I’m with newbrof. At this point games are much better as a form of abstract art than art based on a narrative, or art with a “meaning”. Western culture spent the last bit of the 19th century, and first bit of the 20th, deciding that art didn’t have to be about anything.
He’s wrong about one thing though: Lumines > Every Extend Extra (haven’t played E4).
I would sooner hear what an art critic has to say on the matter than a movie reviewer.
Still I am grateful his is now going to bring his greatest critical gift to games, silence.
That’s nice that you prefer playing E4 to any of those other games but it doesn’t prove anything. Your preference for it doesn’t mean it’s deeper or more meaningful anymore than Burger King’s popularity implies they make a delicious burger.
That mod’s not for everyone, for sure, but it does impact some people in a way that can only be described as art. Moreso then Doom or other purely commercial games, anyway.
Nobody can say the guy has never played a game. He’s practically an expert on motion controls.
He’s wrong about one thing though: Lumines > Every Extend Extra
Lumines is really great, I should have noted it…
btw. Fower and E4 can be handled by anybody … I would say that if you want to get somebody to play a game, the controls have to be really, really simple…
I’m giviing Roger kudos for revisiting his opinion. He showed me something about myself there (that I don’t usually like looking at).
My reaction all along to his original premise has been that it made me angry, judgmental towards him, and dismissive because he had not one iota of experience on which to form his opinion. Those are all qualities in myself which I do not admire or aspire to.
By showing us he is open minded, and mistaken in his viewpoint and respecting and considering our (many!) viewpoints, he helps me to get a glimpse at myself and to understand and feel more comfortable that I’ll be able to treat people more equitably, and respectfully.
Pretty cool how he righted his ship with me, I tend to pin the needle on someone once I form an opinion but he’s gone from villain to, well, not so far as a hero, let’s just say he’s a good egg, shall we?
This is my problem with this debate: nobody ever defines their terms when they’re talking about when they ask if “games” are “art”, and if you do manage to phrase the question in a more specific (and this arguable) way, it inevitably gets dragged down by people using their own, unexplained, definitions.
But since you made a specific point here, it’s one I can agree with. The problem is that a lot of people seem to define “art” as “something moody, probably inaccessible, and also it probably has to have a message about something, preferably death-related”. This isn’t a particularly compelling category of games, and it isn’t something games really have a lot of experience doing.
What games are really good at, and what meshes well with one (not overly controversial) definition of artistic works is that they can make the viewer feel something. Yes, its purposefully vague, because the point is that if an artifact can consistently produce the same response from its target audience, and that is the response that was intended by the creator, the game is successful. Games are very, very good at evoking some things: exultation of victory, wonder of exploration, frustration. It’s a relatively small set, but its definitely there, and its a reasonable place to start the conversation that few people ever attempt, instead twaddling about with narrative, or things like Rob Humble’s (Hi Rob! No offense!) The Marriage, which while doing an interesting job at illumnating a concept through mechanics, does little for emotional evocation (in my opinion! your may vary!)
Man, I finally looked at the actual Ebert article, and I don’t understand how anyone even got past the first paragraph.
I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.
I’m not 100% sure what he says in the rest of it since I couldn’t get past that paragraph, but either it’s inconsistent with the first paragraph or people are interpreting it wrong. (E.g. given that context he’d more likely be saying “people think they’re having art experiences with games” than actually saying “people are having art experiences with games”.)
Or more to the point: given the above quote, I’m doubtful that he’s acknowledging any possibility that games could be art, but rather he’s just acknowleding he lacks the knowledge to make the argument.
Well, if you’d read the rest of his writing, he goes on to point out that he understands that art is subjective and that to many people video games are in fact art and he can understand and appreciate that. Just that where he’s at and with his experiences he doesn’t personally see the artistic merit.
Also, with everything that can be done and experienced in the world and the finite amount of time available to experience it all, he doesn’t particularly feel the need or desire to attempt to make himself play video games so that he could develop an appreciation or understanding for when and how they can approach art on a personal level.
This is not a difficult sentiment to understand - there are plenty of things I don’t find artful that other people absolutely consider to be art. Even though I do not see those things as art I can understand how others might.
It’s funny how even now, years after people started caring so much about what Roger Ebert thinks of video games, the discussion is entirely between gamers (no one else cares) who IMHO “get it” even less than Ebert does. There are a few who do seem to get it, but Jason Rohrer is the only one I know who a) gets it, b) makes video game that are first and foremost intended to be artistic expression, and c) has something worthwhile to say. I disagree with him on one point though, because I don’t think that barrier of entry is one of the most important problems. Braid has the right idea as far as using game mechanics to convey what the designer/developer wants to convey, but I wouldn’t show it to Ebert even if he could play platformers like a virtuoso. I wouldn’t show him Passage either, although I like Passage, because Passage would be almost as good even if it wasn’t interactive at all (the vast majority of “art games” that followed it are even harder to categorize as games and are mostly a complete waste of the very small amounts of time they take to “play”). There is no game that I would show Ebert.
Which is exactly what happens. Many people who play games as kids and as teens stop playing when they get older, even though they still make time for other forms of art and entertainment. I spend a lot of time looking for games that are worth playing because I like games, but I play very few (and most of what I play isn’t very new). If I had less free time, and the vast majority of adults have far less time for this than I do, I wouldn’t bother. There are too many things that are more important and more worthwhile.
