the only rule if it is art is if it evokes an emotional response. Video games do that just as well as film or any other media.
Sounds like someone hasn't experienced Deus Ex.
Although you can 'win' the game; to walk around and talk to the people in the game is to experience it.
If games can have the same effect as art, why aren't they? Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock, and Mass Effect left me emotionally invested in the world, characters, and story - all things that aren't real. If that isn't art, what is it?
If I say I am an artist and I create something, doesn't it automatically become art? How it is experienced, whether or not you agree with it, or for any other reason, somebody outside of the artist cannot say it is not art. Therefore, if a videogame creator says that his work is art, it is art.
Looks like Ebert never played Grim Fandango - That was good art.
I love all the tech-the-tech definitions of art. Emotion, whatever. The expression of some inner blah, whatever.
Art is communication. Nothing more, nothing less. If you start "fancying it up" with a bunch of emotional b.s. you are just wasting time.
Good art is when you get the message and understand it. Bad art is when the message makes no freak'n sense to you.
I love the man, and I think he's a great writer.
Still, we should give his opinions on video games the same weight he would give to someone who writes commentary on movies without ever viewing one: No weight at all.
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You can go and play hide and seek and go .... yourself and furthermore WITH the horse you rode in on.
One line from Ebert really stuck out to me.
my taste ... is better than the taste of anyone who prefers [Nicholas] Sparks [to Cormac McCarthy]
Ebert's entire profession (art critic) essentially depends on people's belief of this being possible; that there's some intrinsic, invisible, undefinable definition of "good taste" that he possesses and his viewers ought to possess. Of course, this is bullshit in every practical sense. If art really is defined as something which affects emotions, then certainly there will be people who are affected more by Nicholas Sparks than Cormac McCarthey. So for them, Nicholas Sparks would qualify more as art for those people. Obviously everyone has their own past, beliefs, etc. so naturally people will be more inclined to look at certain things as art and not others. Although, this concept alone just highlights the absurdity of quantifying "art", even if its only as a boolean.
As for his point of view itself on the matter of video games, he's just trolling. Ignore him. For god's sake, he hasn't even played any of the games he dismisses.
I'm probably one of the few rare gamers out there who really doesn't care if games are considered art or not. While I do agree with most here that I don't think Mr. Ebert does a good job of showing his opinion on the subject, I do think his last few paragraphs raise some good points.
Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009.
Seriously, why do you care? I'm not trying to be a troll here, I am generally curious. I've been playing since the NES days and still play to this day and I could care less. Why do I need a group of people's approval that one of my favorite past times is categorized as art? If they're gonna be so stingy and uptight about it, why do you seek approval? Fuck them and do what you want. If someone is going to demean me because I play games then I don't care about their opinion anyways and in general if that is their attitude then rest of the world probably will give just as much of a shit about their opinion too.
He seems to be confusing video games with board games. You 'Win' a board game by gaining more points than an opponent you face. The win condition for the video games discussed as art is very different... You win those games by reaching the end of the narrative. Unlike a movie where you are asked to passively wait for the narrative to conclude itself you are asked to DO something along the way, but the goal is the same: witness a plot with carefully directed pacing, artwork, and subtext. The only difference is pushing buttons along the way. If you are a 2nd party watching from behind, (or playing a modern final fantasy game some would say) there IS no difference.
Well I'll have to tell the writers, performers, etc that their work isn't "art" because they can use it to win or score points.
By generally accepted definitions almost anything can be considered art.
Oh, very, VERY well said, thank you!
Clearly Ebert has never played a game such as chess or any other in which elegant solutions can be beautiful...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Art is something you experience. It's something that can take you to another place or ground you here and now. It can evoke feelings of anger or sadness, it can be an overwhelming of senses or the slightest tinge of something. It is not limited by things that you cannot interact with! Just because you can "win" with this art doesn't mean it is not art. Video games are most definitely an art form. It may not fit in with Mr Ebert's desired forms of art, but it is indeed still art.
Think about it. If someone said to you, it's not art if you can eat it... wouldn't you think they were stupid? If someone said it's not art if you hang it on the wall wouldn't you think they were really stupid? What's the difference if you can "Win" with it.
Roger Ebert is like the RIAA. He's way behind the times, he's having a tremendous amount of difficulty changing to match how life has been changed by the internet, and frankly I think he smells. (Sorry had to throw that one in there).
Overall, when determining whether a piece of work is art or not, it comes down to the medium. I consider comedy to be art, but you wouldn't judge George Carlin by the same standard that you'd judge Beethoven by. Games can be art, but they have to know their limits.
Game designers are, for the most part, not writers. That's why so much storytelling in games comes off as forced or cliche: the developers just aren't writers. Even in games where the writing contributes to the atmosphere, the writing itself is usually minimal. Half-Life 2 is an excellent example: just enough characterization to give each character a distinct personality without distracting from the core gameplay, which is the meat of the issue. I haven't played very many games recently, but I hear that titles like Bioshock have a lot of value in their writing. That may be true; I'll believe it when I see it.
The people who make games are called "game designers" for a reason: their profession is to design games, and when it comes down to it, the principles that guide video games are the same principles that guide every other type of game. A good game uses these principles to deliver a fresh and fun experience, with attention to presentation.
I live in a world where some people consider actually consider 4' 33" to be "art". (Go ahead, look that one up.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
A video game unplayed is, to the player, all unrealized potential. When you play the game, a set of experiences emerge from those interactive sessions. Perhaps you forge a narrative in a game like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Perhaps it's some form of finessed performance art in a game like Flower. Whatever it is, the art is there once the game has been played from its beginning to its completion. A unique advantage of the medium is the freedom to create new or different art on subsequent traversals of the game.
Interestingly, this is not fundamentally different from any other art. Would a painting or a book or any other recognized piece of art be art if there was no human to experience it? I think not. A painting is an unremarkable thing until a human being looks upon it and interacts with it emotionally. Perhaps the interaction is limited to your imagination, but there definitely is interaction.
And finally, as to the argument that you can't win art, I wholeheartedly disagree. The creator of the art has a definite sense of whether he won or lost based on how happy he is with the finished product. A game player is a co-creator in the art, since it is emergent from the playing experience, and, similarly, winning and losing is about perception.... the game just tends to make it a bit more clear whether or not you should be happy with a given outcome... but with many games it's more nebulous. Not everyone survived my first playthrough of Mass Effect 2, and yet I felt more satisfied with that result than if there had been a perfectly happy ending free of consequences.
Pinball games are closer to art then pc / video games.
And their target audience have art, in the form of acne, on their faces.
"For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. "
That's funny coming from someone who made millions critiquing movies.
...he's not one to talk.
If it's not art, why does it take a small army of the world's most talented artists to create an award winning game?
SW:KOTOR, Halflife2, Fallout3, GRID, etc etc etc.... so many games out there, so much great art.
Anything can be art. Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder.
Thank you for your response on this. I bought MK vs DC a while back and just got into the storyline. As soon as I finish with BioShock 2, I'm going to do MK vs DC (right now I'm right where the Flash is possessed by something - and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the storyline and acting so far)
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I didn't bother to even RTFA. I couldn't care any less what Roger Ebert thinks is or isn't art. To be quite honest, the same applies to what he thinks about movies or anything else.
