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Video Games Can Never Be Art -Roger Ebert

catfood

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PS: most of the gaymz that are brought up as examples of gaymz-as-art-form are shit at, well, being games. Make that of it what you will.
 
Unwanted

Sweeper

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PS:T
A pretty good novel.
Combat is largely an afterthought.
Be art, or be vidya. Don't do that in-between, half measure shit.
 

Reality

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I hate the games as art movement. That path leads to Walking simulators and the like.

As far as I am concerned games that are games 100% of the time are the most art. I mean mostly 80s arcade games. There is no traversal, or no separation from gameplay sequences and narrative sequences. It is all what you paid for all the time.

I feel like story is window dressing, and I remember the famous mean that video game is where rejected movie scripts go to die.
 

Melcar

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I hate the games as art movement. That path leads to Walking simulators and the like...

Because they try to emulate other forms of art (movies, novels, etc.). I would go as far and say that people that make those types of "games" don't really understand games, the art of making games.
 

Machocruz

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By a basic definition of art, I think some games qualify. There is an idea that is brought to life through the work of man, that exists for the purpose of aesthetic delight and maybe intellectual stimulation. Observing nature/reality and organizing it to create something that didn't exist before and perhaps make the reality better.

As far as games not being as well written as literature or as well directed as cinema (or now TV), of course not, why would they be? Those fields are more prestigious and therefore attract top shelf people with those skillsets.

And as long as games traffic mostly in make-believe and juvenile subjects, they will not be taken seriously as culture. It is what it is, they are enjoyable despite that.
 

Thal

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I can't be assed to reread that again, but IIRC Ebert's argument was fundamentally wrong, because he didn't understand what videogames are. Basically, Tetris can't be art, which is correct. He was also probably thinking stuff like Doom, which has narrative so thin and low brow that it can't be art either. But this is not the case if the game has a deeper narrative, like for example Deus ex. In these cases, the question whether its good enough to be genuinely intellectual, which isn't the case most of the time. But consider, if the only movies in existence were Marvel and Transformers movies. It would be easy to say that cinema isn't art either, but it would be just as wrong.

Also, I reiterate that a videogames have a potential to be a very unique art form because of their interractivity, which allows human beings to engage in real self-reflection. Take Bioshock for example. Essentially the point isn't about the twist or Ayn Rand. It's the fact that when Atlas tells you the magic words in the beginning, you actually do his bidding and kill the first splicer and so on. Even if it wasn't railroaded, you'd still do it. Why is it that every time when you play a first person action rpg or whatever game and you get a wrench or a crowbar, your first impetus is to beat people to death with it?

Because you've been conditioned to, just like the character you're playing. You're buying an action game, so you must kill. Well, if this is the case, what else have you been conditioned to do in your every day life? You can't explore this question in the same way through a movie, book or a painting, because you are an observer not an actor.

Having said that, "art" such as this has no direct relationship with the quality of the game. If the gameplay is shit, no matter of art will help. I liked Bioshock but there are way better games, including in its own genre.
 
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wahrk

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Not only are video games art, but they are the superior art form of all because all other art forms are a subset of them. Every story that can be told through film can be done told in a video game, but video games can tell stories in ways that films can't.

So, I actually think you have a point... theoretically speaking.

However, the reality is that all of these elements usually end up inferior to their counterparts in other mediums, rather than resulting in some kind of “gesamtkunstwerk” like you describe. I don’t know if there are, or will be, any developers with the skill to put all those elements together into something that is truly a work of art.

Like I said, the core issue is gameplay. Gameplay has to be the main foundation of everything. And good gameplay = fun gameplay. The story and visuals and music can all be great, but if the moment to moment gameplay is shooting aliens with laser guns, I can’t really call that “art”.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Level design is an artform. Interactive storytelling is an artform (like hiding some critical information in a secret area of the level, able to be missed).

Thief is a work of art.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
if the moment to moment gameplay is shooting aliens with laser guns, I can’t really call that “art”.

Conan the Barbarian (1982) has plenty of scenes where the moment-to-moment action is half-naked dudes whacking each other with swords, yet it's one of the greatest works of art ever made.
 

Lemming42

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The whole argument is stupid. Play Unreal Tournament 1999 - the music is art and stands up alongside many DnB/EDM albums of the era, the visuals are art (some very strikingly aesthetic levels like Facing Worlds), and the game itself offers an adrenaline-packed experience you couldn't get in any other medium.

If the argument is something along the lines of "ah but art has to ~mean~ something or provoke an emotional response", I don't find 99% of paintings or sculptures emotionally moving or meaningful, and I don't enjoy the overwhelming majority of movies (which people unquestionably consider an art form). I'd rather play UT99.
 

