What about certain games is NOT art? What is?

"Like the way the cultural establishment of some film-makers as auteurs has siphoned money and talent away from Hollywood blockbusters and into art-house cinema?"

1. Auteurism afflicts Michael Bay as much as it does Lars von Trier
2. Auteurism doesn't make movies less movie-like, but it does make games less game-like.

The New Yorker profile of Miyamoto certainly plays up the auteur aspects of his role, but he has clearly subordinated these impulses to the benefit of the game remaining a game. Is this something the current crop of game designers will feel bound by?

As a business model, treating games as art is a great proposition -- spend less money developing the game rules and engines that can more or less be copied by your competitors, spend more money on the trademarkable, copyrightable, merchandizable art-trappings.

"all this art is strung together with code and other non-art type seriousness, to make a game."
This doesn't speak well of games (or coding) as an artform, and makes it sound as if games are no more a vehicle of expression than someone's meticulously arranged record collection, but that does seem to be the way the industry is heading.

w/r/t Angry Birds, the game itself is something that's been around for awhile in the form of various catapult-type games, a few versions of which have nearly identical controls and gameplay as Angry Birds, but as popular as those versions were, none of them made the amount of money as Angry Birds, which is disheartening if you want to see people encouraged to make newer and better games rather than newer and more marketable trappings around existing ones, or worse, things that are not games at all.

i dont even understand why its an important question... i thought ebert nailed it when he asked the nerds why they even care if Games Are Art... maybe you could think of a great Gale Sayers run as a work of art, but does it in any way change how you appreciate the run? of course not... its exciting and beautiful, that's all u need 2 know.........

― My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Princess TamTam), Sunday, February 6, 2011 7:55 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is basically my opinion

there was a time when Art wasn't even "art" and so, by that criteria, sure games are art. but since the time when great masters wore the livery of servants while covering up bare walls, art has taken on a lot of other narrower and heavier expectations so it's not really a question that can be answered without really digging into the premises. we know what games are, asking whether those experiences and products are artistic is basically to ask, what is art these days?

i think this question comes up more and more these days because video games are now becoming technically advanced enough to make them compare directly to the last big "are they art?" artform: cinema.

and frankly, as much as i love them, as movies, games are routinely really shitty. there isn't a game yet where i wouldn't have gladly done a rewrite of the scripted elements, a re-take of all the v/o and a re-edit of all the cutscenes. even your well-regarded rockstar titles are sub-direct-to-dvd horseshit.

Seriously? You'd rewrite or re-record stuff like Grim Fandango or PS:Torment? How?

i never played grim fandango. i remember liking planescape except for the goofy skull which was a little too princess bridey

the video game equivalent of "show, don't tell" would be the elimination of cutscenes altogether.
but to give props to rockstar, the radio DJ stuff is onion-level comedy.

yeah that's otm

but you can't escape the "narrative element" (if we're dividing things up that way). half-life was a gold standard imo, told a pretty great story with no cutscenes and a character who didn't talk. every now and again people talked to you (more in HL2 obv) but most of it is just details in the changing environment.

this is really hard to pull off in open world games cos you can kind of go everywhere and do what you want. it's hard to write around that convincingly cos things so easily stop making sense in that context. "so, you're new in town? let me give you this intro mission" no i've been tooling around doing side shit for 70 hours already thx.

half-life is a false grail, all the not-a-cut-scenes are just cut scenes where you can look around a little bit during them... and they're unskippable, making them worse than real cut scenes

yeah except they were better!

ya'll want a real game that's ART... well

http://www.toy-tma.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/TIE-Fighter2.jpg

half-life doesn't hold up well for me these days (except for that absolutely beyond badass multiplayer level where you can press a button in a bunker to slowly close the bunker door and then nuke the entire level, killing anyone who can't get into the bunker before the door closes), but half-life 2 i still replay. it's the most boring masterpiece ever; it is nearly flawless but it's not that fun to talk about. except for the last two levels, which are the absolute high point of old-school FPS story-mode design and which i could do half a page on.

planescape: torment i've tried several times and i never really get anywhere; i always end up bored. for reference, i loved fallout, never finished fallout 2, never played any of the other D&D games except for the VERY old-school pool of radiance, and my favorite CRPG is probably this thing.

it's the most boring masterpiece ever; it is nearly flawless but it's not that fun to talk about.

not fun to play either

nah HL2 is probably as close to perfect game art as its going to get

except for the last two levels, which are the absolute high point of old-school FPS story-mode design

does that include the bit where you climb into the coffin thing and then are shuttled around for like ten mins on rails? LITERALLY ON RAILS! with no interaction at all.

half-life 2 is A Bad Game... its just not fun or interesting at all. the first HL probably holds up better, actually.

though the citadel sequence is mostly pretty good, esp with the super grav gun - not worth playing the rest of the game to get there though

I feel like Planescape is actually pretty irrelevant to the whole games art thing - there's nothing inherent to videogames about the way that it's art - you could print all the good bits, stick covers on it, and it's a book. I can't think offhand of any way in which the actual medium actually furthers things in that game and in a couple of ways it actually works against it. Its role in this debate is basically that you still inexplicably have to deal with nuts who claim that the economics and market of videogames actually prohibit anything intelligent having been made at any point in past or future history of the medium which uh, basically it is not worth arguing with these people.