It'd be easy for me to make my arguments, too, if I could redefine the elements as part of my proof.
"No, I don't believe cars can run on anything but an internal combustion engine. Anything that does so is no longer a car, but some kind of kart!"
blah blah bladibby blah. gag.
It occurs to me that we're looking at this the wrong way. It's not that Ebert doesn't know what Art is. It's that Ebert doesn't know what a video game is. He keeps going on about rules and scoring and winning. An awful lot of video games aren't like that. What he's saying is "A chess match isn't art". Fair enough. Likewise, a match of counterstrike isn't art. But there are so many other genres of video games that his suggestion is rendered meaningless. RPGs, adventures, puzzles, and plenty of others don't fall into his definition of "Game".
From the Wikipedia article on art. Art is, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." Video games seem to fall squarely in that category. Also, I have played many games that seemed very very artful to me, often indie games, often some games are inspiration for movies. Did yall know that the latest Alice in Wonderland movie's "environment" was loosely based on the video game American McGee's Alice (which I loved, and was disjointed that the movie wasn't as macabre)? They even bought the copyright to it I believe. Some artists such as Clive Barker work very interactively in game development. These are just a few of the many examples, so in this case, Mr. Ebert, though often he can have good insights, is quite wrong on this matter.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
what about open ended, life simulation games. like Pirates! for example. or the games that are made in that open ended, immersion in life/period school. what if they represent potential real events, love, laugh, loss, hate etc quite well ?
doesnt it make such games interactive, different-each-time novels ?
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Consider that Ebert is responding to a game designer/producer. The game designer, too, has a vested interest in their argument. You're saying Ebert might be biased because he profits from reviews of film - fair point. But what about the person he is responding to? The person who makes money selling video games? Is the game producer somehow free from bias?
My biggest problem with this proposition is that I make it a rule not to believe 99% of what Roger Ebert says. That goes double since his long-time friend Gene Siskel died (miss you, Gene). I see Mr. Ebert's name always seeming to recommend EVERYTHING. I have a better chance of meeting a whore that is more discriminating than Mr. Ebert seems to be. Anyway, I'm not an afficianado of computer games, but many of the ones I've seen are seriously artistic, regardless of whether of not they involve rules or points or what have you.
Like the inimitable Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me as a member.
When someone says something like "games can't be art" I always come back to two examples of games-as-art:
* Max Payne
* Deus Ex
Yes, they are my favorite games. They are great games because they are great art - presenting convincing characters, immersive art (auditory and visual), and a well-written story. They are not "winnable" games in the traditional sense, though you can finish them: they have little variance in the actual storyline, regardless of how they are played. Even with the multiple endings of Deus Ex, it's no different than (say) a choose-your-own-adventure book or one of the many 'artsy' movies which do, in fact, have alternate endings.
While some would say that what separates a game from art is the fact that you've got to try at a game but art is more passive, I beg to differ. Compare them, if you will, to movies like Momento, 12 Monkeys, or Donnie Darko. These are movies you've got to think about to "get" - they're not passive movies. Likewise, artistry in drink (whisk(e)y, wine, and beer), music (Chopin, Mozzart, Pink Floyd, etc.) and the like often take effort on the viewer's part to fully appreciate. Much of great art can't be simply summed up in a moment as art; likewise, dismissing anything out of hand is somewhat jaded and small-minded. Those aren't characteristics found in a maven of the arts, though they probably are those of a skeptic or cynic.
Would Ebert say the same thing about computer generated models and animations? How about the CG characters in movies? If those can be considered art, why can not the whole they compose be considered art? Anything otherwise would be as if to say that the Pantheon and Colosseum of Rome were artistic, but the greater architecture of ancient Rome was not. But even though the whole of Rome was not cohesively designed and planned as a whole, many would consider it an example of artistry just the same.
If anything, games are, as a genre, more artful than movies due to the fact that they're much more interpreted by the player than a movie or book. They give you more options. Isn't interpretation half of what art is? And if we're going to judge art by the effort and genius involved in creating it, a great game is certainly on par with many movies.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
My girlfriend has a class on the Philosophy of Art this term. I looked through some of her readings. My conclusion is that people who write essays that try to define what art is often have an agenda. Generally, it seems like they want badly to believe that art has some magical value, and they want to show that other people's so-called-art is not as cool as what they like. One can argue, for example, that anything that is an imitation of reality isn't true art. Thus, it is easy to define art in a way that excludes almost everything. If you want to define art that way, then it makes non-art (stuff previously defined as art, quasi-art, pseudo-art, etc) more important and valuable than art. My conclusion is that the word "art" has little importance. Video Games are important in all the ways that art(broadly defined) is important. If you want to exclude video games, then you might as well exclude the Mona Lisa as well.
Here's a great response from Kotaku writer Brian Ashcroft which pretty much hits the nail on the head.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
and I wouldn't their butter touch mah jelly. I define my own art, and if you let anyone else define art for you, you are a tool.
There are billions of games before that ARE art, and Ebert is just old-fashioned and stuck on stereotypes, but the most recent example to come to mind was Heavy Rain.
I have to tell you, 100% honestly, that when I got to a certain scene of the game, I had an emotional and moral breakdown. The game sent me trying to save a child (which it had done a good job building up my interest in wanting him to live) and the only way was to shoot a man I didn't even know. But I get there, and he starts begging, telling me he has daughters. I honestly *wanted* to kill him, not for some sadistic GTA pleasure of just mowing over another ragdoll, but because I genuinely desired to save my son. However, for THE FIRST TIME EVER, I COULD NOT DO IT. I ACTUALLY WANTED TO, BUT COULDN'T. I've killed literally billions upon billions of characters in videogames before, my mind has no problem separating the virtual from the real and given moral freedom with the knowledge they are but bits in a machine I'm happy to shotgun the lot of them; but at this moment I just couldn't do it. It felt wrong.
And that, right there, is the definition of art. I played Heavy Rain, and it, the game, not anything else, caused me to DEEPLY FEEL emotions I hadn't even considered, emotions I wouldn't have felt if I had never played the game, and they were the deliberate result of the artist who created the game's intent for me to feel those emotions.
If that isn't art, NOTHING IS.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
if art is the embodied experience, and life is the embodiment of that experience; then life is art.
As long as it's fun, why would I care if it fits the definition of art?
I would challenge Mr. Ebert to try his hand at:
- Myst
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (in this case, playing the game on the second easiest difficulty level through to the ascent to transcendence)
- Pharaoh, Cleopatra, or Caesar (Impression's Games)
- Heavy Rain
- Jedi Knight : Dark Forces II
- The Elder Scrolls III : Morrowind
If he beats any two of these games and maintains that they are not art, I'll leave him alone.
I realize this comes down to an old discussion “what is art?” I want to point out a couple of flaws in Mr. Ebert's post but then also point out that there is not a clear and concise answer to my question nor to the challenges posed by Ebert.
“Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”
To this I disagree, and if I may point to Jason Rohrer’s Passage without getting poo flung at me for choosing something so obvious then I would also comment that this simple game plays like a poem, or like a short film. It uses the decision and direction of the player as part of the changing story that is told and can in fact be experienced many ways, though the end is essentially the same. However and this is key, one must play the game to experience it fully.
