Games As Art: An Analysis [NoobFeed]

Now that the National Endowment has officially recognised video games as an art form in the US, NoobFeed sheds some new light on the matter, showing that this debate is all but over.

[BushLitter]

No offense to the writer in any way, but I am not going to read this...

The very notion that there should even be debate whether games are Art is ridiculous.

Just ask the scores of artists, writers, composers, designers, etc employed to make the game and then compare their numbers to the numbers of their peers involved in making a movie, writing a book, farting paint on a canvas...

[Daavpuke]

I'd totally go see a live paint-farting exhibit!

[BushLitter]

As long as the 'canvas' is Roger Ebert's face :)

[Degtyarev]

Art is not defined by the amount of people working on it, so that makes no sense. Also, I admit that different cosmetic components of a game can be artistic in themselves, but a video game at its core is significantly different from accepted forms of art.

But, you know, I'm not going to repeat the entire argument here, as that would render the entire article obsolete.

[BushLitter]

I was not referring to the number of people working on the project/game/movie. I was referring to their respective roles

All of those mentioned there: Artists, Writers, Composers/Musicians on their own are accepted as artists.

Why should their collaboration not be considered an artform, in the same way it considered art in a movie for example?

An what does 'accepted standards of art' even mean. That is a ridiculous statement. How can art be judged by any standard. It's a form of expression.

That's why you get people who would like to go a a fart-painting exhibition. If that is considered art, which it is, where does anyone derive the gall to denounce the artistic merit of anything?

At the end of the day it's subjective. So while music may be an artform, who are you to say that the music of the Spice Girls is not an art?
Or in the case of Movies - how dare anyone say Battlefield: Earth is not artistic?

I mean, it's a movie right? And by your logic therefore falls into the category of 'accepted standards of art'

There's no way you can deny games, or fart-painting, a place in the artworld. Any attempt at doing that comes across as pretentious in my opinion.

So what next? Are comic books not art by your standards? How about a haiku? No? A sonnet?

May you should re-evaluate your standards. Life is a lot better here than way up there

[Degtyarev]

@BushLitter The problem is that, while art is ambiguous, this does not mean that you can invent your own definition so that it is conveniently applicable to video games. In fact, the biggest flaw in the advocates of video games as an art form is that they seem to have no real argument but 'everything is art'. The ambiguity of human language, however, is no good reason to rob a term of all its meaning.

What I was getting to is that video games make use of artistic elements for their presentation. The soundtrack of Oblivion is artistic. So are the visuals of The Wind Waker. However, this does not mean that the game itself is art, if only because you can separate the game from the art: take away the music and the fancy visual style, and you still have a game, but no art. Take away the game element and you have some loose elements which are artistic in themselves, but no game. This is because games are essentially based not on the aesthetic expression of the people behind it, but on a mere set of rules.

A game basically consists of the following elements: there is a goal to work towards to, and there is a set of rules that hinders the path toward that goal (i.e. gameplay). After the goal is reached, you receive a reward. This is a game in its essence, everything else is, bluntly put, window dressing.

There are games that at least come close to being artistic (such as Cryostasis) as they try to venture beyond a game's nature of problem solving, but gaming itself is not an artistic medium. It works the same way the other way around: music and literature are inherently art forms, but not every song or book is artistic. The distinction between what's art and what's not is admittedly hard to make, as there's always a blurry line, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there. So I never said all movies were art, just that film is in essence an art form.

So yeah, you could also have read the article.