I feel like there's a continuum of video games re art that goes something like Tetris---Civ---Mario---Half-life. I'm not sure what its a continuum of tho. Maybe it's to what extent are the games dealing in abstracts, so Bejewelled has got nothing to do with the real world, while an FPS at least pretends to model it?

Abstraction is often regarded as the purest form of an art form tho. Unless that's what you're saying, i.e. Tetris is artier than Half-Life.

Not necessarily saying that one end is more artier or Art than the other end, more that all points on that scale can be considered art, the way that Deus Ex is different to how Tetris is artistic. Maybe akin to the difference between the Lascaux cave paintings and Goodfellas?

certainly from the aristotelian position that art is mimesis there's no reason why video games aren't art

Gravel - disagree totally about planescape. from a design perspective p:t actually does a lot of little things to subvert genre expectations and attempts to reward players for doing things differently from D&D Campaign #597367. all those conventions it plays off of are essential to its existence as a ~game~, and of course it offers tons of metagaming opportunities like any infinity engine game

avellone talks about it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUIuQUtCRq0

skip to 2:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wv0Ob-xG-s

are my balls art, lets answer that

do they get a lot of visitors coming to look at them?

can i hang them on my wall?

if I had a pair of nuts on my chin, would they be chin-nuts?

tetris is probably the ultimate art video game - for one thing, the game never ends...theoretically

i will say that, weirdly, this thread has made me want to replay HL2 - i think its cuz when a lot of people see amazing qualities in something i only thought was O.K. i tend to start to doubt myself and wonder if i missed something - i just played the freakin thing last year tho and idk if i wanna do those stupid vehicles levels again

Just can't be bothered to play HL2, tho my boy loves it. Vehicles were enough of a pain in the first game.

are my balls art, lets answer that

ade i was deeply worried when i opened this thread to find you disagreeing politely about the value of planescape torment and i must admit i exhaled in relief when you followed it with this ^^

HL2 has definitely dated, and is probably appreciated more by those who played it at its time. Vehicle levels were daft yes.

physics puzzles were cool at the time, dropping weights onto see-saws etc

weapons and general combat is a bit spazzy now compared to other fps games

Where it excelled for me was the way the story unfolded, just the whole polished way everything strung together. Strict paths with the illusion of openness, how'd they do that? The music score was diamond too.

Yeah, I think what I found most disappointing was how un-fun almost every gun in the game was

it's not a bad game (even tho I just said it was earlier), but it actually made me appreciate HL1 (which i never rated that highly either) more in retrospect - first HL is one of the most perfectly paced shooters ever, and the scenario is much much more compelling imo (ordinary guy trying to survive increasingly insane & horrible circumstances > messiah freeman leading a resistance or something)

Strict paths with the illusion of openness, how'd they do that?

i think the great art (craft?) of HL was this^^. like, you'd look at a pile of boxes and know that it was a little platformer bit to get to the next thing. but it did look like a legit pile of old boxes, too. when i think about 'seamless marriage between ludic and narrative elements' that's the kind of thing i think about, in the details.

idk it always just looked like another jumping puzzle to me - as a gamer that's exactly how i'd process it, while sighing at the same time

yeah all right. i enjoyed it tho! like it felt honest somehow. they were making puzzles and combat set pieces, but doing you the favor of making it all look good.

i have to say that i only really play games that try to do this. some element of simulation is impt to me for some reason, even if it's fantastical or scifi or whatev. i've never been into overt puzzle games and never much been into the classic 'cartoon' style visuals like mario

how un-fun almost every gun in the game was

this becomes even more obvious when you play in multiplayer kill boxes. although its pretty frantic and fun sometimes.

my finest moment in hl2, which i'm sure i've bored everyone with elsewhere before, was when i encountered a bug in the game and a door 'trigger' didn't activate.

the door in question was a huge wall, so i gravity-gunned a ruck of furniture from a nearby house and built myself a huge mountain of chairs/wardrobes/tables etc to climb over.

