Games are not an artistic form; nor have they ever been; nor will they ever be.
"FILM IS NOT ART, movies can never be art, filmakers cannot make art" ~Ralph Block 1927
Forward thinker detected.
zapping the reward center in your brain for dopamine
Looks like someone has been looking at the Fallout 4 design docs...
Any good game is fun. I can't name a good game that isn't fun. If art comes about on its own, who am I to stop it, but fun itself is the paramount quality of a game. Pathologic is a neat little game, but it's not fun. If it were fun, I'd say it was a masterful work of art and wouldn't consider it a negative quality. But to say Pathologic is art and nothing else belies its flaws.
The same company that did Pathologic did The Void. The Void is much much more a game than Pathologic and remains almost as artful, or as I would put it, more artful. I wouldn't play
it again either, but I enjoyed it much more.
A game needs to be fun, is my point. But without fun, a game is not really artful, because to me art only comes about from a mastery of a skill. You wouldn't say an amateur's pot is a
work of art, even if it expressed an interesting idea; an amateur by definition does not yet have the skill to produce something of mastery. You can say it's in the vein of art, and a work in the lifetime of a developing artist, but I wouldn't say it's
art. Art as a concept is, "skill", and skillless art is not much to behold, even if you nannies might try to say everyone is an "artist" and that the shit you put in a toilet can be called art; in which case, who is the one reinventing the definition of art? Not I.
Someone who is a master of their trade... and let's say that trade is making video games? Well, they better make a goddamn masterful game. Then I'll call them an artist. But most game designers, like most artists, are hacks, and ergo, what they produce can scarcely be called art.
I want games to be fun because I derive entertainment from them. Once developers can produce games that are consistently fun, then they can consider ways to make them artful -- though usually, the act of making a fun game makes it art in and of itself.
Go is an artful game, but really only by coincidence. And Go is fun -- otherwise nobody would play it. If Go weren't fun, it'd be people putting colored stones on a board pointlessly. Nobody wants to waste their precious time marvelling black and white stones on a board, despite what pretentious hipsters might try to tell you.
The last thing we need in the industry right now is more poetic, cinematic, gameless twats, who think they can spend 95% of the budget on marketing, graphics, art direction, story and voice acting and expect a product worth my $60 buckaroos (or more, as the case is becoming).