This is a fatal flaw in Ebert’s commentary, he is happy to judge games by a little video, maybe a snapshot and some commentary. He would never do this with a movie.
Does it make sense to judge George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902) from a single image or a series of images? No, and in fact the proof that it is a work of art is in the exhibition and experience of the whole work.
Games are meant to be played. One cannot judge the quality of a game without playing it. Rather what kind of judgement can one make about a game without playing?
Ebert says, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." This is wrong because I do believe that this assertion has been made. Ebert however will never be able to verify this, as he will never play these games. This is a man who has a great depth of knowledge in a field attempting to extend it and to argue about something of which he knows little or nothing.
Finally I want to comment about the idea of art because so many people are just getting this wrong. The definition of art has changed time and again and will likely continue to do so. The problem is that many people who want to say that something is (or more likely is not) art are just not experts. I am NOT saying that people should stfu or anything like that, but if a work is accepted by the community of artists, historians and museums then it IS art whether we like it or not. There is plenty of art I do not like, but that does not make it less art than the stuff I do like.
To that end WACO Resurrection is a work of art, it was made by artists (Eddo Stern, Peter Brinson, Brody Condon, Michael Wilson, Mark Allen, Jessica Hutchins) and has been exhibited at art venues
INSTALLATION HISTORY: Gamezone Festival, De Singal, Antwerpen, Brussels Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, Utah Ars Electronica, Linz, Austra Australian Center of the Moving Image(ACMI), Melbourne, Australia Grand Arts, Kansas City, MI Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, Australia Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA The Kitchen. New York, NY
and is accepted by the new media arts community and historians as a work of art. http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2005/05/so-the-winners.php
If you do not like it that is your prerogative but you are being silly if you claim it is not art. It may not be a masterpiece, but it is by a young group of artists who show a great deal of promise, whose work may eventually fulfill the challenge laid out at the beginning of this post. But these people are artists and not game designers per se. Artists will make art.
Finally I want to say that I think the whole discussion “is this art” is a dead end. I hope to find the time to post again and talk about the influence of Marcel Duchamp on the
If Ebert is so smart then why did he lose his entire jaw to thyroid cancer?
If you staged a dramatic live play with audience participation and a winner, by Ebert's definition it wouldn't be art.
Ebert is just a troll who probably would have had a lot of fun on USENET in 1990 (until he reached everyone's killfile), if he hadn't been so old back then.
By extension, /. is trolling us. Oh, wait, I must be new here, and in Soviet Russia, /. trolls YOU. Or something like that.
Who is Ebert and why should I care, if he thinks games can't be art ? Sorry ^^
Imho Max Payne 2 was an artwork. That was my impression after playing it.
Couldn't care less, if he disagrees. It matters the same to me as if someone says the music I'm listening to is no music.
In times, where I can throw some shit at a wall and claim, it's art, I don't see a reason why a game can't be art, and if he uses a definition that excludes games, who really cares whether games are art or not by that definition ?
Something doesn't get more valuable / better, just because it meets a certain definition of art. Well, maybe for people, who can't think for themselves and believe what the critics tell them. So yes, who really cares ?
Any sport without an objective scoring method isn't. It's merely performance art.
Shadow of the Colossus was about the experience. Most often, gaming elements in Shadow were used to give an immersive sense of terror and involvement. There are no points in the game. And it most certainly is art. It is not typical. Then again, most TV isn't art worthy of the name either.
The fact that Ebert doesn't cite that game or Eco is telling. Games aren't devoid of art. Roger Ebert's knowledge of games is.
One obvious difference between a profession and critiquing is that it is subjective opinion. Professions have rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Ebert might cite a paycheck bearing job without a points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a profession and becomes a representation of a lifestyle, a hobby, whoring for attention. Those are things you cannot base a productive life on; you can only experience them. He quotes the medias definition of good critiquing as 'being motivated by a desire appear to be above the art.' This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad film is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the movies of Alejandro Jordorowsky are so motivated, and David Lynch would argue that his movies are so motivated. But when I say Jordorowsky is 'better' than Lynch and that his movies are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who ever lived)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
In the piece, Ebert wonders why video game designers seem so bent on proving that what they make is art. I quite frankly wonder why too.
The question is a useless distraction anyway: nobody can even define art, so there's no way to prove games are art. They may be, they may not be, but the question is fundamentally unanswerable since we can't even pin down what art is.
Instead of obsessing over whether games are art, game developers should simply be making the best games they can. Likewise players should be buying and playing the best games. There is no need to validate our hobby to anybody people; video games are fun, challenging, and many are engaging intellectual pursuits.
First thing I thought of: http://alexcarrillo.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/sparks.jpg
One day, he'll die. When he does, there will be several generations of people younger than him who disagree about his stance on video games being art. Many of them will go on to become successful and influential people...maybe even critics of various forms of art. They'll treat video games as art and will review them as such. One day, some new thing will come around, and those people will insist it's not art because it does something differently than the art that came before it. Our analogues in that generation will laugh at those people just the same as we're laughing at Ebert. The cycle continues.
I say that there can be peace between Ebert's definition of art and artistic games. Traditional games made to be won can contain such scenes or elements that invoke wonder and awe but that does not make the game, its strategy or gameplay art. Games themselves, however, can be art if they artistically make a point about games in such a way that invokes wonder or awe.
Ebert's argument that games can be won or lost, and hence are not art, is absurd.
Just like an opera with a start and finish, games must have a start and finish as well. The fact that we are motivated to experience them by winning or losing (perhaps), rather than going to the opera so we feel cultured or whatever should make no difference. People MUST be motivated to experience art, or it has no audience.
Also, there is art that is interactive. It has a start and an end as well. There is a piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I believe, where you talk to people and interview them, and they show you around. It's interactive performance art. One could even view these experiences as a game: Who can ask the best questions to elicit a "better" experience? If it were possible to break down these experiences to neurons fired in the recipient, or amount of endorphins released for instance, could that participant theoretically "win"? I can see a future where games can measure those changes in the body, so by Ebert's argument does that make them not art?
In the same way that a song in opera can influence an audience member's emotions, games mold the emotions, learning processes, and reactions of the participant.
Finally, as a Slashdot geek I will reference Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. If played BY THE RULES, to the letter, it is quite an elegant and fairly well-balanced system. One could argue that the rules themselves really are crafted to elicit certain emotions (like the fact that magic items make saving throws and can be easily destroyed) from the participants. It is a template, a filter, to overlay a simple art, the story. One type of art (somewhat analytical) over an emotional one.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I understand that we should draw the line somewhere. What is art? Is it everything around us? If so, then why does it have significance? As someone above said, it has cultural influence.
In a group of people, if I say "The cake is a lie" and they all hear me, it's likely that at least one of those people will recognize what I'm talking about, or laugh if the situation warrants it. I would count that as cultural influence. Absurd? Perhaps. Maybe that's part of what is defining our current cultural climate (a bunny with a pancake on its head, for instance).
