Are computer games art?
The millions of gamers and game designers out there will most likely tell you yes. Artistic principles comprise at least a part of some of the professions in video game design, a list of which can be found on the Video Game Design Schools website. Concept artists, graphic designers and script writers utilize artistic skill sets. But what about the video game product, is it a true artistic medium or simply a means of entertainment?
For one thing they operate on a different aesthetic principle and the idea of durability cannot be comparable say, to a Bernini bronze statue. But they can satisfy the artistic need of creating a rich immersive principle; there is an urban motif with many different things occurring simultaneously that have only an abstract connection to each other.There is a sensation of visual chaos; a tension of sequence and sensation producing an effect of the simultaneous meaning that the images are not organized and arranged in conventional fashion. It is art in the sense that these are often complex and multiple micro-worlds that entice us to explore further. Like a Hieronymus Bosch triptych such as Garden of Earthly Delights, there is a surreal dimension with multiple points of entry.
Jenkins: Miyamoto’s games are a later-day variation on Miyazaki’s panorama boxes — microworlds that delight us in their details and invite us to get down our hands and knees to see inside. Seen in that way, the computer game predates the cinema — at least in Japan. This is all heady stuff — and it may just be the cold medicine talking here — but I hope it provokes my readers to look at some of these works from a somewhat different point of view. Read More: http://henryjenkins.org/2007/01/more_thoughts_on_haw_par_villa.html#more
Ernest W. Adams: “So why aren’t most games art? One possibility that springs to mind is that interactivity precludes art; that art is a form of communication between the artist and the viewer, and if the viewer starts to interfere, the message is lost. It’s certainly true that interactivity interferes with narrative: narrative is about the control of the author, while interactivity is about the freedom of the player….
Roger Ebert: Santiago now phrases this in her terms: “Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging.” Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, “Night of the Hunter,” “Persona,” “Waiting for Godot,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?” Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand. Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato’s any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste….Read More: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html
However, I don’t believe that interactivity does necessarily preclude art. Chris Crawford, in his book The Art of Computer Game Design, wrote, “Real art through computer games is achievable, but it will never be achieved so long as we have no path to understanding. We need to establish our principles of aesthetics, a framework for criticism, and a model for development.” I disagree with him about a model for development – I think how you create a work of art is irrelevant – but he’s right on the money about the other things.” Read More: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/ArtForm/artform.htm
ADDENDUM:
Ebert: Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies’ “A Voyage to the Moon” (1902), which were “equally simplistic.” Obviously, I’m hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination. These days, she says, “grown-up gamers” hope for games that reach higher levels of “joy, or of ecstasy….catharsis.” These games (which she believes a
lready being made) “are being rewarded by audiences by high sales figures.” The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation. Read More: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html
—Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro has once again lavished praise on the medium of games.
“Videogames are the comic books of our time,” he said following a book reading in Portland attended by ShackNews. “They are an art form and anyone saying differently is a little out of touch because they are a narrative art form. “It’s a medium that gains no respect among the intellegensia,” he added. “They say ‘oh, videogames.’ And most people that complain about videogames have never f***ing played them.” Read More: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/268348/news/games-are-an-art-form-guillermo-del-toro/
Henry Jenkins:Panorama boxes — small windows into imaginary microworlds with titles like “The Great Underwater Adventure,” “Monman the Water Spider,” and “The Ogre’s Snack Box” sit close to the ground forcing adults to get down on their hands and knees to look inside. On a plaque, Miyazaki explains, “Just as people wished to make pictures move, they also wished they could look inside a different world. They yearn to enter the story or travel to a faraway land. They longed to see the future and landscapes of the past. The panorama box with no moving parts was made much earlier than the zoetrope.” Cinema, for Miyazaki, originates from a desire to step inside these microworlds and become a part of the story. Read More: http://henryjenkins.org/2007/01/more_thoughts_on_haw_par_villa.html#more
http://www.billogs.net/how-to-evaluate-computer-video-games-as-art/
John Lanchester:This sense of agency is the cultural and aesthetic USP of video games. The medium doesn’t have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can’t match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film. But it does have two great strengths. The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema. The second is to do with this sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose. It is this which gives the best games their immense involvingness. You are in the game in a way that is curiously similar to the way you are in a novel you are reading – a way that is subtly unlike the sense of absorption in a spectacle which overtakes the viewer in cinema. The interiority of the novel isn’t there, but the sense of having passed into an imagined world is. Read More: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/john-lanchester/is-it-art a
Bio Shock. Lanchester: If one were trying to find a point where video games are turning into a form of artistic expression, however, it might be towards the more powerful consoles that one would look. The Wii is great entertainment but in spirit it is closer to a toy than a game; I don’t mean that as a criticism, it’s a virtue. In the form of games such as those of Miyamoto, it is close to a spirit of pure play. This is often elusive in the darker types of video game. A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work. Read More: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/john-lanchester/is-it-art
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