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[Funyarinpa]

I could relate to OP.

Then I watched the Persona 5 trailer (the first one after the teaser).

Games are still art. Good games' common denominator often (usually) isn't as low as mainstream stuff, though.

 

[Dangansona]

I won't address the other points because I can't really argue against them, but for the preservation side of things I was saying that keeping both digital and physical versions of games is important, even if a consumer only cares for digital games. As for the last thing you said, it's perhaps just an imo situation but I do value the feeling of what I hold in my hands being the result of the hard work developers undergo to create the piece of art I'm about to experience. I feel like it's easier to forget that when burning through digital games.

Also for the last time before I put it at the top of the OP, I never wanted this thread to be a "are games art?" thread.

Of course video games are art, it's just that some games aren't made with artistry in mind and that's where OP's concern comes from.

That was largely what I was after yeah, and that several recent developments in the industry are overshadowing the artistry.

And to the guy above mentioning Persona 5, there's a great example of a game that will most likely come out as a finished product without any immersion breaking purchase notifications. And while some others that understood my concerns argued that doesn't matter and I can respect that, I still appreciate what Persona 5 will do.

 

[RipperGrim]

When I think of what makes games artful, I probably don't think of a game that tries very hard to be a movie.

Like, I don't think the artful things in Metal Gear Solid are the cutscenes.

What does it being similar to a movie have anything to do with it? People greatly exaggerate The Last of Us and it's similarities to being a movie.

It still touched people and it's still a videogame.

No, they're not art.



It's at the very core of gaming with you competing against the obstacles placed by another human. If you take that away, you are not playing a game. Games are simply surrounded by art. The cover of a video game is artistic, the contents of the game are not.

This is laughable, the only thing artistic about games is it's cover? So all the actual designs for the game be it visual or audio is just what exactly? Also what kind of definition is that for a game? What does it make a game like Minecraft where everything is up to the player? Why does it have to even be separate? How can a game not be the expression of someone's creativity because it has goals?

 

[Two Words]

I think some movies, music, tv shows and games try to be art. I think some try to simply entertain or meet a demand. Not much more to it than that.

 

[Monocle]

Games are more diverse than ever. Like every other kind of art, maybe 5% of games at most are going to be unusually excellent.

You don't see people wondering "Is literature slipping away from being art?" just because of Twilight's popularity and the rise of Young Adult fiction.

 

[Henkka]

No, they're not art.



It's at the very core of gaming with you competing against the obstacles placed by another human. If you take that away, you are not playing a game. Video games are simply surrounded by art.

I suppose you could define it like this. But then, you're saying that some products that are marketed and sold as 'games' aren't actually games. Their creators call them 'games' and they might be for sale on Steam, but they don't have any competition or obstacles.

 

[ngFROMAN]

Yeah; the parts individually are art on their own right, but the published sum is basically becoming a dopamine distribution device. Like an amusement park, essentially.

 

[JetSetRadio]

99.9999% of "crafted" art is pure shite too though.

 

[Enigmatic Rainbow]

What are the defined goals, rules, challenges and interaction of this?

A person(s) originally created this piece of art. The goal of this work was to most likely capture this person's beauty in the current state of emotion that is portrayed. The rules were most likely to retain the realism, that this is a real person, while also accentuating their features. This alone is challenging. Art doesn't have to be necessarily interacted with, but many will interact with this painting like any other piece of art. Examining the colors and how they accentuate the person's features, what the artist originally intended to make others see, and what others might get from the portrayal of this person. Who is this person, what do they do, etc.

Your narrow definition of what you think a game requires is meaningless.

Do you also not consider music, movies, or books art?

 

[RealityCheque]

Who cares?

Why do gamers have this need to compare their pastime to movies/TV/art etc?

This hobby/pastime/activity has been around for a long time now, do we really need to still be trying to justify its existence by measuring it against other, usually totally dissimilar media?

 

[GOOCHY]

They've never had a status as art so that makes answering this thread easy.

That said, there are artistic games and I appreciate the art that goes into them. Games as a whole being art? Nah.

 

[Cyrano]

Who cares?

Lots of people, as this thread shows.

Why do gamers have this need to compare their pastime to movies/TV/art etc?

People compare everything to everything. That's what we do as a perceptive species.

This hobby/pastime/activity has been around for a long time now, do we really need to still be trying to justify its existence by measuring it against other, usually totally dissimilar media?

Absolutely, because media is influenced by it and it's important to understand and appreciate where those influences come from and flow into. Deep analysis can only occur when we're willing to first destroy our own assumptions about what is, and look at what could be, but for a small shift in our perspective.

 

[BocoDragon]

Indie games are more "art" than ever.

AAA and mobile games are more "service" than ever.

 

[Enigmatic Rainbow]

They've never had a status as art so that makes answering this thread easy.

