[General Discussion] Games as Art

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*Of course, Elder Scrolls is omitted from that phrase, being that is in the genre-definition of "player choice" among RPGs.

You haven't played enough RPGs.

When I think of art, I think of consistency. To me, the games which embody art possess consistent themes concerning aesthetics, storytelling, and interactivity.

SotC, for instance, had a lot of mystery and subtext surrounding its events. Its gameworld, then, is equally mysterious with the ruins of long-dead inhabitants scattered throughout a manless wilderness. Interactively, there wasn't much about the game's design that would interrupt the aesthetic. Actions followed their own logic, and executed naturally. Compare that to games which routinely throw minigames at the player and detract from the experience by forcing the player to re-learn rules of interactivity.

To me the one game which fully encompasses "art," is Planescape: Torment. Aesthetically, thematically, and interactively, the game never contradicts itself, while simultaneously allowing the player to interact with the story, instead of having the story dictated to the player. There are plenty of RPGs that do the same thing like Fallout and Ultima, but none of them do so on the scale which Torment accomplished.

That's not to say that the game was large, it's to say that it's the only RPG in the video game market to approach narrativism. While progression is linear, the player's choices throughout the experience determine the character of The Nameless One, eventually forcing the player to determine the nature of man, and what can change it.

It also enhances the player's connection to the game. Constantly interacting and using characters creates a much more significant link between the player and characters in gaming than in passive media. The connection does not simply exist because of likability, it's personal. Through interacting with the characters, both in action and in conversation, the player develops relationships with them. Something which many games have tried and done successfully, but none as masterfully as Torment.

Then in the end, the story itself kicks the cliches of its medium to the curb, and establishes itself as something wholly unique.

That to me is art. Something which connects to the viewer or consumer on a personal level.

From there, though, you start getting into issues of what is "good" art, and most of the games on IGN's list are shit.

Ultimately I don't think the problem is whether games can be defined as art, but how ever increasing budgets necessitate the expansion of an increasingly homogenous consumer base. The problem is taste.

Unless the cost of game development goes down significantly, we're going to be faced with very little of what can be considered "good art."

When game making was a hobbyist's pursuit instead of big business, there was a lot more soul. Maybe now that the graphical capabilities of 7 years ago are well within the reach of hobbyists, we'll be looking at a mini revolution of independent games.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

They're not even comparable. One product takes one person 50 bucks worth of supplies and maybe 2 weeks of time to complete, while the other takes 50-100 people, millions of dollars, and 2-4 years to complete.

So which medium sounds like a better outlet for creativity?

Games as art will always be the rarity, because publishers are simply not going to want to take the risks. When they do occur, it's almost always as a fluke.

I'm not even talking about masterpieces, here. Every other artform has a much larger portion of what can be considered good to all tastes, precisely because of the costs involved in their creation and the amount of personal vision which impacts the creation of the product.

The best games for consoles tend to be released late in their development cycles because publishers are willing to take more risks in order to gain market share. The crap selection among launch titles occur precisely because all parties involved want titles that are guaranteed to sell, not titles that may actually be good.

PC Games in a lot of ways are even worse due to the constant hardware crawl, but PC Gaming has the advantage of independent development, since you don't have to acquire a license just to make a game.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

If you view a game as the sum of its parts, rather than simply the embodiment of its interactivity, then yes I don't think it's a logical falsehood in any way to give the game credit for possessing good art. That's because when people are referring to the game, they are referring to the finished product, and not simply the gameplay.

What if, however, the interactivity involves elements which are traditionally defined as art, as per Planescape: Torment? Does the writing or story stop becoming art by virtue of the player interacting with it? Does it have to be experienced passively in order to be deemed art?

How ya doing, buddy?

So how does that view of art as an individual work mesh with murals and other collaborative works?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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So I guess the "choose your own adventure" books are not art all.

The Choose Your Own Adventure books are a really bad example, considering they contain pulp writing worse than any Hardy Boys concoction.

I was speaking idiomatically.

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How does the game take credit for these pieces? Even as those pieces of design and writing come together, the game merely hinges these things together. If everything suddenly became stick figures and dots, you would lose the aesthetic that was there... yet the core game ideas would still exist. When you remove the shell, where's the art? If you strip a human being of his skin, he's... well, skinless. He doesn't cease to be a human being. If you strip him of the clothes he might be wearing... he's quite naked. Yet, are the clothes human?

You have to admit, though, that the naked person is going to give off a much different impression despite still being the same person.

If you strip away all of those elements from a game, you still have a game, but it lacks context. It lacks something which the player can identify with. In the end games are made to provide an experience, and discounting the elements which comprise that experience seems incredibly naive. Color isn't art, but if you remove all color from a painting, is it still a painting? The piece still conveys an image. The viewer can still interpret it, but a lot of what elicits reactions from the viewer is no longer there. The piece is the worse for it.

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I'm trying to see why Ebert too the stance he did, and I'm of the mind that he viewed "games" as a vessel. Something that helps enrich the experience of the things contained within. It seems many people are willing to paint broad strokes with the term "interactivity." Your coffee maker is interactive, your soda can, and backpack are interactive. Are they games? Are they art? Are all games RPGs?

If that were the case, and a game was just a vessel for the art (which is really the other way around), then I could also make the argument that film is merely a vessel for the screenplay and acting performances. That wouldn't fly, though, since the film itself is popularly considered to be the piece, not the individual elements which comprise it.