when i clambered over the other side, truman show style, the graphics weren't quite ready but were slowly rendering into life.

and the game continued on okay.

that is awesome! I've been watching youtube vids of people doing things in HL2 that i wouldnt have even thought of my first time through, makes me think i need to try it again and apply a lil more lateral thinking this time

i've been playing some cactusquid games lately. i think maybe psychosomnium could be art, but i don't think i would say that about clean asia, though both appeal to me aesthetically. psychosomnium seems to say something to me about dreams - something subjective that couldn't be communicated through direct text. on the other hand, clean asia has very stylized visuals consisting of simple geometric shapes. why are those shapes different than, say, a mondrian painting? to me they don't have any content beyond looking cool. but maybe they do for someone else - i'm sure there was the same conversation about mondrian. now hardly anyone (or anyone concerned with this question anyway) would say he didn't make art. it's a historical development. and now gamers are growing up and we want games to be respectable. i think they can be or already are, based on our actual experiences. can games be art according to the rules decided by the last generation of critics, audiences, wealthy patrons, etc? maybe not

haha, that thing about the HL2 guns sucking is totally fair. i don't even remember what the guns are; i guess there's A Pistol and A Shotgun and One That Shoots Bullets Fast and stuff. but come on there is THE GRAVITY GUN.

i don't mind that coffin part (which is nowhere near ten minutes) because it comes right after the urban-warfare kill-the-striders level, which is incredibly long and hectic and loud and which ends with you scurrying back and forth across a blasted rooftop while the striders blow up walls around you, and when i first struggled to the end of that i was basically Done with first-person shooters, and never wanted to see another medkit or shield pack or ammo box again, and never wanted to worry about how much health i had or when the last time i reloaded was, and was just thoroughly exhausted. then there was a brief riding-around-in-a-coffin interlude followed by the game taking away all my guns, giving me basically infinite health, and turning enemies into environment puzzles for a level. i don't think i even took a break.

(xp obv)

oh and "strict paths with the illusion of openness" is exactly right. i'm a nonlinear explore-and-improvise guy--that's the stuff i like in games--and HL2 is one of the most fascist, linear games i've ever played; most of it might as well be time crisis. i think it's the peak of that subcategory of level design: environments where, yes, the designers are going to manage all your experiences, but don't worry it'll be fun and you might not even notice.

in retrospect the best thing about HL was the long first day of work intro in the first one

the gradual build-up of off details and broken environments in portal was pretty great too. there's diff of opinion itt i guess, but think the valve people are really good at telling a story via moving through spaces.

xp re: "fascism" yeah i think they take their storytelling very seriously and so they do have to stage-manage your experience pretty closely, which is a tradeoff

by my lights art is a Thing that someone Makes. you don't interact with it except in an appreciative way, i.e. laughing, crying, clapping, looking, not looking. a novel doesn't change. a painting doesn't change. a movie doesn't change. even in games "on rails" where many of your experiences are managed, you can die at almost any moment. you can decide to shoot or not to shoot. which is why it's so difficult for game designers to create a sustained sense of narrative and tension. so no, insofar as games are games, they're not art. it's the least game-like aspects of games that i would consider, and obviously are, art: the graphics, the cutscenes, the dialogue, the soundtrack. but they combine to create something that's not a finished product, something that doesn't unfold with the same considered effects for each and every person.

(and of course, this might make them better than art, depending on your point of view)

i'm fine with the "art is non-interactive" objection. it's of course a tautology (games are not art because games are not art) but then so is mine (games are art because games are art). that's why i don't like the question much.

telling a story via moving through spaces -- yeah. which is how a game should tell a story, really: not with a page of text or five minutes of video but with environments. that's what they can do that the others can't.

(not that i don't love a million games w/ pages of text and lots of cutscenes and so on, plus games that don't tell stories at all, or tell stories in different ways.)

I do! (think they are better than art, when they are not afflicted by art)

I don't think it's possible to build a controlled, pre-conceived, cinematic, coherent story the way that artists want to with games without sacrificing its essential gameness, or being completely ancillary, and in attempting to do so, they usually make something that is bad at being a game and bad being art.

Tracer what about architecture? some buildings may be more workmanlike than built for the aesthetics, sure, but there's a similar open-ness and purposive (?) constraints on a building. you can't determine whether someone will sit here or there, look up at the high ceilings, go to the top floor or not, or even walk through the door

doesn't unfold with the same considered effects for each and every person.

This is straight-up wrong. Even taking away cutscenes, you still get FPS set pieces where it's fully interactive but you're still being affected in the exact way as intended. Game design is fundamental to creating the desired affect too - most recently Amnesia.

yeah goole that's why architecture ain't art! (imo)