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We have a film critic called Mark Kermode. Now, I have no problem with his critique of the film industry on the whole, he seems to be fair and balanced as far as cinema goes. But the few times he has mentioned video games, he goes rabid, not stopping short of calling it a waste of time, and generally an immature medium (paraphrasing here, but you know what I mean). In short, he is not far off the sort of reaction I have heard from Ebert over the past few years. Curmudgeonly is but one phrase. Scared is more accurate to my mind. They both sound very afraid of a medium they do not know or understand pulling the rug from beneath their cosy world entertainment viewpoint. Adapt and survive boys.
Ebert is seriously not going to see a serious uptick in movie review gigs if he says movies are not art. Nor is he going to see a serious downtick if he doesn't say this. He's just a critic, and as such he is full of opinions. He just think everyone wants to hear his opinion on everything. Critics are paid to write columns that are interesting and flowery to a certain kind of person. Most movie critics are over the top, and it's just their nature. They don't actually provide any real information because if they did, they'd be giving away too much about the movie.
Logically, his argument is not sound, because in an epistomological sense, everything is art. Art is life, life is art sort of thing. Art is like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. He is perfectly entitled to his opinion, but his opinion is not valid.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'm normally a big fan of Ebert, but in this, he fails miserably. His entire argument is, "the games I played aren't good, therefore games are not art." And his judgment of their quality comes down to "they're not as good as prehistoric cave paintings." That's an extremely subjective statement, really just his opinion.
Oh, and he throws in something about rules and goals that he claims makes them different from art but he never explains why.
His big mistake is the same one almost everyone makes: trying to separate "bad art" from "art." Impossible. That's always going to be a matter of opinion and therefore completely useless as a definition.
Let me suggest my own pet definition of art (and I challenge anyone, including Roger Ebert, to come up with a better one): "That for which quality is open-ended." It can also be phrased as, "That for which perfection cannot be objectively defined."
Why is this definition any better than any others? Because it's the only trait that all art, good or bad, possesses yet is not possessed by things that are not art. Thus it can categorically separate art from non-art.
A symphony by Mozart may be of the highest quality, but who's to say that if he had set the second movement in a different key it wouldn't have been better? A painting by Leonardo da Vinci may be of the highest quality, but who's to say that if he had used a lighter color of brown in the corner it wouldn't have been better? A book by Dickens may be of the highest quality, but who's to say that if he had used the word "his" instead of "the" in the 3rd sentence of the 4th paragraph on page 247 that it wouldn't have been better?
As long as there's always something, anything that could have been done better, it's art.
Another example: An architect is an artist because his designs can be called perfect only in that they meet specifications (and the laws of physics). Within those parameters, he has infinite possibilities, some of which are better than others but none of which can objectively be called "perfect."
On the other hand, if the specifications are so rigid that the architect has only one way to design the structure, then he ceases to be an artist, at least for that project.
A construction team that builds a building is not an artist, because their "perfection" is objectively defined as following the architect's design. The further they stray from that, the worse the quality, and it is impossible for them to achieve quality greater than the original design.
Note that my definition does not distinguish between "good" art and "bad" art, and that's by design. In fact, it emphasizes that quality is a continuous scale, just one without endpoints. You cannot, I repeat, cannot have a work of art with endpoints on its quality. The concept of good vs. bad is taken out of the definition specifically so that it can be handed to the right person to deal with it: the audience.
Art can be interactive (A choose-your-own-adventure book is still a form of literature). It can have rules (architecture follows the laws of physics). It can be functional (look at how many designs of cars there are). It can have a goal (find your way out of the corn maze).
I agree with Ebert that video games could be done better. But that's exactly the quality they share with Mozart's symphonies, Dickens' stories, da Vinci's paintings, architectural drawings, choose-your-own-adventure books, corn mazes, and prehistoric cave paintings. It's that very quality that defines them as art.
You couldn't win that, unless you made up a goal for yourself. Or SimCity? Are the scenarios games, but the sandboxes not games?
what about EverQuest? and as for his quote: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." to that I say, 'you fight like a cow'
and I still haven't won. I guess World of Warcraft is a legit art form.
His narrow definition of 'art' is precisely why art schools have such poor reputation. What a stupid fuckwit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think you have hit on the main reason for his point of view. It is helpful to remember that Ebert is first and foremost a movie critic. If art is really all about the creator, then movies are on shaky ground because there isn't a single creator. This is the plea of someone who wants to be taken seriously by "real" critics (literature, painting, etc) by purposefully defining art in such a way to include his own field but is then left with the problem of his definition also including things that he doesn't like. So he has to refine his definition to exclude those nasty things while being careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, to answer your question - Yes, he really is that dense.
is that art? After all, you aren't able to win. I would rather watch my friends play through almost any Final Fantsy game than watch most movies with George Clooney
Excellent argument.
Though what I find interesting is that even if one were to try to dispute your point and claim that it can't be art, because art is in fact in the eye of the beholder, it still doesn't make sense. It just takes one "beholder" to appreciate a creation and put some abstract value on it to make it "art" in some form.
Art is not about the person VIEWING or EXPERIENCING - it is about the creator.
Fascinating, my first thought was that art is something that evokes emotion in the person meditating upon it. It doesn't even require an artist. If a sunset makes you feel emotions then it is art for you. But maybe by thinking about the sunset in such a way that it makes you feel something, you become the artist? Maybe the professional artists' job is to create things that facilitate an observer's ability to think in ways that evoke emotion?
Perhaps Roger Ebert is so lacking in artistic ability, he can not do the type of thinking required to experience a game as art so for him it isn't art. So what? Or maybe, he is just trying to dump his morality on us--winning is bad? If so, perhaps his criticism is art since it makes me feel like telling him to STFU.
Maybe I don't know what art is, but I feel strongly that video games can be art. I have been moved by World of Warcraft so I feel it is art.
http://www.marxist.com/
Guys, he's a film critic, and he doesn't even get those right (all the time). Science Fiction and gaming has always been looked down upon by critics (except video game critics). So, in a nutshell, he doesn't know nothing about gaming so who cares what he thinks?
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as 'being motivated by a desire to touch the audience.' This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire.
So art is only art if you like it? There's no such thing as good art and bad art? If you like it, it's art. if you don't like it, it's not art? Now I understand Ebert's position. He's not art.
The artistry of games, consumer devices, etc, is not in the interaction, it's in the design.
Where is Siskel when you need him?
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
First, from a math/logic perspective, video games are a super set of all art (save taste, smell, and many touch aspects). Practically any piece of art that has ever existed can be experienced through a video game.
Example 1. Paintings -> Textures. Sculptures -> 3D models. {Books, Movies} -> {Plot, Storyline, Character Development, Text, Conversation, Setting}. Some touch -> Force feedback. Music -> Soundtrack. Sounds -> Sound effects.
Second, video games can be "turned into art" by trivial means.
Example 2. Imagine the Mona Lisa was never painted. Some game designer creates a maze game with colored walls that allows zooming in and out. If you zoom out enough, the level is shown to be the Mona Lisa (to any degree of fidelity required). This is not art, but printing off a copy and taping it to your wall would make the printed copy art?
