This blog entry is art.

by devwil

I've followed the Roger Ebert-inspired "Are games art or not?" situation to some extent and there are some positions that some people are taking in the debate that confuse or disturb me. The debate as a whole seems somewhat misguided, but I'll address the following points one-by-one first: "Games may not be art now, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future?" "Some games are art, but most...

"Games may not be art now, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future?"
"Some games are art, but most aren't."
"Games aren't art, but they have art in them."

"Games may not be art now, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future?"

This one is the silliest to me. I'm of the opinion that, with the PS3 and Xbox 360, we've reached a plateau in both game design and game technology. On a purely graphical level, it seems like the industry can't handle another great leap forward in graphical fidelity. First of all, games look really good today. With the Xbox and earlier consoles, I think we all knew games could look much better if the hardware was better. I don't think that thought comes into most people's heads today, though. I think we're all pretty satisfied with the graphical fidelity of our games. Anything much more photorealistic would be either technologically or economically impossible. We've already reached the point that the most high-definition graphics are too expensive for most developers to handle. Naughty Dog figured out how to push the PS3 really hard for Uncharted 2, but most people trying to make a game don't have the resources that they do. We do have stereoscopic games coming in the near future, but that really doesn't add anything to if games are art or not. I don't think so, at least. Until we reach technology that rivals the Holodeck from Star Trek, stereoscopy will always simply be turning existing flat media into a pop-up-book version of it.  I'll be more surprised than most if games have a silent-films-to-talkies kind of revolution. Again, it just seems to me like we're at a plateau.

But that's all technology. What about game design? I also think that, in the past 5 years or so, game design has matured to the point that it seems silly to believe that some game designer could truly revolutionize the medium itself. I hope people keep trying to, because it'll undoubtedly result in interesting projects. Realistically, though, games are basically as artful as they're ever going to get. With all of the style and nuance of games that already exist, I don't know what could possibly impress someone who isn't impressed yet. People will keep pushing the form and finding new ways to tell new stories, but people have still been doing that with film long after the form was established and accepted as art.

"Some games are art, but most aren't."

This argument certainly has some relevance. If you want to tell me that games like Pong and Madden barely qualify as art, I can see your point. However, even the most amateurish and/or least ambitious of sculptures/films/paintings/novels are still art. Unless a game is making no effort to communicate on a creative level, I think all games are art. A bad film is still a film and, therefore, is still art.

Video games don't compare to other art forms perfectly in cases where the player's experience is basically just one of overcoming challenges. Pong is a good example because of it's absolutely minimal graphics and simple gameplay. It's purely a game. By the same logic, I wouldn't call checkers very artistic. I think it's safe to say that the people behind both Pong and checkers were interested in competition and rules, not communication or beauty. However, there's a reasonable argument to be had that the conflict and tension experienced by the player is an emotional experience desired by the game designer(s). If that's true, there's a strong argument for a pure game being art. We can likely agree, though, that these types of experiences are less artful than the story-driven games that tend to be cited in the games-as-art debate. A sports game can evoke strong emotions, but because of how purely representative of familiar reality the aesthetics are, we can say that these are much less creatively designed than other games.

I can't agree with anybody dismissing any game with a story as non-art. Video games have become much more than simply games. They really are interactive fiction in many cases. Why would interactivity make what is essentially a computer-animated film go from art to non-art?

Even something with a very abstract or no discernible narrative should be considered art if it has enough style, in my opinion. At some point, it's got enough going on aesthetically that it needs to be appreciated on that level, just like we would any other form of visual art.

"Games aren't art, but they have art in them."

On the surface, this makes some sense from certain perspectives. But if you really think about it, it doesn't hold up especially well. Music is most assuredly art and, even though sports games (which, again, can be argued to be the least artistic of video games) tend to have licensed soundtracks, the music in them doesn't really make them any more artful as a game. However, when a game is defined by the arrangement of the art (music, sound effects, graphics, story, level design, etc) that it's made up of, the person who did said arranging is most definitely an artist. They've deliberately designed an evocative experience for an audience. That's art in a nutshell.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the thing all of these arguments have in common is that they treat art as a binary quality. They assert that humans create two things: art and non-art. It really seems to me that what's closer to the truth would be that all human creations are varying degrees of artistic. While I do think it's important to value professional, serious art over amateur ramblings, I also think we try to separate the two in far too absolutist terms. If someone types something funny in an internet forum, isn't that art? If someone makes a funny image in photoshop by combining existing images or an image with text, how is that not art? These things are relatively ordinary, but they're creative and evocative.

This blog entry is art. I don't feel pretentious saying so, because I don't think art exists as a Venn diagram of two separate circles. I think it's much more akin to a continuum.

This is where Ebert is fundamentally mistaken, in my opinion. I think this blog is art because it's a creative attempt at human communication. I don't think that's a crazy definition of art. However, because of Ebert and others treating art as exclusive rather than inclusive, we end up engaged in (what are essentially) flame wars about the topic. I can't emphasize enough how much I think we should distinguish between good art and bad art. If we didn't believe in criticism, we wouldn't be on a site like Giant Bomb (which has a lot of editorial content) and we wouldn't care about what Roger Ebert had to say.

I just think that the good art versus bad art considerations get perverted into arguing about what is art versus what is non-art. Every creative endeavor by a human should be considered art, but when it's unimpressive or impressive for all the wrong reasons, there's nothing wrong with expressing exactly that.

Note: This blog is so long and _serious_business_ that I feel remiss not taking longer to write/edit it...but, whatever, it's a blog and not a thesis. You get what you pay for.