That said, there are artistic games and I appreciate the art that goes into them. Games as a whole being art? Nah.

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

NY TIMES: Supreme Court ruling on Video Games as an Art.

CNN: Supreme Court sees video games as art.

Supreme Court Documentation.

 

[Pudge]

It depends on your definition of art, just like it always does. For me personally, every piece of media that is created is art, whether that be Undertale or Madden 2002. Just like I would say that Rocky 4 is just as much art as some Oscar bait movie that I've never heard of.

Even if something is crass and commercialized, you can strip that away and appreciate the gameplay and systems underneath, that's what really counts

 

[Moronwind]

Games are not art because true art does not move.

 

[blame space]

what about movies

 

[spekkeh]

Indie games are more "art" than ever.

AAA and mobile games are more "service" than ever.

Yep, this year gave us The Beginner's Guide, Her Story, Land's End and Undertale, among others.

A lot of AAA and mobile games though, I hesitate to even call entertainment. Sick in vivo experiments on manipulating compulsive spending that bypassed any kind of ethical committee.

 

[Freshmaker]

No moreso than art is slipping away from art.

 

[JetSetRadio]

Art is not entertaining.

 

[Sumio Mondo]

Art is not entertaining.

Sure it is. I enjoy looking at paintings and listening to music, sometimes more than playing a game, to be honest.

 

[Whompa02]

Movies apparently slipped away after they removed intermissions and 3 hour minimums.

Now you get Harry Potter and Hunger Games micro movies

Damn Hollywood ruining our precious art!

 

[JetSetRadio]

Sure it is. I enjoy looking at paintings and listening to music, sometimes more than playing a game, to be honest.

Absolutely, but I consider entertainment to be cheap shit like a movie/game/hooker/rollercoaster.

 

[boiled goose]

It is only growing as a medium.

Artsy games have also increased, but there are also more games focused on competition, or party or whatever.

Being an artform can never be given or taken away from a very diverse medium.

Video games broadly describes interactive media. Writing is also broad. There's newspapers, poems, novels, and forum posts. Visual media is also broad. Movies, films, porn, sit coms. Even the fine arts are broad. Is every drawing art? What about the stick figures i drew when bored?


It's not even a valid question imo.

 

[Speely]

There is no art. Art is artifice; artificial. None of us are even really here, so art never was and never will be. Weep for that which was denied you before you ever weren't, which you aren't.

"Art games" is an anagram for "smart age." This means nothing, of course.

 

[MattKeil]

How can 200+ artists work on something for years and not have the end result be art?

Games are works of art. It's not up for debate. Just because you don't like something doesn't disqualify it as art.

 

[potatohead]

How can 200+ artists work on something for years and not have the end result be art?

Games are works of art. It's not up for debate. Just because you don't like something doesn't disqualify it as art.

Because people are assholes.

 

[OrlanisWorks]

Everyone gets to define what art is to them, but you better be up to tell why you believe as such or you can simply piss off and not bother talking on the subject.

There is no slipping away from a status as "art."

 

[petran79]

Ever since the 80s I could grasp with my small mind that games were art, especially if you were playing them on a multimedia computer like the Amiga....
The Amiga was the first computer to unite art and video games, especially through the demo scene

 

[Roran Stehl]

As the definition is mostly organic and personal, the better question is: "Why would it matter?"
External validation? Keep in mind that most people external to the medium won't spend the time to fully engage. Gaming often lack the immediacy of its offering, way different than painting for example.
Internal validation? Many people liking the medium as is won't see the need to call it as such, as their experience through enjoyment is enough.

Personally, I've played enough games and experienced enough other artistic medium to fully appreciate games as unquestionable art.

 

[John Kowalski]

Who cares?

Why do gamers have this need to compare their pastime to movies/TV/art etc?

This hobby/pastime/activity has been around for a long time now, do we really need to still be trying to justify its existence by measuring it against other, usually totally dissimilar media?

I care. Y'ev a problem b?

 

[mikefrails]

Can a product be art?

 

[RealityCheque]

I care. Y'ev a problem b?

Yes. Let's meet and fight to the death to see who's correct.

No i just don't see the need to compare, in the case of film and TV, to something that I see as generally inferior. It's like an inferiority complex on the part of vidoegames in general that they have to justify their popularity. They are great and a shitload of people love to spend their free time this way, isn't that enough?

 

[visiblemode]

I think you make some valid points here OP.

I very much consider the fragmentation and elemental monetization of games to be an erosion of their purity as an art form. It's hard not to see it that way.

Imagine a film winning Palme D'or at Cannes in spite of half of it's plot lines being locked behind microtransaction paywalls.

 

[John Kowalski]

Yes. Let's meet and fight to the death to see who's correct.

