Del: Hey, Jeff. Define art.
Jeff: Uh…
Del: What is art to you? If you had to write a paper on it. Or tell someone what I’m asking you for a test.
Jeff: A creative process that, ah–
Del: So it’s a process or a result of a process?
Jeff: I’d say both. Like music, writing, and drawing. Whatever. I’d say it’s art as it’s being made and once it is finished.
Del: Would you say what we do, at work, (we both work at Whole Foods, a grocery store) is art?
Jeff: No. No, that’s not art, but I’m trying to think why that isn’t and what a musician does it– Can I look up the definition?
Del: No. What I’m getting at is would you say video games are art?
Jeff: Yeah. I would. No matter how bad it is. Yeah, it’s art. I’d say art comes from your imagination. It’s a creation. Something you’ve made.
Del: So let’s say you know someone that does’t think games are art. They think music, painting, movies, etc are, but not games. To them a game is just a toy. They’re like LEGOs or action figures. Just something to play with, but certainly not art. What game would you tell them to play in hopes of getting them to think maybe they’re wrong or reconsider their stance?
Jeff: Ah, the first game that comes to mind is Okami, but I never played it. It just seems–from what I’ve seen–very artistic.
Del: Let’s stick with something you’ve played.
Jeff: Ok, then I’d say Journey or Flower. Those both do a lot with very little. There’s no talking, it’s just visuals and music. But with just that you end up with very strong emotions.
Del: I’d agree with Journey. That’s a game a lot of people seem to reference when art and video games come up. I never played Flower so I can’t comment on that one. I played Flow, but I wouldn’t use that to try and change someone’s mind about games being art.
From left to right: Journey, Flow, and Flower
[While we chat a bit more on the subject I go to see if The Pirate Bay is up; as of my writing this it was not]
Jeff: Still down?
Del: Seems so. The other day we were talking about Dishonored again and you said you’d already pre-ordered it. You also told me that in the terms and conditions that it’s actually ok to put the game on two systems? That surprised me, a lot. I mean, you could pay the $60, or whatever, for a new game. Go to your buddy’s place, tell him that for $40 you’ll put the game on his PS3 and you’ve now paid just $20 for the game and your pal has saved $20. That doesn’t seem very ‘Sony-like’ at all to me. I guess you could keep doing it, I don’t think there anything to stop you from putting your games on ten systems, or a hundred. At what point does copying a game become piracy?
Jeff: I guess it’d be personal.
Del: Personal?
Jeff: Well yeah. Like for someone it might be two times, since that’s what Sony has said is ok. But, I mean, other than… it’s kind of, just whatever. If they don’t want it to happen or for things to be abused then they should do a better job of plugging those holes. Like a technical glitch. If there’s a glitch in a game, like being able to beat The Legend of Zelda: OoT in 20min, then so be it. Someone is going to find it if they want to.
Del: So to you there is no such thing as piracy. It’s just an error that publishers, movie studios, music labels and the like need to fix. Couldn’t you then say that if a bank didn’t want to be robbed then it shouldn’t allow robbers in?
Step it up, banks. Stop getting robbed.
Jeff: Exactly.
Del: Huh. Well, ok. That does make sense in a way. It’s like… Spock logical to a fault, I dig it. Next week we can talk about Dishonored since we’ll have been able to play it a bit. Do you think it’ll be as good as, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution in that you’ll want to play it a few times? Maybe stealth once and all out murderer the next or maybe another time kind of in between? You can beat it without killing anyone, did you know that?
Jeff: I didn’t. But I can tell you that on my first time I’ll certainly be a mass murderer. I’ll try stealth for a minute and then just kill everyone. That’s why I’m so bad at the MGS games.
We’ll be chatting about this next week.
I think it’s much more correct to call video games an “art medium” rather than “art” in its entirety.
