What about certain games is NOT art? What is?

aw dammit i'm on my way out the door.

there are a very few games whose narratives intertwine with their interfaces in a way that makes them narratively artistic, but for me most of the games i think are Great Art are all about mechanics. i wrote a gushing and sorta rickety piece about "super mario 64" that gets into the Art Question near the bottom.

anyway as for the just baseline "are games art" question, well why wouldn't they be; they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people. the only real question is "which games if any are really good art". i think the best mario games are intensely artistic. i thought the mechanics (but not the undergrad "story") of "braid" were as well. i haven't played "heavy rain" but from a distance it looked like exactly the kind of thing game designers make because ebert gets to them, and exactly the kind of thing that doesn't help them argue with him.

xp

also out the door but I did think better of it, later. Narrative is a part of the artistic element in the game like it is in cinema. Am using "narrative" in a loose literary sense here to try and rule out poor games with "deep" plots as being the only repository of worth.

It's also weird that years after the reader response revolution in literature ppl are still trying to isolate objective criteria for judging texts.

"they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people."
this definition seems to be the opposite of art, or a recipe for bad art, art commissioned to pander to the tastes of an audience.

The ideal art is an expressive representation of its creators, and the ideal games are the expressive vehicles for its players, and
so the answer to the question "which games are great art?" is "the ones that are terrible at being games"

"we recognize that chess as a ludic mechanical thing suspended in platonic form is not itself art."
and chess is a great game -- the idea that definitional constraints we apply to games like chess don't apply to video games seems ludicrous to me.
the "video" in video games really denote a platform distinction rather than a medium that is wholly unique from the general umbrella of things we call games.
I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles.

that is totally ridiculous

Angry Birds played with actual birds might be Art though in the Damien Hurst sense.

first of all "the ideal art is an expressive representation of its creators" is a helpful definition for discussing art but definitely not the be-all end-all and certainly other definitions, like how people respond to it, and the impact it has on groups, is just as important if not more so. lots of scholars like to use the 'productivity' of a piece of art as one of its variables for discussing how great it is (ie: how much thought/scholarship/ideas/culture has it produced) and that has almost nothing to do with the expressive representation of its creators. in fact, the who auteur representation thing is just repackaged new criticism and imho totally passe bullshit if just evaluated on its own without any other input.

and

I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles.

productivity is surely an important subject of study, but is a faulty criteria of art because many productive things born without a conscious expressive act (e.g. the Earth, evolution) aren't considered art, at least not without presuming a creator.

the problem is the 'faulty criteria of art' thing. it's not 1920 anymore

we've had a few revolutions in this discussion over the last 100 years

Did these revolutions address how productivity applies to memes in general rather than art in particular?

They address that the 'what is art' conversation isn't particularly productive

I'm not trying to be difficult -- it's just that to use the impact of a piece as an arbiter of what makes great art doesn't seem to hold up when someone can point out similar or greater impacts of other things that consensus holds isn't art at all, so in that sense all I'm really getting is that what productivity addresses is that productivity itself isn't productive in the 'what is art' conversation, but this doesn't negate linguistic or survey approaches, for example.

I mean, people built up philosophical conceptual models of how the brain processes color that was valuable in designing experiments that helped our current understanding of the phenomenon, so I don't see why a similar conceptual framework of what art isn't worth pursuing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller's_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus

"[conceptual framework of what art is] isn't worth pursuing" I mean.

also:
'"I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles." is just provocative nonsense'

Why is it nonsense to point out that sandbox video games are sometimes played in actual sandboxes?