No i just don't see the need to compare, in the case of film and TV, to something that I see as generally inferior. It's like an inferiority complex on the part of vidoegames in general that they have to justify their popularity. They are great and a shitload of people love to spend their free time this way, isn't that enough?

It's not necessarily a need to be accepted by others. It's the personal acceptance that games are far behind other media which i also consume. When i go to movies, or to theater, or to a photo exib, there is an acknowledged artistic integrity that is on display and which the audience does not deny or seek to devalue. But in games that's what happens very, very often. They are insular, people come to games from games and ultimately they don't benefit from interdisciplinary experience the way other media does. There is an inferiority complex running across the medium but it displays itself not on "we're not good enough" but in "aren't these breadcrumbs enough? we should accept what we have, it should be good enough for us".

And no, it's not enough. What does it matter if games are extremely popular if they are vacuous, ephemeral entertainment? What does that achieve? Is that what devs should aspire to? That's highschool popularity, not genuine relevance. A ginormous number of people are coming to the medium and they're doing their best to explore the medium and explore themselves with it, doing very good work that is often discarded (and sometimes attacked) by the community they grew up with. Moreover, it's always important to have high standards. High standards keep us in check, they acknowledge the uncomfortable parts of the industry and community, they safeguard the developers and their vision, they force us to learn our tools and improve our work, they strengthen our methods and the individuals behind them, and most importantly they push us onward and upwards.

Games exist and that's something we have to deal with, so we deal with it by accepting it and pushing ourselves to give them the importance they rightfully deserve.

 

[Reebot]

A person(s) originally created this piece of art. The goal of this work was to most likely capture this person's beauty in the current state of emotion that is portrayed. The rules were most likely to retain the realism, that this is a real person, while also accentuating their features. This alone is challenging. Art doesn't have to be necessarily interacted with, but many will interact with this painting like any other piece of art. Examining the colors and how they accentuate the person's features, what the artist originally intended to make others see, and what others might get from the portrayal of this person. Who is this person, what do they do, etc.

Your narrow definition of what you think a game requires is meaningless.

Do you also not consider music, movies, or books art?

Actually, you just improperly answered his question.

You confused the rules for the artist with the rules for the consumer; its the latter in question. Same confusion for the challenge. And you just kind of skip over the interaction part.

His point is very valid. People don't engage with art like they engage with games. Its a fundamental and significant difference. And despite all the brushing off in this thread, no one's yet managed to answer his question.

 

[domlolz]

Look to indies. Transistor, Ori and the Blind Forest, Journey. The art is still there, it's just separate from the summer blockbusters.

the triple-aaa/summer blockbusters are still art if the indies are.

 

[Ivory Samoan]

My definition of art is something that has been created, and someone deriving emotions from said creation.

To me, that's art.. so anything can be art really - gaming fills me with so many complex and amazing emotions, I see it as my most used channel for artistically derived emotion.

If anything, with gaming getting more complex and mature: it's moving perfectly with my age/time: feels like the art style is moving with me too.

 

[NathanS]

Guess Shakespeare and his constant re-writes of his plays and even different versions for shorter runs times made absolutely no art.

Art does not have be something that is done once and and is then never touched again. Artist have been meddling and "patching" their works since before recorded history.

 

[Gh0stlyMostly]

Some games are art, some are service products.

You can tell which games have artistic integrity fueled behind it, and want you to experience something. And which games are trying to just put out a competent yearly product, or using a formula to make the next big thing.

In a sense gaming is becoming diverse in a real way, some people are artistically inclined, some aren't, some companies are artistically motivated, others aren't.

 

[littlebigman]

Of course video games are art. In terms of purpose, they're no different than books or movies - they are forms of creative expression that exist to entertain people. To say that only two of those three are art requires one to define "art" in a way that specifically excludes interactive media. The going assumption seems to be that books and movies are pure mediums, allowing the author to deliver their vision to the audience unhindered by the obligations of others, while video games are inherently enslaved by the need to provide players with cool toys to play with, and even a narrative on par with the works of Stanley Kubrick would need to sacrifice its artistic merit for the sake of totally awesome action setpieces.

My problem with this argument, besides that it basically suggests video games are incapable of carrying an engaging fiction, is that it assumes that narrative is the only true form of art. To be art, so the conventional wisdom goes, a video game must be written and paced and played out in sequence exactly as though it were a movie, and a truly artistic game puts the player's interactions with it entirely at the mercy of the tightly-structured story laid out by the artist behind it all. Essentially, a truly artistic game must shun the trappings of its own medium, and become little more than a movie where players must occasionally press X to dodge.

Hardly anyone seems to feel, as I do, that the real artistry in video games is in engaging the player on a purely interactive level. Just as movies can thrill people by showing them worlds and characters that invigorate their imaginations, video games entertain people by placing those things at their fingertips and giving them the reins. To create worlds that people enjoy exploring, and characters that people enjoying playing with, takes talent, creativity, and vision. Just as we celebrate Quentin Tarantino for creating wonderful movies that millions have seen and adored, we celebrate Shigeru Miyamoto for creating truly delightful video games that have entertained millions of players. They are both artists - they simply chose to engage their audiences in different ways.