I’d say that art is the non-literal conveyance of information. Information being defined broadly here. Note that this is a different thing than necessarily the nonverbal conveyance of information, but this definition rules out a lot of things, such as assembly instructions, factual textbooks, strategy guides, and Microsoft Word, unless their design is in some way conveying a sense of aesthetic. It is also inclusive of a lot of things that people might not necessarily consider art, such as advertising, product design, games, and other “artful” things. I like this definition because it gives words to help explain a lot of things I have personally regarded as art for a long time while also accurately separating that which I consider creative work, but not necessarily art. Worth noting is that I personally have a very broad definition of information, broader than most people use the word for, so bear with me a little.
I believe games are art because they convey non-literal information in the form of their method of play. The method of play is itself an aesthetic that is distinct from its graphical representation. The design of the game conveys itself in non-literal terms. This means that it doesn’t outright describe itself to you, you must understand it implicitly through its means of conveyance. The information conveyed by the game is its strategies, the pace of the gameplay, the model of the actions you perform, the type of thinking required to solve it, the “feeling” of the actions involved, the spaces you traverse and their internal model contrasted with their visual appearance.
I think that by mentioning games like Okami, Journey, Flow, and Flower, you are falling into the exact same trap as the people you referred to with, “They think music, painting, movies, etc are, but not games.” What game would you recommend to a person who only thought paintings were art? A game that looks like a painting! No, that’s only reinforcing the idea that paintings are art. If this game is very artistic because it looks like a painting then you are implicitly admitting that games are not art, only things which stick to the categories we’ve accepted as art culturally are.
An example a friend gave to me was, “Is a hospital art because paintings are hung up in it?” No, a hospital exists for a literal purpose, not to convey non-literal information. Hospitals without paintings are not art, and hospitals with paintings are not necessarily art either. Redesigning the entire hospital to look like a house from Dr. Seuss or something doesn’t mean all hospitals are now art because that one has an artful design. In the case of such a hospital, the hospital itself would not be art nearly so much as the building that houses the hospital is. A hospital is not art until its methods of being a hospital itself are artful. Attaching objects that we accept as art to non-art objects does not make them art by proximity. Okami, as a game, is art because of the nature of its interactivity, not merely because it has a Sumi-e filter on everything. Dwarf Fortress is art despite being composed entirely of ASCII characters, the barest form of visual representation possible. Nearly all games are a form of art because nearly all games convey some form of nonliteral information. To call them art by association is to limit what games are and can be.
Didn’t investig8ivejouralism address this partially in his Mass Effect 3 video on art envy?
And Maiden Rape Assault: Violent Semen Inferno is at the height of our artistic expression, yes.
How do you consider advertising to be art? According to your definition, it isn’t, since it literally conveys information. It may do so in the trappings of a non-literal style (that often take the guise of tv shows, movies, and animation) but it is still trying to very literally sell you something. For me it seems similar to your argument about over-fetishizing visual art as art–which I agree with–but that specific example seems wobbly.
I think the discussion of “is this art? or even “what is art?” might be going the same way as discussions on brows, and even more recently, taste: the important factors are not whether it fits this pre-described category (that, remember, used to be designed by old white men, for old white men, and filled with old white men) but through what medium it conveys its message, what that message is, and how that message modulates in meanings due to the context surrounding it. Post-modernism, cognitive science, and social psychology have done much to destabilize our conception of a stable and consistent reality (for example, at the time we recall a memory, we reconstruct it using materials and associations that are in our “present”), and literary studies and political examinations have shown us that much of our categorization, and even our use of language, is heavily codified and resides in diachronic contexts.
Thanks for the intelligent reply. I’m too used to /v/.
Maybe it’s just the mindset that I come from, but it seems to me a natural assumption to say that advertising is art. The basic reason that commercials as they exist in their current form are art is because they do not choose to inform straight up about their product and ask you to buy like infomercials of the past generally did. They’re not nearly so straightforward. The non-literal information they convey is brand identity. Coca Cola commercials are built on conveying ideas about tradition, family, belonging, relaxation, happiness. Commercials that we know use all the tools that music videos, film makers, painters, and other types of artist use, and generally for the same purposes. The only real qualifier that makes a commercial any different from what we normally accept as art is that there is a product attached. On a more basic level, advertising firms hire artists to do the same work they do normally. Is a trailer for a movie no longer art in its own right because it’s trying to sell the movie? Does this mean that an anime music video isn’t art because it is compiled the same way that a movie trailer is? Is a music video not art because it is trying to sell the music featured? I don’t think that necessarily trying to sell something automatically strips something of being artful or not.