"they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people."
this definition seems to be the opposite of art, or a recipe for bad art, art commissioned to pander to the tastes of an audience.

i mean, WHAT IS ART???? is a pretty impregnable question if history's anything to go by, but as far as i'm concerned, "created for other people" is not the same as "pandering to an audience". nor is the ideal art an expression of its creator. the ideal therapeutic breakthrough is an expression of its creator. the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone. it's collaborative, and empathic. in a video game, a person creates an environment designed to be navigated by another person. it's designed to be challenging but helpful, hostile but survivable; it teaches the player some rules, and asks him to apply them in clever ways. the experience of the played game is a collaboration between the player and the designer, the same way the experience of pale fire is a collaboration between you and nabokov. "self-expression" is paltry and arid by comparison.

on the chess question: it's now so commonplace and ancient it definitely feels weird to say it, but i would call chess a terrific piece of art. not as terrific as go.

civilization IV, meanwhile, is powerful art.

chess as a performative act can be art, but chess the game is just a board, pieces, and a rulebook.

"the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone."

this breaks down in the case of chess where the creator is ... is there an actual creator of chess? It feels like a game arrived at through iterative evolution.

the problem is in trying to nail a specific definition of Art, i think

I don't think it's impossible to nail it down. It's certainly a fuzzy category, but there are generally things we consider as art and things we don't and it is totally possible to build a working model of how we define the concept. It's not purely arbitrary -- there's a mechanism behind it.

there is, but a thread like this is demonstration of how undefined the art/craft definition still is, i reckon. or how disparate people's definition of art can be whilst still being recognisably related to the dictionary definition.

I mean, take something maybe more philosophically fraught than Art -- What are things that are Alive?
and ultimately, you can make some sense of it in that things that move constitute life, because as a mode of survival, it's useful to foreground moving objects versus stationary ones, and from this simple principle you can build a framework of how we think of certain things as living and other things as not-living.

But, for the most part, we can agree basically what is a living thing and what isn't, and with a little work, I think we can do the same for Art.

I just don't believe that. I think definitions of Life have historically been circling around the same measurable characteristics, but Art is demonstrably a different idea in 2011 than it was in 1711. And if we maybe want to argue for a coherent definition of Art today then there's no dominant authority that we could refer to for convincing support.

art sucks the big one

so do games

vanquish 4 lyfe

fuk u

there are discoveries and developments of edge cases on what constitutes life that must have changed its borders somewhat over the past 100 years or so (artificial life, discovery of microorganisms, etc...), so the fact that borders change doesn't present too high a threat for a coherent Art consensus.

the lack of a dominant authority isn't a problem either, if you suspect as I do that art as a concept has as much evolutionary basis as the concept of life/non-life.

let's approach it this way -- can non-human animals make art? which ones and why those and not others?

this breaks down in the case of chess where the creator is ... is there an actual creator of chess? It feels like a game arrived at through iterative evolution.

there are presumably a whole bunch of creators. the point is that's a set of rules, and an environment, created by some people (in this case over a very long period without knowing each other personally) for the express purpose of being played in by other people, who will bring themselves to it.

chess as a performative act can be art, but chess the game is just a board, pieces, and a rulebook.

sure, but ulysses the book is just pulp and ink. it only flares up when someone reads it. in chess, the interpretive act is to play.

xp

We could formulate a lot of conditions that we would probably agree were Not Art. I don't think you can come up with a set of conditions that we would agree defined Art? And by "we" I mean a significant majority of authorities qualified to grant a definition.

oh well no there is never going to be an Authoritative Definition of this. but my appeal-to-authority for mine would be the brittanica definition: "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others". i think that's the most useful definition possible. in which case the are-games-art question is trivially easy.

the problem with folding appreciation of a piece into the defining quality of art is that it necessarily eliminates neglected art from the table.