 

[cRIPticon]

Never was art.

Completely, 100% disagree.

Also, replying to the OP, no. Those practices do not diminish video games as art.

 

[petran79]

Of course video games are art. In terms of purpose, they're no different than books or movies - they are forms of creative expression that exist to entertain people. To say that only two of those three are art requires one to define "art" in a way that specifically excludes interactive media. The going assumption seems to be that books and movies are pure mediums, allowing the author to deliver their vision to the audience unhindered by the obligations of others, while video games are inherently enslaved by the need to provide players with cool toys to play with, and even a narrative on par with the works of Stanley Kubrick would need to sacrifice its artistic merit for the sake of totally awesome action setpieces.

My problem with this argument, besides that it basically suggests video games are incapable of carrying an engaging fiction, is that it assumes that narrative is the only true form of art. To be art, so the conventional wisdom goes, a video game must be written and paced and played out in sequence exactly as though it were a movie, and a truly artistic game puts the player's interactions with it entirely at the mercy of the tightly-structured story laid out by the artist behind it all. Essentially, a truly artistic game must shun the trappings of its own medium, and become little more than a movie where players must occasionally press X to dodge.

Hardly anyone seems to feel, as I do, that the real artistry in video games is in engaging the player on a purely interactive level. Just as movies can thrill people by showing them worlds and characters that invigorate their imaginations, video games entertain people by placing those things at their fingertips and giving them the reins. To create worlds that people enjoy exploring, and characters that people enjoying playing with, takes talent, creativity, and vision. Just as we celebrate Quentin Tarantino for creating wonderful movies that millions have seen and adored, we celebrate Shigeru Miyamoto for creating truly delightful video games that have entertained millions of players. They are both artists - they simply chose to engage their audiences in different ways.

Another form of artistic expression also faced the same issue till it managed to be accepted by the public and art theorists:

video art

If video art installations can manage this kind of interactivity, borrowing also heavily from technology and video games, then it should be no issue for the latter to do the same.

 

[spekkeh]

Why are so many people discussing whether games are art, when this is not what the thread is about. OP asks whether they have become less art, ergo the games are (were) art is an axiom.

 

[Doctor_Thomas]

I don't like this idea that something like Call of Duty or whatever can't be art.

Art isn't about provoking some sort of profound response or being intellectually challenging, it can be, but doesn't have to be.

Art can be any created media. Stop trying to dismiss it as "service". Chopin's work is just as much "art" as Justin Bieber's work, but that doesn't mean that we have to put them on the same level, just that they've been created by people and provoke emotional responses.

Do I put Call of Duty on the same level as Journey? Absolutely not, but that doesn't mean that Call of Duty has any less value as art and potentially holds a higher artistic value to someone else because, here's the thing, artistic value is entirely subjective.

 

[Dangansona]

Why are so many people discussing whether games are art, when this is not what the thread is about. OP asks whether they have become less art, ergo the games are (were) art is an axiom.

Yeah, either less art or more likely just that the art within them is being washed out by certain aspects of the industry. Maybe I didn't make enough of a disclaimer in the beginning that this isn't a "are games art thread" and once a few people come in here shitpost "never were art lol" then they were challenged by those who disagree. And I don't blame the latter group, because of course games are art.

I think you make some valid points here OP.

I very much consider the fragmentation and elemental monetization of games to be an erosion of their purity as an art form. It's hard not to see it that way.

Exactly.

 

[nel e nel]

Yep, this year gave us The Beginner's Guide, Her Story, Land's End and Undertale, among others.

A lot of AAA and mobile games though, I hesitate to even call entertainment. Sick in vivo experiments on manipulating compulsive spending that bypassed any kind of ethical committee.

Her Story is a mobile game, as is Monument Valley. What format it comes out on is irrelevant, and thinking it is is the same kind of gate keeping bullshit that this thread is full of.

Lots of classical music and fine art "masterpieces" were commissioned by the ruling class throughout history.

 

[spekkeh]

Her Story is a mobile game. What format it comes out on is irrelevant

I erm, huh? I guess it got released on iPad too yeah. But I said 'a lot of mobile games' not categorically all of them.

 

[Delusibeta]

This thread is a bit like arguing that movies are losing their status as an art form because all of the blockbusters are designed as franchises first and foremost: a fundamentally silly argument, since it ignores the smaller stuff.

 

[JoseLopez]

Bad paintings exist, micro transactions are more often then not overstated and most games still feel traditional and digital games are the future (don't really understand how it affects the artistic part of game development since it's just more convenient.