Good stuff.
Here’s a trial balloon as to what art really is:
Whenever people who are making something go the extra mile wrt to attention to detail, care, love and thought put into it, then it becomes art. At the most general level, the more energy someone puts into something, the more it’s art.
Maybe trying to define art from the end-user’s point of view is a wild goose chase? Maybe it’s defined from the maker’s point of view.
Art is first of all artifice, craft. People make stuff and do stuff. 90% of it is crap (it may even be barely functional). But some of it has been made with such love and intensity, that it transcends its function and becomes a piece of new reality in itself, something to marvel at.
e.g. What is painting? Several hundred years ago it was a functional add-on for religion. But some of it became art. Nowadays you have perhaps millions of people all over the world doing something called “painting”. But only some of is is art. Little Jemima can have her dance lessons paid for by her rich parents, and she might actually be a physically gifted person; but only if she really gets into her dance, will any of it have a chance of becoming art.
Videogames can be, have been, and are, an art-form - when they’re good games, as that “goodness” is recognised by both makers and users. It might be difficult to think of games as art when you look at some of the categories they share with other art forms, but games also have their own language in terms of which to be art. Most people on this board have probably had many moments of sublimity when something in the “language” of the game spoke to them (whether it be great level design or great immersion or great story).
And it’s true, someone like Ebert will never “get it” until and unless he’s had those moments; but if he’s had even one, then he must admit that videogames can be art.
I think we can all agree games are ‘pop art’ I think the discussion always comes around to when is games going to have their ‘high art’. I say we already had a couple, but we still haven’t had that lasting emotional piece that we will all look back on 100 years from now as ‘Whoa’.
‘Art’ games.Not a fan.
For the first time we are trying to define something that is interactive–always interactive as art. The usual conventions do not apply. from painting, to dance, to film is always the audience watching, and never (other than Improv I guess) manipulated by the audience. Games are. For interactivity the definition has to be redefined.
Note, I’m not talking about the individual’s creation of art–guitar playing, painting a picture, but the end user experience of art, which up until Pong has been a passive experience.
So I submit again, is game play art? Is the creation of a new way to play artistic?
Was Doom a work of art? It fits gurugeorge’s definition.
Was Mario Bros? Bioshock?
So all you need to do is try really hard? I’m sure the people that make the worst games imaginable (or worst art) don’t go in saying, “let’s make this suck!” And sometimes, the most amazing art happens with an offhanded “let me just point the camera and shoot… holy shit, that’s the best picture ever!”
You then contradict yourself by saying games need to be recognized by users as good games to be art, which shouldn’t matter if the most important thing is that some guy spent like 10 hours laboring over a grass texture.
Keep trying, people. The day will come when you can finally tell people you play tons of games and they’ll be super impressed that you’re so passionate about art!
Kind of, yeah. What’s that quote, something about 99% perspiration?
I mean the basic context rules out things that just don’t hang together at all. At the level of trying to define art, one is already presupposing talent and some technical proficiency. What is to be called “art” is usually selected from a pool of artifice (entertainment industry products, in this case).
The sociological context is people collaborating on a big job. How something like that becomes something approaching art, is when everybody in the team is doing their job well. Same with films as with videogames - and even in music.
But even if you think of “naive” artists, they’re usually pretty obsessive. The thing they make may be kind of goofy, but it has power.
Professionalism shades into art. When a team is professional, then the product is on the way to being art.
I think why it’s “just energy” is because (using a sort of fractal-hydraulic metaphor :) ) it’s like a big pile of energy just finds channels in the work, it fills out all the possibilities of the medium, so the work is rich and can give many meanings to beholders.
Things like paintings and sculptures become art when lots of people are able to not get bored looking at them. They preserve them and reproduce them, and they can still not get bored looking at them. And the root of that is the artist, the artificer, the maker, just putting loads into it (granted talent and technique), in thinking about how the work will hit all sorts of viewers and beholders; and endowing the work with integrity, and richness of possible meanings. If it’s a spoon, it’s a fucking great spoon. If it’s a game, it’s a fucking great game, if it’s a film, it’s a fucking great film. That’s when product starts to verge into art. Then critics can make finer differentiations, and the scale of what’s merely good as opposed to great, gets publicly articulated.
The error he admitted was expressing his ignorant opinion in public. He maintains that his opinion is complete correct even though, as he also admits, he doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. That’s not gracious, quite the opposite.
Here. Let me make this statement:
“17th Century French Literature is not art.”
Now, let me say that I’ve never read any books from that era and region of literature. But it’s not art, so let me go ahead and argue why.
You don’t see anything abso-fucking-lutely-retarded with this approach to arguing?
I could, however, say:
“I don’t see how 17th Century French Literature could ever be art.”
This statement is entirely true, but it’s an entirely stupid thing to say in public as it is not defensible by any measure aside from being just my uninformed opinion on the subject.
Can you give the guy a break for admitting as such or do you feel the need to hound him until he changes his opinion on something purely subjective so that it matches your own? He basically wrote an entire article admitting that his original statement was abso-fucking-lutely-retarded to have made.
I see something pretty wrong with arguing against a position after the person holding it has recanted.
D’oh, I’m sorry. I made the error of not fully reading the thread before quoting.
But hey, I’m still sorta making a jab at Ebert, eh?