Whether something necessarily has a literal function doesn’t really prevent it from having a non-literal conveyance. A speech for example may have the literal intention of telling people what you want them to know, but an artful speech goes beyond that to convey a certain aesthetic in its wording. Speeches can use devices found in poetry and prose to convey non-literal ideas such as emotions, brand identity, and suggesting information about the subject matter that is not outright stated.
I think the discussion of, “Is this art?” is generally pointless, because nearly everything that even raises the question is itself artful. Better questions are usually whether something has merit as art, not whether it is or isn’t as if that connotes some special status to the object.
There is a lot of argument over what is or isn’t art, because for millenia, we have struggled to define what is or isn’t art in a consistent manner, being forced to rely on innate preconceptions of what we believe to be art. I like the non-literal conveyance definition because it is simple and elegant, fitting everything we’ve called art through the ages, yet obviously not being all inclusive like some people’s conceptions that everything is art.
I believe that what is or isn’t art has remained consistent throughout history. However, “The map doesn’t match the territory.” Our internal models of what things are, do not always match the things themselves. Something is what it is, even if people don’t necessarily recognize it as such.
Our language is codified and obfuscated, but that does not mean that it does not necessarily have meaning, or that meaning does not exist independently of its representation in our language.
I think what really gets me is that, sort of in line with Walter Benjamin (and I don’t intend to turn this into a name-drop fest), human perception (our way of constructing and viewing the world) is conditioned by history, by our current state and context. With that in mind, I find it frustrating that, when talking about games, people (myself included) default to terminology and classifications that belong to other art forms. Games are unprecedented in their capacity for both interaction and the compulsion to think, to feel, to be affected. Unlike, say, a play where we have direct view of the cast, and thus sympathize with them, or a film where we assume the viewpoint of the camera and thus sympathize with it, games create a sense of dissonance there that I think can be played with more (though, having no technological design background, would venture no way of doing it). There exist signs and referents, but I think it’s in the form of the work, in how it creates and represents its own world, and then allows the viewer to dig into it, that gives a work merit. (But even the word ‘viewer’, and the perspective it implies here, is incorrect and troubling.) But that is kind of a post-modern, “anything goes”-type response.
I would say that the merit of a game, similar to the quality of other forms of art is generally determined by depth. It’s about how the work can be interpretted and reinterpretted, and how many levels it’s working on to convey information and generate complexity. In animation, you have the composition of the scene, the lighting, the color choices, the contrast, the saturation, the body language of the characters, the actual design of the characters, their scripts or lack of scripts, the tone of voice in the voice acting, the voice actor casted for the role. All of these are individual values that can or can not be used to convey aesthetic and narrative information.
Games are unique in that they are interactive. The merit of a game is whether it creates interesting interactions or not. Interesting interactions have a wider variety of precise possible outcomes that are meaningful to completion of the game. Being able to ring a bell for example is not a meaningful interaction, unless it triggers something else, or has some effect on the environment. The slice of a blade through space however can be, depending on how much effort the developer puts into it. If it’s god of war, the slice of a blade usually means nothing. Things auto-attach and are generally filler actions. They do not have much physical information. In Dark Souls, the slice of a blade is very different, and it has its own hitboxes that actually move through space and their positioning determines if they strike the enemy at all, or hit a wall and rebound and other factors. Blades have startup, active, and recovery animations. This interaction has much more substance than say Batman’s punches in Arkham Asylum that lock onto enemies easily.
I don’t think the creation of a virtual world is what gives games merits, as there have been many games with totally insubstantial worlds that were great, and many games with massive and tremendously detailed worlds that were awful. I’d say that world creation is an art unto itself, and that level design, more directly related to games, has its own set of values. No matter how well populated a world is, if it has shallow interactions, it falls flat, and Skyrim is plain as day evidence of that.
