Interview BioInterview: Games Are Not Art

[Burning Bridges]

Lady GaGa: I'm an Artist, Not a Celebrity

 

[mondblut]

Is a hack n’ slash fighting game art? Ehhhhh, that’s marginal. You know, it’s the same way as movies... lots of movies aren’t art and some are. It’s like anything else.

With shitty date sims, it's even more marginal, Ray.

 

[Jack]

Main Entry: art
Pronunciation: \ˈärt\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin art-, ars — more at arm
Date: 13th century
1
: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation <the art of making friends>
2
a: a branch of learning
b: archaic : learning, scholarship
3
: an occupation requiring knowledge or skill <the art of organ building>

I'd rather stick to the old definition than the one some pseudo intellectual schmucks thought up during the romantic era.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I agree the above definition leads no where and is too old.

For example in old-fashioned German you could say: "Und wir haben gegessen und getrunken, daß es eine Art war" (we ate and drank as much that it was an art] )

Tbh I am not even 100% sure what it means (haben gegessen und getrunken wie der Teufel?) but certainly not "art" in the modern sense.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Art is in everything that can only be created by a being with a soul. A creation that elicits reaction emotionally or intellectually. In that way art is never in the object but in the beholder. Kitsch can be art for some! Art can be Kitsch for another!!

Mathematics is also art since it was created on a higher plane.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Whatever, the fact remains the games of this decade are less artistically pleasing than the ones from the previous decade. They are no longer made by artists, visionaries, idealists but clerks, workers and assholes.

 

[visions]

Once in a while, I hear that Shakes was just a mediocre writer that got lucky.

I've only read one of his books, but occasionally I say this for the lulz. The resulting butthurt can power your posting habits for years to come.

Anyways Othello was pretty shit, and I remember our English professor reading, like, way to much into the play including race and slavery issues.

Funny, I remember my English literature teacher in high school (who was a pretty cool guy and one of the few teachers I actually respected there) liked to say that Shakespeare's writings were pretty much pointless and mediocre.
Can't say that I disagree with him, then again I have barely read any fiction in the last couple of years so what the fuck do I know.

 

[Gragt]

greater than Shakespeare.

Well that's just like.

Your opinion.

Man.

Shakespeare relied heavily on melodrama and that's why the great artists who came after him and built on his foundations while not drawing from his flaws are greater than him. Same thing happened with other artists in other domains. Shakespeare was one of the greatest of his time, on who pushed art forward, but it's evident that he had to stop at some point and others picked up.

Once in a while, I hear that Shakes was just a mediocre writer that got lucky. Others are more codexian about it and say he was a hack, plain and simple.

Yeah, I hear that often too. Then again those who claim that can't explain why. It's true that he was mediocre at comedy but his dramas are great. As for the hack claim, it's just ridiculous.

 

[dr. one]

thankfully, art defies all definitions, it´s merely an interjection.
everything´s just a footnote to The Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Galaxy anyway.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Codex and English professors cannot into Shakespeare.

Also, am i the only one who thinks this incessant mulling over the definition of art to be completely fucking pointless and usually entirely besides the point?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Me too, 2nd post. LS cannot into reading.

Which is probably why he likes Shakespeare, lolololo

 

[Burning Bridges]

Codex and English professors cannot into Shakespeare.

Also, am i the only one who thinks this incessant mulling over the definition of art to be completely fucking pointless and usually entirely besides the point?

Yes it is quite pointless, but isn't it also intriguing one that no one has an answer for?

 

[CrimHead]

To be honest I don't think any of this shit really matters, though its always fun to argue

 

[Jack]

To be honest I don't think any of this shit really matters, though its always fun to argue

The nature of the 'dex is very much like that.

 

[Nyarmith]

There is no art, there are only artists.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Yes it is quite pointless, but isn't it also intriguing one that no one has an answer for?

Actually, we've already answered this. First, common usage of the word art implies two distinct things. One, the basic definition, that is, any activity in which individuals purposely manipulate symbolic elements to achieve specific aesthetic goals, which can then directly stimulate the senses and the mind of others. Then we have Art, the Romantic notion that the aim of all artistic endeavors is to achieve greatness, anything short of which cannot be considered 'real' art. So we have art, and Art, and either definition can be extrapolated based on context.

Then, we've also established that games cannot be art for the same reason chess is not art, however, they contain artistic elements which taken by themselves could potentially achieve artistic greatness, except they won't, because all developers are nerds with no real artistic ability (all of their artistic influences being based on childish mediums like science fiction and fantasy literature or comic books), who write games for dumbfucks who are so below the evolutionary scale they can barely understand games as they are.

And last but not least, we have established that Shakespeare was a shitty writer, according to clueless nerds who have never read a great novel in their lives and faggot university professors who's ineptitude is probably what lent them the job in the first place, everybody else with a shred of writing ability probably working in some literary field or another, the real idiocy here being that nobody seems to realize that Shakespeare was a dramatist, not a novelist.

 

[Topher]

the real idiocy here being that nobody seems to realize that Shakespeare was a dramatist, not a novelist.

This... very much so.

 

[Davaris]

Art is in everything that can only be created by a being with a soul. A creation that elicits reaction emotionally or intellectually. In that way art is never in the object but in the beholder. Kitsch can be art for some! Art can be Kitsch for another!!

 

[orao]

Art is a product, an 'artifact' or 'artifice' (fact/fice obviously from latin facere - to do make, and many romance languages) which contains or communicates ideas or aesthetic principles etc.
Would we call an advertisement or a fast food wrapper art? We might if it was divorced from that context to be used in some collage or pastiche or subversion or something, but otherwise of course not! However it communicates ideas, etc., has an aesthetic... but it is worthless. It has no value.
That is the case with games. They could be art, but they aren't.
The faux 'art-games' are positively embarrassing: juvenile, pretentious, self-important and conscious whilst being empty of substance... any critic would laugh at them.
Why do you need "games to be art" anyway?
To feel validated? To feel more intelligent? They're just mindless entertainment.
The best most expensive videogames as a text are similar to the most cliche hollywood b-rank crap.