Again, why does this standard not also apply to the interpretation of a game?

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Is a hammer art? Are the stereo speakers that play your music, art?

On their own? No. But if you can give them context within a piece then they can become art. If you can interpret a game as an art piece, then the gameplay is given that same context. The only hurdle is the willingness to interpret a game (the whole package) as art.

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Again, why should I stop this.

For the same reason that writing, acting, and cinematography become the film.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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But why is it naive? I don't want to steal your thunder, everything before this cut was very well put. I really don't disagree with what I cut out, but I have issue with this section because while the game does provide an experience... it's still not the drawings, it's not the writing, it's not the FMV/CG work... it's a game. Games don't need a story to be a game, I've seen that very well established. Games don't need music to be a game. Movies don't need dialogue to be movies, yet they would still be considered a movie.

Hmm. I think I've probably misrepresented myself here.

You're right that if you remove those elements from a game, then the game is not art. Tic-tac-toe is not art to be sure, but I still believe that many games can be interpreted as pieces of art by virtue of the experiences they provide. At its base, a game only requires mental function (sans meatspace sport u no), but then roleplaying games allowed players to engage their person as an active part of the gameplay, becoming a type of performance art that is mutually enjoyed. Now games have multimedia presentations which require a range of sensory function, and elicit a much wider range of emotions when done right.

What I take issue with is that games are categorically denied art status, even though some games, I feel, can be fairly interpreted as collaborative works of art.

If somebody tried to claim, though, that Pong is a work of art, then I'd laugh in their face.

Some games are art, others aren't, much in the same way I wouldn't call Friends art by virtue of it being a tv show.

You're right that "It features writing and stuff, it is art," doesn't work and I wouldn't dare make that claim. The point I'm trying to get across, though, is that individual games should be interpreted as a piece rather than simply as a game (from an art perspective). Though that's admittedly impossible if you're not willing to entertain the possibility of a game being art.

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The game doesn't need writing or acting or cinematography to continue to have goals and gameplay.

That depends, I think, on what the stated goals of the game are. Let's replace acting and cinematography in films with storytelling and aesthetics for a game. If the goal is to make a martial arts game, then the piece doesn't need either storytelling or aesthetics, since what is represented in Virtua Fighter is just as easily represented with stick figures. Yet, if the goal is to create a game that forces the player to negotiate the political intrigue of a Renaissance-era Italian court (there was a game like this believe me, but I forget its name) then it does require those elements to accomplish its goal.

Lastly:

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I feel that people who consider themselves gamers are too willing to try and qualify for special labels and treatment based off their interest.

I don't think it's so much that, as it is a desire to have their hobby recognized as a potential medium for art, like film and music hobbyists. If they feel that it's art, then why shouldn't it be? It needs to be seriously debated instead of presented one-sidedly as was the case with Ebert's speech and his dissenters. In light of all the games I've played, I think it can definitely be done.

If people start going off into the realm of rentseeking, and demanding Federal grants (which I already disagree with in principle ) for independent developers, then you're talkin' crazy talk.

FELIPE NO

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My definition, I want to say, is a dry and heavy handed one.

Well, I could only really think of RPGs before video gaming, because miniatures gaming doesn't exactly constitute anything that could be considered art, even though everything about Games Workshop properties certainly are.

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This seems a bit narrow to me, though I would like to play this game you mention. Not sure where I would place my chips on this one.

It'd be a real feat if you could play it. It was an old text-based game, so the aesthetics were admittedly interpretive. It probably won't be Vista compatible.

How ya doing, buddy?

I don't think of doing nothing as a choice, to be frank. I mean, you could argue it as such from a semantical perspective, but if somebody started to think of it as a legitimate choice, then they're retarded.

I think it's a shame that most games aren't like a Choose Your Own Adventure, since they have such a tendency to put everything on rails. That's fine for your Halos and Quakes, but if you're gonna call a game an RPG I'm going to expect some sort of appreciable consequences for my actions. (The Witcher seems to be doing this)

This is also a big part of my love/hate relationship with adventure games. In the end, I love the experience and absolutely hate the game. The mechanics always demand overturning every single nook and cranny for the sake of pixel hunting, and despite being purely story there is no gaming aspect to it. Adventure games could make a serious comeback if the player was given control over how the protagonist behaves, where it wants to go, and what it does. The convention is that there's always a "right" way to do things that the developer has pushed on the player.

Something like story interaction as opposed to story absorption was admittedly harder to do back in the days when art resources were poured into creating 3D models to import as bitmaps, or further back when everything was driven by pixels, but tradition is the bane of the genre. Indigo Prophecy accomplished a lot of what I'm talking about, but was destroyed by scheduling constraints and ended up with a non-sensical climax.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I'm not exactly tooting Fahrenheit's horn for having three different endings you can choose during the climax, regardless of how you did things throughout the rest of the game. That was essentially the biggest problem with Deus Ex.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I think there's two solutions to the endgame disconnect between your choice of endings and what you've done during the rest of the game:

1. Choices are limited in accordance with character alignment or story-related variables.

2. Games have individual endings for factions, communities, individuals, etc. This validates the player's choices throughout the game while not limiting endgame options.

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Roger wants attention, read his comments, he sounds like shit.

No shit, does he own a farm? I don't think I've ever seen so many strawmen.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.