Are Game(r)s Art(ists)?

If you've played ThatGameCompany's Journey and traversed its shimmering sands with your pensive little shroud-person until the bittersweet end, there's a good chance you were online when you did and that you traveled at least some of the distance with another pensive little shroud-person just like yourself.

[DragonKnight]

Interesting way of titling this article.

[knowyourstuff]

Gamers aren't artists, the designers are artists. Just like painters are artists, however the people who go to art galleries are patrons. Are we really not clear on the meaning of simple words?

[ZoyosJD]

The point is that games are an interactive medium, and the player shapes the experience. I can see where your coming from, but with games like LBP or any mod-able game for that case, they can really walk that line.

A game made by a dev can be a tool used to make art just as much as a chisel made by a blacksmith can be an admired piece in his eyes and a tool all the same.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

[knowyourstuff]

@ zoyos

No one is claiming that a game can't be a tool used by gamers to create artistic expressions. Everything from creating Little Big Planet levels to painting your mask in Army of Two can all be considered artistic expressions created by gamers.

The topic is whether games inherently make gamers artists, which they don't. They only make gamers artists if the Dev purposefully creates tools that allow artistic expressions like the examples given above. It is, however, hard to argue that someone replaying a youtube video of themselves playing Call of Duty and killing everyone immediately spawning at a spawn point would be considered art. That's the point I was making. Cheers!

[-Gespenst-]

That's a very difficult question. It depends on what gaps the game creates or encourages for the personal creation of meaning. Most of the time, I'd consider gamers as competitors or "players" more than artists.

I think that to some degree, a technical game like Street Fighter has an art to it, and real masters are probably partly artists, but they're also "players" and I'm not sure if you can really separate the two despite their intrinsic difference. Just like you can't separate the mathematics of game programming and development from the actual creative process and result manifest in the game itself.

Interactivity is something that's very hard to subsume into art as well. For me it really depends on how that interactivity resonates with and plays off of the music and the visuals. I think the interactivity of Journey is deeply artistic for instance.

[ApolloTheBoss]

1.) Yes
2.) Depends on the gamer.

[dboyc310]

It is expressing human creativeness so yup. A lot of people just think of art as a painting and a sculpture but there are many things that fall into it like music, theater etc.

[kB0]

Awesome title:)