 

[orao]

....

Thank god, another intelligent person on this site.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Before we take this discussion any further, everyone should read this.

Fuck, that site is ten times more :monocle: than the Codex. What the fuck is going on?

 

[nomask7]

childish mediums like science fiction and fantasy literature or comic books

That's just cruel, and inaccurate. I know it's a throw-away line meant to illuminate something else, but you're using too broad a brush, dude. H.G. Wells was serious literature before anyone thought of marketing books as "science fiction". The medium is the written word. Science fiction is just a convenient label. Harold Bloom includes H.G. Wells's science fiction novels in the Western canon, but doesn't include anything else by him. That should tell you something.

Of course, after sales people started marketing books as science fiction, many writers also started writing what they imagined to be science fiction to take advantage of artificially created demand. These writers were often crap writers who didn't have the talent to be published in the mainstream literary market but, these days, there is little difference in quality, from my casual sampling in the genres, between genre fiction and mainstream fiction (it's all mostly crap).

What's important to notice is that, for the last hundred years, there have always been a few exceptional writers writing in each genre, some of them as good or better as anything in modern mainstream fiction. I'm not counting love books written for middle-aged women as a genre. Just so you know.

(There was hardly any mainstream before the 19th century, which is when inventing market categories became important to marketing people. Before that time, for millenia, almost everyone who was anyone wrote what would now be marketed as fantasy if it weren't already classic literature. From Dante to Goethe everybody avoided the mundane wrappings of modern mainstream fiction. Dunsany's purposefully incredible early short stories find their precedent in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cabell's Jurgen, escapist fantasy according to the rabble at Wikipedia, is like Candide, except tons better & more intelligent.).

 

[Lyric Suite]

Art is in everything that can only be created by a being with a soul. A creation that elicits reaction emotionally or intellectually. In that way art is never in the object but in the beholder. Kitsch can be art for some! Art can be Kitsch for another!!

The trainer is the artist. He's just using the elephant instead then his hand.

 

[Sceptic]

That's just cruel, and inaccurate. I know it's a throw-away line meant to illuminate something else, but you're using too broad a brush, dude. H.G. Wells was serious literature before anyone thought of marketing books as "science fiction". The medium is the written word. Science fiction is just a convenient label. Harold Bloom includes H.G. Wells's science fiction novels in the Western canon, but doesn't include anything else by him. That should tell you something.

Of course, after sales people started marketing books as science fiction, many writers also started writing what they imagined to be science fiction to take advantage of artificially created demand. These writers were often crap writers who didn't have the talent to be published in the mainstream literary market but, these days, there is little difference in quality, from my casual sampling in the genres, between genre fiction and mainstream fiction (it's all mostly crap).

What's important to notice is that, for the last hundred years, there have always been a few exceptional writers writing in each genre, some of them as good or better as anything in modern mainstream fiction. I'm not counting love books written for middle-aged women as a genre. Just so you know.

(There was hardly any mainstream before the 19th century, which is when inventing market categories became important to marketing people. Before that time, for millenia, almost everyone who was anyone wrote what would now be marketed as fantasy if it weren't already classic literature. From Dante to Goethe everybody avoided the mundane wrappings of modern mainstream fiction. Dunsany's purposefully incredible early short stories find their precedent in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cabell's Jurgen, escapist fantasy according to the rabble at Wikipedia, is like Candide, except tons better & more intelligent.).

Nomask is that you? :shock:

That's the best post from you that I've seen on here. I also agree with (almost) all of it. I take back all that I've said about you in the past, you're my new hero

 

[Serus]

childish mediums like science fiction and fantasy literature or comic books

That's just cruel, and inaccurate. I know it's a throw-away line meant to illuminate something else, but you're using too broad a brush, dude. H.G. Wells was serious literature before anyone thought of marketing books as "science fiction". The medium is the written word. Science fiction is just a convenient label. Harold Bloom includes H.G. Wells's science fiction novels in the Western canon, but doesn't include anything else by him. That should tell you something.

Of course, after sales people started marketing books as science fiction, many writers also started writing what they imagined to be science fiction to take advantage of artificially created demand. These writers were often crap writers who didn't have the talent to be published in the mainstream literary market but, these days, there is little difference in quality, from my casual sampling in the genres, between genre fiction and mainstream fiction (it's all mostly crap).

What's important to notice is that, for the last hundred years, there have always been a few exceptional writers writing in each genre, some of them as good or better as anything in modern mainstream fiction. I'm not counting love books written for middle-aged women as a genre. Just so you know.

(There was hardly any mainstream before the 19th century, which is when inventing market categories became important to marketing people. Before that time, for millenia, almost everyone who was anyone wrote what would now be marketed as fantasy if it weren't already classic literature. From Dante to Goethe everybody avoided the mundane wrappings of modern mainstream fiction. Dunsany's purposefully incredible early short stories find their precedent in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cabell's Jurgen, escapist fantasy according to the rabble at Wikipedia, is like Candide, except tons better & more intelligent.).

This.

The faux 'art-games' are positively embarrassing: juvenile, pretentious, self-important and conscious whilst being empty of substance... any critic would laugh at them.

Yes they are and yes they would. But it only proves that games are shitty art, not that they can't be art.

the real idiocy here being that nobody seems to realize that Shakespeare was a dramatist, not a novelist.

Everybody realizes it and the real idiocy here is this quote.