Example 3. Imagine that someone's play through of Final Fantasy X is recorded. One in which he talks to everyone to provide the character development, etc. This is essentially a (super long, rather slow developing) movie. It has a plot, character development, etc. This movie would then be art, but having any say in the outcome is not? (FYI, I do not intend to compare FFX to the Mona Lisa by this example, it is merely an example....any sufficiently interesting game would have worked. I mainly chose FFX because I remember some critics calling it a 100 hour movie because of the long cut scenes)
Example 4. Imagine a given work of classical music was never created. Imagine a platformer in which the only solution recreates this work through sound effects to reach the next area. A given audio recording would be art, but the game itself isn't?
Third, having some extra control in how you experience something should not change whether it is art.
Example 5. While watching a movie, I may, intentionally or not, fail to notice something a character says or an object shown on the film. It is still art. If the movie from example 3 were to skip some of the character development, it would simply be a movie with crappier character development.
Example 6. You are reading a book and do not recognize why certain elements are crucial to the plot. In a subsequent read, you put 2 and 2 together and notice what you didn't before. In a game you can find side plots you didn't know exist that explain further why the plot turns out as it does, or even simply "finally put 2 and 2 together."
Fourth, having an objective/puzzles should not disqualify something from being art. (a.k.a., BRAID IS ART...Grrr)
Example 7. "Where's Waldo?" books.
Example 8. "Choose your own adventure" books.
These two examples can be done with works of arbitrary quality and I'm sure could be qualified as "art." Not only this, but these can be directly made into video games.
All art is the expression of some idea or emotion {or combinations} by it's creator. How can a medium that allows so much more than any other medium not ever have the possibility of yielding art?
I have the impression that Ebert wouldn't give a video game a chance anyway. I doubt he has had much interaction with the medium of video games, and, as some posters above have stated, may have an agenda against the medium as a whole to protect movies or is biased another way (perhaps just age). You cannot judge a book by it's cover, you cannot judge a movie by it's trailer, and you cannot judge a game by it's trailer either. Not only this, but just because you cannot appreciate something doesn't mean it is not art.
I give Ebert's article/argument two thumbs way down.
Give an established artist a grant to create a work of art in the medium of a video game. It will be "a breakthrough", and will convince traditionalist & entrenched critics.
Moma's current display of performance art consists in part of walking between two naked people into a room. When it's directed by an artist and in a gallery, it's art. When it's the same thing but just at a great party, it's not art. Makes perfect sense.
Art is any conscious creation that adds beauty or significance to our otherwise empty existence. (That's my own personal definition).
To quote Nietzsche, "Art is the proper task of life."
Games, much like the opera, are a combination of many distinct forms of art (imagery, music, storytelling, etc), and also constitute a form of art unto themselves.
Ebert can stuff it.
This is silly. Games are already Art, good or bad. Art is the celebration of free will. In other words, art is the product of the act of play.
Arguing that video games aren't art because you can't 'win' art is like saying Movies aren't art because you can't ask for butter-esque snack-topping at an art gallery. Calling this thoughtful also makes the OP retarded, for the record.
Wrong. Stupid, as well. I've experienced video games as art (multiple times) long before you made this ignorant comment. I guarantee most other gamers will say the same.
The Same Egotistical Blowhard says:
I could name quite a few, but the one classic that comes to mind is Final Fantasy 6. Good game, Roger. By the way, why did you mention poets twice in that quote? You must be going senile (hence your failed argument).
To be honest, I think Roger is just trolling... I mean, nobody can be that stupid and ignorant, right? Right?
Ebert will never consider videogames as art because he simply does not play videogames. It's not really on his hands to even think about considering them art. If he even tried, his opion would be as invalid as this one. I think he simply should stop talking about videogames thinking people will believe that he has the slightest idea about them.
I really enjoy his reviews, but this is out of his reach.
Oblivion Awaits
...that the original Star Wars trilogy is not art by Ebert's definition. Since Lucas decided to fuck with originals.
does that mean there's no such thing as a "martial art"?
maybe if this opinion came from someone other than a person who has spent their entire life criticising films, and had actully made something within even his narrow definition of "art" i might respect it. but all this guy does is talk about art. he dosent make things. he dosent create. he just criticises. and right now, hes trolling. hes trolling cause hes a attention whore. and the best thing we can do is ignore him, after we tell him hes a old ass fuck whos had the inconsequential life of a middleman, and that he is so out of touch, he doesnt know how wrong he is.
"Anything you can get away with"
Any definition beyond that is lacking. Does that mean art has no definition? Well yes, which I think was kind of Warhol's point. Considering the shit I've seen in art museums before, I'd say Warhol was spot on.
Roger Ebert should know better.
AccountKiller
Well, WoW has points and all other kinds of pointy type stuff that he says makes it "not art" cuz you can "win". Well bucko I'm here to tell ya I've been playing WoW for a few years and I'm positive at this point you can't "win" WoW. There's simply no way to do it! As soon as you get close some developer say "look there! A player is getting close to winning WoW!" Then another developer says "Oh yeah?, HA! EXPANSION TIME!!!!!" So where does that put your "art" argument now Mr. fancy pants?
You are correct...
He is simply defining true 'art' to specifically exclude games, by saying that anything where you can 'win' or 'lose' is automatically not art. To this end, I would ask him the following:
Is that screwed up photo I took with my thumb in front of the camera lens 'art'?
Is the Lumiere brothers "Train Pulling Into A Station" art?
Is a cinematic inside a game art? After all, it's really a movie since the player can't affect the outcome)
Is a 'sandbox' game, like the Sims, 'art'; since the player can interact but there is no 'winning' or 'losing'?
Is a film where the audience can affect the outcome (I don't remember which movie(s) it was; but they had button boxes where you could vote for the outcome you wanted) still 'art'... or is it now a game?
Or... in that vein... is a cinema based game (like Spycraft) any different than the multi-ending movie (above)? Or is he now reduced to saying a movie with 4 or less endings is 'art' and 5 or more possible outcomes is not?
I've been more moved by some games, than some of the paintings I saw in the Louvre, but I would never presume to say either of them is not art.
Defining art is perhaps the most ridiculous thing to attempt - in that it is a heroic endeavor but ultimately a tragic one as there cannot be found anything in the human experience that is not art by a subjective definition. Below some poster mentioned the "two deep" model of art. I challenge anyone to find anything that isn't "two deep."
Well I'm sure we can easily come to an agreement with Mr. Ebert that video games _contain_ art, and are therefore representative of art. Let's just update our argument and see what he does.
Mr. Ebert is incorrect for the very reason that the medium does not determine art.
Writing is often used with an objective - to communicate inventory, describe an actual scene, give orders.
Rhythm and rhyming may be used to aid in memorization, to aid in oral recollection.
Pictures, video are used for documentation, recorded evidence.
Wood, marble, steel is shaped to create buildings, stairs, chairs, eating utensils or religious relics.
Bodies move with precision in order to build, cook, or fight.
Interactive computer programs and simulations exist to educate, train, provide guided assistance on tasks, or obtain information.
At some point we get art out of all these mediums. We decorate the urn, make our religious icons more elaborate, tweak our oral histories to make them more fun to listen to, arrange our photo shots, play with the beats, create a more elaborate melody. The medium changes from straight functionality more and more to creation for aesthetics, to elicit an emotional response rather than a strict material/practical goal.