Serious_Business

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I would say games are artistry more than art. It's true that the interaction part of games remove them from the artistic sphere : in art you are not meant to modify the work, the work is supposed to stand on its own. Nevertheless there are elements in video games that are not interactive ; ironically these elements can be seen as the poorer aspects of the artistry, of the gameplay. A purely interactive medium would in effect stimulate you in a way that you have to react to something at all times, take decisions and such ; this isn't really an aesthetic experience, in fact it sounds more like work than anything else. You might argue that this interactivity is complex, that it allows the individuals to apprehend the experience in their own way, and that this is the core of the aesthetic experience ; but when you're interacting you're breaking the distance between you and the game, the "piece of art", in a very peculiar way. This distance seems to me to be essential in an aesthetic experience, even though you can again argue for something like a "lost of the self", where you just break the distance and become fascinated. When when you're interacting with the game, you may very well experience this kind of fascination, but precisely you're doing it interactively ; you're engaging in a kind of dialectic with an informational system that presents to you a set number of mathematical possibilities, and you have to evolve in a kind of constant state of variables where you yourself become a variable.

Here the question you might as well ask is this : are mathematics art? Mathematics in themselves go beyond artistry, as they deal with a very much wider plane than what closed systems offer ; I'm no mathematician so I can't speak much about this, and unfortunately I suspect most mathematicians can't speak very well about what they do. At any rate, we're in the realm of quantities here, and you could say that art is in the realm of qualities, and even though that'd be too simple of a way to put it, it wouldn't be entirely impertinent to think about. Meaning : games are very much in the realm of quantities as well, of forms and structures, and I doubt that art create structures to speak of. This is perhaps what makes art so confusing to people : it doesn't have any kind of general structure, or informational message either ; it doesn't have "general ideas", although you can surely produce ideas about art ; art produces singularities, not ideas. The main aesthetic confusion of our time is this : people believe artists create ideas, they essentially think they are philosophers. They aren't. The truth is, a lot of artists probably can't speak about their work without producing an endless stream of banalities ; it's not so much worth it to listen to them, but it doesn't mean that what they do is worthless.
 

wahrk

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if the moment to moment gameplay is shooting aliens with laser guns, I can’t really call that “art”.

Conan the Barbarian (1982) has plenty of scenes where the moment-to-moment action is half-naked dudes whacking each other with swords, yet it's one of the greatest works of art ever made.

:lol: Even if Conan is true ART(tm), half naked dudes whacking each other with swords is not a core foundational element of film, like gameplay is to games.

The whole argument is stupid. Play Unreal Tournament 1999 - the music is art and stands up alongside many DnB/EDM albums of the era, the visuals are art (some very strikingly aesthetic levels like Facing Worlds), and the game itself offers an adrenaline-packed experience you couldn't get in any other medium.

If the argument is something along the lines of "ah but art has to ~mean~ something or provoke an emotional response", I don't find 99% of paintings or sculptures emotionally moving or meaningful, and I don't enjoy the overwhelming majority of movies (which people unquestionably consider an art form). I'd rather play UT99.

IMO having artistic elements doesn’t make something “art” as a whole. Shitty popcorn films can have great soundtracks. But I guess that depends on your definition of art. If a finely made clock is a kind of art, then games could be art in the same way.
 
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Egosphere

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Trying to answer this simply leads to word games without any substance. Agreeing on the definition of 'art' might resolve this, but there will never be an agreement, since taking the intersection of every opinion will most likely lead us to an empty set
 

Morpheus Kitami

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The whole argument is stupid. Play Unreal Tournament 1999 - the music is art and stands up alongside many DnB/EDM albums of the era, the visuals are art (some very strikingly aesthetic levels like Facing Worlds), and the game itself offers an adrenaline-packed experience you couldn't get in any other medium.

If the argument is something along the lines of "ah but art has to ~mean~ something or provoke an emotional response", I don't find 99% of paintings or sculptures emotionally moving or meaningful, and I don't enjoy the overwhelming majority of movies (which people unquestionably consider an art form). I'd rather play UT99.
The art has to mean something or provoke an emotional response seems like a bad argument to me. Think of what likely produces an emotional response in art. The works of Jackson Pollock are going to produce an emotional response in anyone, but its not a good one. By that metric, the works of every edgy teenager on Deviantart have made high art. Has anyone not laughed at Coldsteel the Hedgehog? Laughter is an emotional response. Ergo, Coldsteel the Hedgehog should net the artist millions.
Of course that leads to the problem that every attempt to define art falls into. We are like Plato describing man as a featherless biped, and soon enough Diogenes will pluck his chicken to mock our arguments. I could say that something very well-made is art, but that could very well apply to the building someone lives in. It is like pornography, we know it when we see it, despite the author's claims.
 