I can totally neglect ulysses and be comfortable on the hearsay that joyce was really serious about the thing when considering its arthood,
but do people honestly think of the accumulated mass of chess creators when considering the arthood of chess, or rather kasparov and fischer's idiosyncrasies?
who is the artist in a basketball game? Naismith or Jordan?

it's the notion of Art as needing a single, unified Artist that's historically shaky I think?

the problem with folding appreciation of a piece into the defining quality of art is that it necessarily eliminates neglected art from the table.

well, the definition is that it "can" be shared with others. now, if it is never shared with others, that's a shame. call it "potential art", like an egg is "potential life". (under a nonscientific but popular and here more analogous definition of "life".) when it actually is shared with others--even if with only a few others! even if only with one--it comes into artistic life.

who is the artist in a basketball game? Naismith or Jordan?

well i mean the obvious line here would be, who is the artist in hamlet? shakespeare or olivier?

the fact that we largely don't give a shit about naismith but we do about shakespeare isn't just a cultural accident, I think, but speaks to some fundamental aspect about how humans produce the concept of art.

but let's try attacking this from a game-to-game perspective:

miyamoto vs. naismith -- what does miyamoto do that qualifies him as an artist more so than naismith?

I don't think it's impossible to nail it down. It's certainly a fuzzy category, but there are generally things we consider as art and things we don't and it is totally possible to build a working model of how we define the concept. It's not purely arbitrary -- there's a mechanism behind it.

― Philip Nunez, Saturday, February 5, 2011 8:57 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

would be interested in this, I mean hasn't this been a Big Question since forever, if you are really able to answer this conclusively once an for all, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

There was a recent scientific paper on the question why people laugh when other people tickle them but not when they tickle themselves, and the answer was because they're surprised. I think figuring out what Art is will be about that level of breakthrough, and might require the same amount of MRI scans.

i'm not necessarily convinced miyamoto does qualify more than naismith but yeah it's def true that most people would say he does. so, why? well the amount of his input has something to do with it--all naismith has control over in a game of basketball is (an earlier version of) the rules, but miyamoto (and his team) have control over the rules and images and environmental details of every level of every copy of the game. so it's easier to talk about what he does.

i would say that naismith is one of a series of people who were part of the development of jordan-era basketball, which was an artistic process. some of those people were players! which makes basketball, and sports in general, an odd kind of art because they are endlessly being revised and contributed to by people who are also receiving and interpreting them, but a lot of people would label such a thing as Art were it a visual artifact or a piece of architecture, so i figure you might as well plug it into games too.

basically i want the broadest possible definition of art and the reason i want it is this: because it minimizes the danger of having protracted arguments about the definition of art. much more useful is to talk about whether this or that game is or isn't good, and why.

What are people really worrying about when they debate this question?

I can't help thinking that there's an undercurrent of "Why isn't there a meaningful discourse about the cultural value of games?" when people mention the games as art issue, which is a problem that sure seems to be fixing itself these days.

Don't really think there's much underness to that undercurrent.

I mean if people could just agree that games where culturally valid/useful/powerful/just as good as film have a pat on the head then about 80% of the games as art discussion would stop.

where = where
i = idiot.

i give up.

selfpwned

the worst is all the thousands of people who wrote ebert letters about that and recommended he play games that have "incredible stories" that "match the best literature" and he took all the recommendations as votes, so i think the only video game ebert's played recently is "clive barker's the undying".

which is nothing against "clive barker's the undying" it's just not exactly a conversion tool.

I feel the goalposts of 'what is art' get moved around all the time, let's revisit this question in 10 years

"much more useful is to talk about whether this or that game is or isn't good, and why."

the art question is still something to be wrangled with because by and large the things that make for a great game also make it terrible, or anti-art, and vice versa. It's not a coincidence that the kinds of games that make it into museum exhibits are absolutely no fun to play.

"all naismith has control over in a game of basketball is (an earlier version of) the rules, but miyamoto (and his team) have control over the rules and images and environmental details of every level of every copy of the game."
This issue of control I think is one of the keys to figuring out the game/art distinction. There are kinds of games in which the creator has a great deal of control while the player has very little, such as crossword puzzles, but as great as crossword puzzles can be, they don't leap to mind as being very good exemplars of the best that either games or art can offer. What makes individual crossword puzzles deficient as a game or as art?
On the game-side, I feel like the lack of replay value, the inability of the player to alter the outcome in a meaningful way (other than getting the solution wrong) seem like deficits most people would agree on. What's missing on the art-side?