For me this point in video games (interactive computer programs and simulations), was definitely reached when playing "Planescape: Torment" back in the early 2000's. Yes, ostensibly you have a clear goal, and you can win the game. But the dialog and overall plot elements are such that I was immersed in thought, absorbed by the characterization and concepts. For others in my rough age group (cutting our teeth in the mid 80's to 90's) it may be games like "Myst" or "Psychonauts", Infocom's "Trinity", "Grim Fandango", or even a silly satire like Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" (http://www.wurb.com/if/game/146); more modern might be Katamari Damacy. Yes, please get off my lawn all you newfangled Xbox360 and Nintendo DS gamers.
If someone's never had an aesthetic moment with a video game it simply means that they haven't found that game yet.
One does not "win" Tetris, Tetris wins you. :)
If I make something and say it is a work of art and want money for it, and another person agrees that it is art and pays money for it, then it is art.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
> Roger Ebert has long held the opinion that video games are not and can never be
> considered an art form.
27 years ago a group of young code thugs decided that they were going to earn (according to Bill Budge of pinball fame) the title "software artists". Their first self-promotion as a company with this goal was titled "Can a computer make you cry?" Museum piece visible at http://chrishecker.com/Cry
Art is intended (if not defined by the ability) to evoke an emotional response. Crying isn't a common response to most art, so these kids set their sights high. But laugh? Hell yes. A sense of awe? My first trip up on the space shuttle, done in line drawing style on a green phosphor, did the trick for me. Ebert's assertion and its rationalization are arbitrary and selective. Most of his negatives could be applied to movies, and many of them are a matter of opinion and/or taste.
In any case, Ebert is a "critic", meaning he can't do what he talks about, he can only be critical. Not only can he not create a computer game, he can't make a movie either. So why do people pay attention to him? Because he is, as are almost all "critics" an entertainer, and we have been trained by the media to accept their designated authorities as experts based on their entertainment value. Now, he is quite knowledgeable about the history and such surrounding film, but the fact remains he only knows stuff, and makes a show of knowing it, yet cannot do. And knowing a lot about something does not make one an expert at something else.
Like all long time critics, he's been outvoted by the viewing public repeatedly, yet he continues to promote his opinions as though he hadn't been proven wrong. The same goes here.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Making anything is a craft. His point was that when these products are meant to be interactive and the audience is meant to fulfill a set of predetermined outcomes then any art associated with this is incidental. You could have Shakespeare write the backstories for every piece in a chess game, have a romance between a rook and the enemy queen, and he would have made art based on chess whereas the game itself would still remain chess.
Whateva!
and one that I think does not fall to Ebert's "games are goal directed" criticisms: Jason Rohrer's "Passage" http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/ I highly recommend it!
Music shares many of the same attributes: it has rules, it's linear with objectives, and people engaging in it are often quite competitive. Despite that, there are aspects to music that are clearly art. The same is true for architecture, yet some architecture is also art.
So, while blowing away opponents in a FPS may not be art in itself, the architecture, characters, story, and other artworks (hence the name) may well be art.
(I really think Ebert should stick to movie critiques for old folks; that seems to be his forte.)
One question I would pose would begin with the example of Japanese Visual novels as art. The Kinetic Novel Planetarian is very similar to traditional forms of storytelling, and progresses along a fixed path much like a novel or movie. Setting aside the question of relative value (Is it overly sentimental, etc...) it would be nearly impossible to deny the former as Art, without denying the latter as well.
However, introduce one single player choice that splits the storyline into two possible paths -- now, is the Visual Novel a game yet? And if so, can it still be Art? If one ending is good and one is bad, it can be said that the "player" can "win". What if one ending is ambiguous and thought provoking... and so is the other?
There is an entire spectrum of Visual Novels with varying degrees of freedom for the player, ranging from none, to almost none, to considerable freedom. Does the separation of Art and non-Art occur with the very first choice?
Videogames are so obviously art, that I don't know what the point is on even discussing it.
19th century painting was exhibition painting. Turner, Monet, ... whoever, but not Van Gogh; where exhibition painters directed by rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.
Neverhood wasn't art? Come on!
Roger Ebert should lay off the fatty foods.
"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."
There are a couple of major problems with this paragraph.
1. The is an implied assuption that if you can win at something then it cannot be art, an assuption that he provides no evidence for. Why cannot winnable games be art? I've frequently heard the term "poetry in motion" applied to sports people. Prior to Duchamp, found art was not art. How about conceptual art? Was that art a hundred years ago? Art is a moving target and in some cases it is perfectly reasonable for a piece to be art for one group of people but not for another group. A personal piece fro the artist to a friend for instance.
The blanket assertion that anything winnable cannot be art fails due its breadth.
2. He is using the term "game" in two different ways so that there is a generalised "Computer Game" inclusive of immersive games, and then the subset of games which excludes imersive games which then become representations of Films, novels etc.
Here he shows the flaw in his argument by effectively claiming that anything that can be considered art cannot be a game and anything he considers a game cannot be art.
He has decided the result before a ball has been kicked:-)
To the extent the artistic product of a video game depends critically on the input of the player, video games are crappy art. This simply follows from the fact that the vast majority of people have no appreciable creative talent. It could probably also be argued that video games in which the artistic value does not depend on the input of the player are not the best video games. That's probably only true for specific cases.
I will say this in defense of Roger Ebert. Suppose the movie Rashomon had been, instead of a fixed movie, a game that the player gets to "direct," with scenarios and virtual actors supplied by the game and the rest left up to the player. This is a few years from now, so it's really like you're getting a populated movie studio in a box. So this is a movie-ish game. I doubt that so many as one in ten thousand players could produce anything with the artistic value of the original (fill in your own movie if you don't like Rashomon). Some might produce something better, but it would be quite clear in those cases that the bulk of the artistic value came from the player and not the game. So to the extent that's what Ebert was getting at, I certainly agree.
For Mr. Ebert, computer games are not art and never will. For many other people, they are. It's a fallacy to assume that there can be a definition of art everybody agrees to, or even if there was such a definition, that everyone would come to the same result when applying this definition.
I've always thought of the definition of art as simply
"an expression of creativity"
I realize that's pretty broad, but once you go beyond that, you're categorizing or critiquing.
For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky...
Writing, textiles, glass blowing, metalwork, ceramics, architecture, painting, photography, programming.. eventually robotics and genetic engineering all have this in common: They start as interesting new technologies and eventually become art forms. It's a matter of time and refinement. If you're at the point in history where it makes sense to have the argument, it's probably not worth the effort to worry about it.
"Rap isn't music" argument.
Sigh. We get it. You don't like games. Just say so.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Ebert is only expressing an opinion, and like every other opinion it is beyond the bounds of reasoning or bargaining. Opinions are not fact, just a qualitative stance held by the person stating them. For instance, no matter how much I screamed and ranted at him that THX 1138 was wankish art student dribble which drew heavily from the trurly original works that proceeded it, he would no doubt defend his stance.
Now for my opinion. I spent a lot of time thinking about the question "What is art?" and have come to a reasonable conclusion for myself. Art is anything that can provoke an emotional response in the viewer. I saw a lot of art in Europe, some of which was moving and other pieces less so - but perhaps they moved other viewers.