Shinji

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This is one of those questions that are really worthless, because regardless of the answer nothing would change.

Let's assume that from this day onward we all collectively agree that games are art, end of story. Do you reallly think people would care?
People would still buy and play their favorite games, and developers would still create whatever games they want, regardless of the general consensus.

Only failed developers craving attention from their peers care about pushing the idea that "hey, *my* games are art, look at me, the starving artist trying to move the medium forward, while still failing thanks to those dumb consumers that don't have the intelligence required to appreciate true art".

In the end what really matters the most is if people are having fun and being challenged.

I don't play Nintendo games, but I respect their vision of always making games play like games. So thank God for them.

Bonus:


bdegE1a.jpg
 

Whipped Cream

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So, I actually think you have a point... theoretically speaking.

However, the reality is that all of these elements usually end up inferior to their counterparts in other mediums, rather than resulting in some kind of “gesamtkunstwerk” like you describe. I don’t know if there are, or will be, any developers with the skill to put all those elements together into something that is truly a work of art.

Like I said, the core issue is gameplay. Gameplay has to be the main foundation of everything. And good gameplay = fun gameplay. The story and visuals and music can all be great, but if the moment to moment gameplay is shooting aliens with laser guns, I can’t really call that “art”.

You make a good point. This reminds me of an article written by science fiction novelist Peter Watts (https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8692). The TLDR of the article is basically that he used to think that adding more and more interactivity to a game would make the storytelling better untill he played The Last of Us (the original one). He thought that the story was one of the best that he had seen in a video game, but that the reason that the story was good was that the game was basically a movie. Essentially: gameplay and interactivity can add to the story, but also detract from it. Interactivity allows the player to create their own story, but a well-crafted linear story written by a good writer will generally be better than the one that a player creates by themself on the fly.
 

luj1

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"Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."
-Roger Ebert


https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/video-games-can-never-be-art

Do you guys think he's wrong? If so, why?

Yeah, I respect Mr Ebert but I believe he is wrong.

Drawing, painting, sculpting, composing, etc. are art.

What are video games if not a conglomeration of 2D drawings, 3D-sculpted objects, music, sounds, etc. - therefore a pan-art form. Just like film.

There is good and poor art, but that is another matter.
 
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DeepOcean

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Essentially: gameplay and interactivity can add to the story, but also detract from it. Interactivity allows the player to create their own story, but a well-crafted linear story written by a good writer will generally be better than the one that a player creates by themself on the fly.
On a game like Last of Us, the only reason the gameplay is in there is to give the illusion the world is a real place where you are with the characters in it, so you have the impression of doing a journey but that is gameplay in the service of traditional story telling but that isnt the only way to do it and "better" is a subjective assement.

A game like Thief for example, do the opposite, the game is about the life and fantasy of being a master Thief with traditional storytelling as just a tool for a small bit of context but the heavy lifting is done by real "lived" spaces where the focus is the spaces you interact with some levels having a surreal quality about them.

Interactivity allow for full immersion while traditional storytelling, because of the presense of some person controlling you, you are always kept at distance, yes, in theory you could end up with a better Hollywood story that way but what if you didnt care about the Hollywood story at all?

There are many ways to explore interactivity, unfortunately it is risky to do it on a AAA game and many project leads have this ambition of being seeing as famous Hollywood directors like Neil Cuckman for example, so in practice, they dont do it. It is a lost cause to use modern games as any example of video game art because they barely even want to be videogames to begin with.
 
Self-Ejected

RNGsus

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"Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."
-Roger Ebert


https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/video-games-can-never-be-art

Do you guys think he's wrong? If so, why?
I agree that games can't be art as a rule. I also say cinema can't be art as a rule, and artists themselves are extremely rare. An artist is a born mega-psycho possessed by gods of genius, so devoted to excellence in all life that nothing around him is even real anymore. They aren't just talented hipster cucks pretending to be great for presstitutes and random internet losers. Since these are the only people capable of possessing the ideal of beauty, they are also the only people capable of true, aristocratic art.
 

Ash

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Not only are video games art, but they are the superior art form of all because all other art forms are a subset of them. Every story that can be told through film can be done told in a video game, but video games can tell stories in ways that films can't.

This is not quite true. While I prefer video games over any other form of medium when they're at their best, it is "restricted" in a very major way: rules of game design/gameplay. Things have to be balanced. Player efforts have to be rewarded. Things have to be fun. There must be challenge. If these things are not present, it's not really a game but an interactive story (see: walking sims). This heavily dictates what kind of art a game must be. I have no problem with that, however. This means that while yes, games can tell stories in ways movies can't, movies can also tell stories in ways games can't.

Why do you think some 75% of games feature murdering shit with swords and guns?
 
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