Are you positioning this as art vs. ludus, with ludus = fun and art = no fun?

One-time puzzles (crosswords, sudokus etc, as opposed to replayable puzzle games like Tetris) are interesting because they don't really fit in with ideas of ludic gameplay or creative / narrative play; you have to stretch the definitions to consider a crossword puzzle a 'game' at all. They are clearly gameplay-deficient because they have only one solution, and aren't replayable. What makes them artistically deficient is impossible to say without defining art, which is a question I still feel can't be answered.

the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others

...is a good start but fails to exclude design and decoration, and maybe even entertainment depending on how you define 'aesthetic'.

the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone.

...I think this is closer to it, particularly the last clause. I'd go further, and add that art doesn't just help you to notice things, but aspires to present those things in a way that creates resonance, gets in behind your intellectual defences, and changes you / your understanding. I could spend all day elaborating on that, but let's move on.

So a crossword puzzle could be art if it was designed by, say, a poet, and the experience of completing the crossword puzzle was such that it touched you emotionally or changed your worldview. I have not encountered such a crossword puzzle but I can imagine it. I think it could be enjoyable, even entertaining, but it's unlikely that it would be fun.

Fun can't be your sole criteria for a good game though?

or we could just call him a 'designer'

http://www.givememyremote.com/remote/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/time_gunn.jpg

i think miyamoto has been subject to the dread New Yorker Appreciation

not that you're wrong!

hahaha, he totally has! not his fault though.

besides, as that excerpt probably shows, i'd be unspeakably happy writing about miyamoto for the new yorker.

i didn't read it, but the caption to the art was something auteurist. he has near total control over the mario brand, or something?

i didn't read it either because it was too upsetting that someone else got to do it.

this is what i always like to point to when discussing miyamoto's genius:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-gP7sSR458

the miyamoto article in the new yorker wasnt really that good or interesting, it was written by a 'video game skeptic' & was mostly biographical detail & some investigation of 'how he thinks' but no real critical appraisal of his work.

much respect to miyamoto, but character design is window dressing over the game.
for example, dream factory and super mario 2 USA are essentially the same game.

what makes miyamoto a great designer to me is he keeps his art impulses in check,
and his process is much more discovery than creation. A dude who optimizes for fun
is performing engineering rather than artistry, like a bicycle repairman who can
squeeze and tweak the sweetest ride from your bike.

well, we're not just talking about the way the characters look; we're talking about how they behave, how they present themselves to the player, how their "personalities" are connected to the mechanics of the game, how their behavior elucidates those mechanics, the coy way they show the player what he ought to do without outright telling him.

aren't these called affordances in the UI world? there's an art to it, but it's definitely a discipline of design rather than art, and it is also an aspect that is conceptually divorced from the game. For example, the wii controller (which Miyamoto also likely shepherded) affects all these things as well, and in much the same way. Actually the more I think about it, Miyamoto's games themselves are not nearly as satisfying as the level of polish he brings to the mechanics.

miyamoto's games are about mechanics. that is practically his entire medium. it's one of the reasons people make such a big deal of him: he's an unusually pure game designer.

anyway, we've hit the inevitable wall again: i don't think it's of any use to distinguish between "design" and "art". we can however talk about what games we love and why.

"affordances" is a really good word though--i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games.

damn, this thread is really scary to open. gonna have to set aside time to read the whole thing.
But sight unseen and undoubtedly repeating others: Games are art insofar as they are the product of creative people working on music, sound, visuals, rules of play, design, etc. They are commerce too, but they don't have to be. They HAVE to be art though, almost by definition.

miyamoto's games are about mechanics

I remember reading an interview, I think, where Miyamoto was like (and I paraphrase) "We came up with a demo version of SM64, which was literally just the mechanics of how Mario moved and jumped. And controlling Mario was so satisfying an experience in and of itself that I was content to leave that as the "game". But others at Nintendo persuaded me that we actually needed levels and stuff."