Yeah, the way we view the world is inevitably biased by how we are conditioned, but I’m an objectivist. I believe in a reality separate to myself or my perceptions of it, where perceptions are hints as to certain aspects of it. Objects exist outside our conception of them and it is our job to make our conceptions of them as accurate as possible. I don’t want to consign reality to being something that we cannot understand interpret or judge, because that is an epistomologically useless viewpoint.
Default to terms that make sense, invent new ones where required. Make sure invented terms fit well and seem natural, like intelligent uncertainty (yomi, or being uninformed of the opponent’s tactic but knowing your opponent well enough to make a likely guess), or efficiency race (games based on doing something the fastest without any RPS (rock paper scissors) interactions).
I don’t think that games can really enable sympathy on any greater level than other mediums except for the fact that they frame the player in the first person relative to the actions of the other characters. I don’t think they can enable greater sympathy just because they are limited by the same conventions film are until there is greater AI capabilities enabling true interaction with characters rather than preselected dialog choices. That and I don’t imagine we will be able to empathize easily with anything we perceive as a construct rather than a human being. As long as that border exists, I think that games will be stuck separated just as much as other mediums. And until that is possible, I believe that conversational styles of gameplay are going to continue to be shallow series of decisions instead of multifaceted phases of interaction like they could potentially be.
This is why I like writing for this site. Because I know we don’t get Kotaku-tier posts in the replies. It’s a good feeling knowing our readership is a bit above the rest of the web.
Haha, I actually wrote an application to join the staff yesterday. I like writing about video games and it would be nice to get some of my stuff published, even if this isn’t exactly the most professional site (only one I respect though).
Wouldn’t let me further respond to your last comment, but I think your last paragraph is particularly interesting. I just read an article by J. Hoberman about how 21st century cinema is fundamentally different than its predecessors. He claims that, among other changes, the switch from a physical film format to a digital one, as well as the rise of CGI, has led to a cinema that can seemingly draw a viewer more forcefully into its world, but actually further distances them from it due to the awareness of “things not being as they seem,” with the ultimate effect of a total cinema totally disassociating people from reality.This is fascinating (and, I think, with merit) because many pre-digital films relied on the conceit of camera-as-person in order to draw that sympathy; though there is no interactivity with a film, there is a spatial and relational invitation, which then allows emotional bonds to be made.
CGI, and films made primarily with it (no matter how good they look), point to an artificiality of setting, a dislocation for the viewer and thus a destabilization. I think this might be why games have trouble drawing sympathy and more complex emotions: because the artificiality, even if we claim not to be bothered by it, automatically places us at a distance from games and arouses in us a feeling of the uncanny. Then again, I think your points have merit, and illuminate how video games are in a unique place in that they have to invent their own rules of representation, of physics, of mechanics, of logic. Of everything, really.
And send in that application! I actually write for the site (though not as often as I’d like) and it would be great to have another person to bounce ideas off of, especially since you’ve got some great ideas. I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing something about gaming terminology, and the need for consistency, but haven’t got it into a satisfactory form yet.
It’s interesting that you brought up world building as not being a part of what makes a game good or artistic, because I held that belief, but I believe you are right. It is merely a part of the possibilities that could be used to create a game, much like blue is a color that doesn’t necessarily need to be used for a painting to be art.
I don’t entirely agree that it is impossible for people to associate with things that aren’t strictly human, in fact I quite often prefer things that are distinctly not human for my artistic intake. Almost all of the music I listen to lacks “traditional vocals” (e.g. screaming, spoken word, robotic voice, looped voices), I much prefer more abstract movies and music, and I often have some sort of emotional disconnect with movies that center around human issues (e.g. those soldiers returning home videos never really get me, but I saw one were a dog freaked out to see him and I balled like a child). I know that it isn’t a typical thing for people to not be able to sympathize with human emotion (and probably isn’t healthy) but I often find the games that are the least realistic to be the most touching. These are, of course, ultra-art house indie hipster games (see Twofold Secret) with extra helpings of pixels, but there you go. This is probably more because of the literary nature of the games, but there is also the music which has a ridiculous influence on my emotions.