If playing any of the many games out there makes you feel something then it's art - no matter what some movie critic says.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
oh you mean some jive old windbag talking bout some shit nobody cares about
Art isn't about moving your audience. Art isn't about being pretty or exciting. Art is about the emotion that the artists themselves put into their work. The purpose of art is to express these raw emotions.
Take for instance the comparison between a professional ballet dancer and a dancing with the stars dancer. The ballet dancer feels the emotion of the piece they are performing. They attempt to re-create the raw emotion through pure language of body. It is this emotional purity, intent if you will, that differentiates the work of art from the work of entertainment. By comparison, the game show dancer is not dancing for emotional purity, they are dancing to win. There may be contestants which breach the imaginary threshold but the intent is to win. This is where I agree with Mr. Ebert to some extent.
Perhaps a better example would be game art. A game artist is creating artwork to suit a particular purpose as specified by a their managers, directors and overlords. In this context, most games would not be art as they were labors of effort, attempts to satisfy a specification -- akin to modeling a sailboat from scratch but without the raw emotion. True, artist working on a project will grow attached to the project, but they are still working from a spec. I do agree however that some games can be considered "art" in that the creator(s) poured their raw individual emotion into it and as a result made the player feel it.
Most games are no more a work of art than a print out created by a program designed to randomly generate colored cubes.
Unfortunately, since most games exist to entertain, it is quite difficult to ascertain whether there is truly emotional, artistic content or merely the facade of such things. Is this a priceless painting of a girl, created by a starving artist as he wept over the death of his lost love, containing clues to his emotion and state of mind? Or is it a photoshopped image of a girl in central park with a couple of filters applied with no real purpose? Most games must be experienced and analyzed in detail to truly determine this.
Not to ramble on too long but, while I may have never played the Waco game, I believe it may have missed the art mark ever so slightly. I can watch a documentary about a particular event in history, and it is simply that. I can also watch a documentary in which the creators went to great pains to distill the pure emotion of this event in captivating imagery and it may very well be considered a work of art. Games tend not to stray in this direction but instead stay mostly on the socio-political commentary side.
If in fact the game is distilling an immensely emotional experience despite the uninspired graphics and without relying on the emotion that the event itself holds to the viewer, then perhaps it is a work of art...
Art is the act of making. If careful consideration is taken during the creation of an object (whether physical, virtual, dimensional or abstract) there is the potential for art. Art is from an artisan. You cannot separate the two. What is not art is the slapped together creation of necessity or utility (though you can make utilitarian art). A carefully planned meal presented with care is art. A room arranged with intent is art. Certainly a game which expresses more than mete mechanics of play is art. Even thoughtfully discerned and employed game theory/mechanics is art if the result is enlightening.
Recreating the same again would not be art without the addition of a new layer of expression (which is why you can't copy Wharhol's style and call it art) - the innovation of expression is what can be considered the artfulness rather than the technique.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
In most movies, there is a clear victor, so by his argument doesn't this mean movies are not and can never be art?
Ebert commenting on games is like deaf person commenting on music or a blind person commenting on paintings. Just like you need to hear to understand music and you need to see to understand painting, you need to be able to play it to understand a game.
The old meaning of the wort art is the same as "technique" or "craft" means today.
Simply put art is defined not by content (game, play, movie, music) but by how the content is/was crafted.
So any work from an ikea chair, to a boardgame or computer game, to the making of chess pieces, or the making of a movie is art.
Of course the meaning of the word art has been idealized by people who would like it to only be connected to things they like, thus you have people saying one thing is art, and another thing isn't.
If I look at a few examples:
A chair handcrafted by a complete beginner would not be considered art. A handcrafted chair by a expert craftsman would be considered art. It's the technique or learned craft that separates what's art and not art.
A designed chair by an expert would be considered art, even if the design is then crafted by machines to make a million copies and sold by Ikea.
a beautifully done chess pieces and board is considered art, even if it's done in millions of copies
2 players competing at chess is not considered art, but is a chess match between 2 grandmasters art?
2 players playing instruments is considered art by modern standards almost regardless of skill.
The modern definition is: Art is in the eye of the beholder, but that is only meant as an important part of verifying that the i) chair actually works ii) the chess pieces aren't missing pieces iii) the players aren't sucking badly. It's the verification of the craft/technique as good work.
Some people though add another definition to narrow it further down: "Only what I call art".
is that you can win a game.
nobody EVER won tetris!!!
Do angels have wings? what color is the imaginary unicon that poops skittles? and what color are the imaginary skittles it poops?
Ebert doesn't want to admit that games are art. To admit that they are art in his definition, one merely has to point out that the player is in fact also a producer of the art that is the game. If all those unwashed masses in their basements are part of the art that is the game, and this art is eclipsing movies/tv, then he has to admit that these people playing games in their basements are having more impact on the culture than he does. His ego is incapable of admitting that.
And why does he consider himself an expert on art and video games? Last time I checked, he was a movie critic. Stick to what your good at, bobby.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Critics and cynics are among the least useful people on the planet.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Long ago someone said "It is not only the job of the theatre to entertain but transform men’s' souls." Adapting this to modern times, as is so frequently necessary with older anecdotes and sayings, this basically is meant to describe the true effect all art forms have on the human condition. Today, after artistic revolutions of TV, movies, and new age music, it is time to consider what many believe to be the newest entry into the great beyond of art, video games. A recent study on thirty-six university campuses revealed that of all who were surveyed, men, women, graduate, undergraduate, exactly one hundred percent had played video games. The only other ways to get results like that are to ask people if they have ever taken a shower, or if they had ever listened to music. The generation that grew up playing video games on Atari and Nintendo Entertainment systems has reached the age their parents always said they would grow out of gaming but it would seem, due to the massive industry figures reported every year by major platform manufacturers and game studios, that they have not. Reminiscent of mothers telling them as children that too much video gaming would “rot their brains” today’s gamer is average aged mid to late twenties and as far as demographics are concerned largely male but more importantly more intelligent and successful than equally set non-gamers. But they're just games, right? If this were true would every citizen, in most likely the world, know who Michael Jordan is? At the same token what if Michelangelo’s work at the Sistine Chapel was just considered a ceiling in a church? The revelations that occur to man when inspire by and for art is a necessary reality of humanity. For a moment, put aside the social impact of art and just focus on similar areas of controversy, when the Beatles first surfaced their music was considered relevant only to the irresponsible, now a large segment of society considers their work classic. The same rings true for television as a whole medium, in it’s beginnings many criticized it for it’s nature of allowing people to engage it for periods with little to no activity of body and what seemed at the time no activity of the brain. Once the true marketing potential of television was realized when broadcasters began running fictional programs in series form people began condemning it for depicting violence and sex claiming these images corrupt or society. After what seemed like a million court cases and studies it has been determined that people don’t do what’s on TV because it was on TV, they do it because they feel there is no wrong in it, fault of the individual (whether it be by mental defect or deficiency or lack of proper upbringing). The topic of wrongly accused art forms as detriments to society could be expounded upon for hours, regardless of the artistic area. Some people even had the audacity to try and blame violent video games and aggressive music for the catastrophe that occurred at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado on April 20th 1999. The video games of today are so intricate and detailed that some actually allow the player near complete freedom in the game environment providing different occupations and activities for all types. The dictionary definition of art is as follows: “the creation of beautiful or significant things; the products of human creativity; works of art collectively; a superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation” and do the creation and playing of video games not fit this description? So the only question remaining is when will we see a “Video Game History and Appreciation” class in university schedules?