Probably tongue-in-cheek, but interesting nevertheless and kind of backs up what you are saying regarding his interest in mechanics.

are games fart

"i don't think it's of any use to distinguish between "design" and "art". we can however talk about what games we love and why."

broadly speaking, the fundamental difference between design and art is that designers will use affordances to make the game-playing experience a joy, artists will use affordances to mess with you, and depending on your tolerance for being messed with, that's going to affect the kind of games you love and why.

"i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games."
the problem with this idea is that the affordances are tied into the interface elements, not necessarily the game itself. going back to the chess example, you can play chess in multiple modalities (using live people, a marble chess set, on an ipad, in your head), each with its own sets of affordances, but the game itself remains constant.

When you say miyamoto is all about mechanics, then does it make sense to speak of him as primarily a game designer rather than an interface designer? He'd be the guy making sure the chess pieces have a good weight, that they slide across the board at just the right speed, and spending maybe less time figuring out the implications of adding an en passant rule.

"i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games."
the problem with this idea is that the affordances are tied into the interface elements, not necessarily the game itself. going back to the chess example, you can play chess in multiple modalities (using live people, a marble chess set, on an ipad, in your head), each with its own sets of affordances, but the game itself remains constant.

this is a new word that you just taught me so i defer to you, but wiki sez: "An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action." so while all those interface things you list are indeed affordances, isn't it also an affordance that a knight moves in an L and can jump over pieces? that the knight has a quality which allows a chess player to perform L-shaped jump moves with it? and this quality is granted to the knight by the game designer (in chess obviously kind of a diffuse concept as we've already been over). if i'm misusing the word then just forget it, but either way, that's part of what i mean by design, and i think it's artistic.

miyamoto does make sure the pieces have a good weight and slide across the board right, but he also designs the en passant rule: he designs how the things in the game interact with each other. like, here's a "rule" of super mario 64: if you jump against a wall and press A at the instant of contact, you fly off the wall at a 65-ish-degree angle. this is simultaneously a visual/auditory/tactile experience, a "move" in various puzzles, and one of many means by which the player can improvise interaction with the world. the en passant rule is all of these things except the first one; that's the province of people who design pieces and boards. one of the ways video games are different from chess (and maybe why people classify them differently?) is that a video game designer designs the game and the board. miyamoto's good at both--i remember reading someone somewhere enthusing just about the way mario's jump feels, about how unnaturally high it is while still having limitations, about the pleasure of the sound it makes, etc..

anyway. again, i think the best way to talk about this stuff is to talk about what works or doesn't work in specific games, and why.

(should be noted here that i'm using "miyamoto" as synecdoche for "miyamoto's team", if necessary; i don't actually know the credits on any of the games i'm talking about)

'Miyamoto was like (and I paraphrase) "We came up with a demo version of SM64, which was literally just the mechanics of how Mario moved and jumped. And controlling Mario was so satisfying an experience in and of itself that I was content to leave that as the "game". But others at Nintendo persuaded me that we actually needed levels and stuff."'

I think I'm with Miyamoto on this one, but this makes his work great neither as art nor game, but rather more like a well-crafted instrument, like a knife that's a pleasure to wave around even if you have nothing to cut. But maybe he's uniquely good at this? Every other game seems quite clumsy by comparison, or requires a ridiculous learning curve before you can appreciate its mechanics. (the button combinations on fighting games never made much intuitive sense, but obviously there are dudes who can become jedis at it)

Every other game? c'mon.

If you look at sonic, which has about the simplest interface possible (1 button), there's still a certain rigidness to the controls that make it less joyous than mario.

Every other game? c'mon!

oddworld was pretty cool

so was boy and his blob

the first serious sam was kind of art right because it made me all lollllllllll at the concept of fps

just the name 'croateam' brings a smile.