The whole thing brings to mind a quote from Aldous Huxley about fiction and literature. “The trouble with fiction… is that it makes to much sense. Reality never makes sense.” I wish I could just quote the first two or three paragraphs of The Genius and the Goddess but you can look that up if you want to. That’s kind of how it is, for me at least. I have an easier time understanding and dealing with the abstraction of things rather than the reality of them, and that understanding allows them to affect me more.
Haha, glad to see I’m changing some views here. I was in a similar situation once, twice, maybe more. I used to think good level design was teaching the player how to play the game without saying a thing. I used to think Valve were the almighty lords of level design because all their games were structured this way, and they have absolute reams of commentary on how they carefully crafted their levels. Frankly, to a large degree, this is bullshit. Level design is a lot more complicated than being obvious. Sometimes it’s about not being entirely obvious, or outright hiding things. Level design, like other aspects of game design, is about conveying nonliteral ideas. It’s about creating interesting and dynamic situations, not explaining how to beat the game. Valve is pretty brilliant for making games that anyone (iJustine is not a person) can beat/solve, but they often do so while sacrificing the integrity of their levels. I’m sure you’ve seen that one picture or heard the actual dev node in HL2: ep2 where they explained how the antlion hive was going to be more mazelike but playtesters got lost. (This one: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/416986/temp/1345320110659.jpg) Dark Souls is my obsession lately, and I frankly think it is a master class in level design. Every trap has a subtle tip off, the enemies are positioned to create difficult to escape situations and sometimes attack you from in front and behind or completely mob you. There are tons of secrets hidden in nearly every area of the game. I just found new secret areas recently and I’ve been playing the game more or less since it came out. The big idea is to use the levels to kind of engineer stories. Create situations that the player finds memorable. I’m sure absolutely EVERYONE remembers that dragon bridge from Demon’s Souls. The one that everyone wrote, “Run straight through” in front of. I’m particularly fond of the double illusory wall in blighttown that leads to the great hollow, and those fucking silver knight archers guarding the way inside Anor Londo’s castle. I’ve beaten the game several times and they still bug the crap out of me sometimes.
I don’t mean that people can’t associate with things that are not actual humans. Just that there are limits to that. People can obviously get very attached to fictional characters. I mean, I feel a bit silly for admitting this, but I get really worked up over cute and well done romances in some stories (y’know, ones that aren’t mass effect). The veil can never be fully pulled as long as we are aware there is a veil to pull at all. The big deal with actual relations to characters in games or fiction is, we know on the inside that they are a surface without anything behind it. They have no thoughts of their own like a human would. Our actions cannot affect them, so we cannot empathize with them on that fundamental level. There is no other besides ourselves, and this puts a cap on how far we can lose ourself in the fiction. Suspension of disbelief is still necessary.
Things that are less realistic are frequently more relatable for us. They have tremendous potential to be appealing, and people with difficulties associating with other people usually like characters like that because of exaggeration of expression that makes them more easy to understand. http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/730
I generally process the entire story, visual aesthetic, and emotionality of a game in a completely different frame of mind than I process the gameplay. I love both, but I think that the trappings the game decorates itself in are just trappings, and at best serve to convey more aspects of the gameplay rather than necessarily being the most important part of a game. For this reason, indie arthouse games typically bug the shit out of me. They tend to have such insubstantial gameplay aspects to them that they’d be better summed up in a lets play on youtube than actually playing the game for yourself.
Also worth noting is that I’m totally taking some of my statements here and adding them to my evernote essays on game design. Hahaha!
“So let’s say you know someone that does’t think games are art. ”
Does’t
I wanted to point this out, it felt too glaringly obvious to me.
1. vidya isn’t art, you shouldn’t care if it is either
2. piracy is a good way to show developers if a game is good or bad or play games that are too short to be worth £50