The real question: can setting up a firewall be considered a game, and therefore art? Ebert is just playing shock jock to get attention. Games are art are life.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
Ebert is getting old and cranky. Last week, he pronounced "Kick-Ass" "morally reprehensible".
The real question for games is not whether they're art, but whether they are "stories". A game with too much story becomes a "track ride", as you're forced from scene to scene along a predetermined plot track. Movie-licensed games generally suffer from this. Games with more free play are a place that you go, not a story. GTA is the best known example. GTA has subplots, but no overarching story arc. The GTA developers have the sense to realize that a GTA movie would be a bad idea, and have refused movie deals. A movie would produce pressure to lock the player onto a plot track, which would ruin the game.
MMORPGs have little story, and the extreme case, Second Life, has no story at all. It truly is just a place that you go. Yet Second Life is about art, fashion, and design. Second Life even has fashion magazines. Good ones. Runway was spectacular while it lasted.
The sum total of replies here seem to convey a sort of offense that folks have taken to the notion that games are not art, without any real discussion of what seem to be his two central arguments:
1. "Games and Art are mutually exclusive things, by definition." That seems reasonable to me, for simplicity's sake. As for an in-depth philosophical discussion, maybe you could dissect this point and refute it.
2. "No game creators are held up with the same reverence as great poets or painters." I'm not sure how one would refute this fact. The only thing I would say is that lots of time seems to pass before anyone's work is typically appreciated as "great."
I pose one simple question: Who cares?
I get suspicious when people are so offended by semantics. I think many of us have matured to a degree that we view the label "nerd" as either a badge of honor, or as an inaccurate label of someone who is simply different. (No, I'm not trying to trivialize the issue of bullying by children, I'm speaking from the point of view of an adult who isn't going through that stuff.) It's totally subjective, and kind of silly to waste a lot of time or thought on, IMHO.
Enjoy your games. Be amazed. Immerse yourself. Does the possibility that what you are experiencing is not "art" detract from your experience? I hope not!
Are you certain? Watching a movie, I'll grant you that, as everyone watches in much the same way (unless they decide to be horribly disruptive).
But no two people play a game in the same manner, unless they strictly follow a script and play with exactly the same set of start conditions and rules. For some, a guy playing a game might seem trite and uninteresting, but there is a market of recording and/or watching masters of the game-- to the point of calling their play-throughs "performance art".
Not every activity can be dismissed as "not art".
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Four out of five stodgy old men agree that {film; television; rock music; cartoons; comic books; rap music; video games} can never be art!
Also, three out of five stodgy old men were heard to add, "Humbug!" The other two were asleep.
However, Tetris does not. Tetris has a single obvious purpose, and no underlying message.
Are you kidding? Tetris is a wonderfully sublime commentary on the absurdity of life! It's impossible to win, all you can do is try not to lose just yet; and the longer you play the harder it gets to keep from losing.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
My preferred definition of art is similar:
- Art is anything (whether found or created) presented with the intention of evoking some reaction from an audience (which may be just the artist himself).
GOOD art, on the other hand, is art which SUCCEEDS in evoking the intended reaction; though as intentions vary not only between the artist and the audience but between audience members, what constitutes good art is entirely subjective. If an artist presents a giant pile of horse shit with the intention of evoking disgust in the audience, and the audience comes to the exhibit to be amused or whatever but NOT disgusted, and they ARE disgusted, then the exhibit is good art from the artist's perspective and bad art from the audience's.
Which brings up the point that art is not necessarily beautiful. Beauty is the quality of evoking... the opposite of disgust, I guess you might call it "love" in a sense (philia as opposed to phobia, if I may be [dons shades] Romantic). Most people intent to experience beauty rather than ugliness, so for most audiences good art is art that they find beautiful (art that evokes a positive, attractive reaction in them); but the artist may intend to evoke something other than that, and to the extent that he succeeds, such art is good to him, and those who agree with his cause. (It's worth noting that "good" here is used in an entirely non-ethical sense: "good"-as-in-successful art can be far from "good"-as-in-normatively-correct, e.g. the effective propaganda of an oppressive regime is "good art", in that it achieves the intended purpose, but not good as such, inasmuch as the intended purpose is not good.)
Beyond even that, people sometimes seek out experiences which evoke things other than "love". People see horror movies to be horrified, they read thriller novels to be thrilled, they listen to hyperactive electronica to be excited. To the extent that the art they are experiencing evokes those intended reactions in them, it is good art, even if it is not properly speaking beautiful.
And lastly, the intention of evoking a reaction need not be the only reason for something's presentation in order for it to qualify as art. Buildings are built for strictly utilitarian purposes first and foremost... but then architects also consider what impression the building will have on those making use of it, and in that consideration the building, which still a practical, utilitarian object, becomes art.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What Ebert is saying is that a house can never be art because its purpose is to provide shelter. This doesn't hold water. Nobody said he was a genius (did they?). I don't feel like I 'won' when I finished Black. I felt disappointed. Sometimes I am disappointed by a painting, often by movies. Black had all the makings of bad art, with some good bits. Tetrisphere, now that was art. Brittanica's definition: "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." Wikipedia: "the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions" When I was in high school people would say "Graffiti can never be art" and "heavy metal is not music" and all kinds of silly things like that. Anyhow we all know he's wrong and stupid.
I defy anyone to play either of:
* Darwinia
* World of Goo
and neither be emotionally moved, nor see the spiritual/social metaphors behind both of them.
Both games actually make me cry and think deeply about the world around me and the direction culture is headed. They are both doing very interesting and subtle things in terms of using carefully designed and integrated game constructs to evoke a deeper thematic level of meaning.
If this deeper-level-of-meaning thing isn't the goal of 'art', then what is?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
When did Roger Ebert become the pope of art?
The point of playing a video game is to finish it (win) or finish creating it so others can experience it. Just like the point of reading a book is to finish reading it or writing a book is to finish writing it so other people can experience it. Just like the point of painting or drawing is to finish so others can experience it. I figure video games are just as much art as these other examples but more in depth, a combination of multiple kinds of art. Video games could be a story, graphics, video, and experience all in one.
Near as I can tell, the argument is over the definition of the line between what is and isn't art. Art must be something that is created by a mind. Art must be something that can sensed (seen, heard, felt, etc.). Art is not bound to any particular medium. Yet we're missing something if we have people arguing over whether video games are art or not. I don't think anyone would argue that video games don't contain art. Some of them contain vast amounts of art, far more than is in a movie or a book. But is the video game itself art? It has art in it, but is it art itself? Perhaps what critics like Ebert are trying, and failing, to communicate is that while video games can have the best art within them, they have not yet become art in and of themselves. They think there's something within the whole of the arrangement that is a video game that makes it not art. It seems to me that Ebert thinks it has something to do with the rules by which a game is played. Perhaps it's that a game can be viewed in a context where the aim is not to experience something, but to complete a task? Then again, perhaps art is just in the eye of the beholder.