Hell, not only do I disagree with you about videogames, I disagree with you about the elephant.
I don’t know what he’s talking about here. There are loads of games that are as vastly overrated or outright boring as many of the “great works.”
A while ago, Joel Stein decided to sound off on the Harry Potter books and the adults that read them. The sentiment was pretty much the same. “I don’t appreciate them so they must be detrimental to society.” I’m not saying that there is a great deal of worth in video games, and some of them certainly aren’t raising the bar as far as culture goes, but they are no worse than a majority of the movies that are coming out.
Video games, like art, poetry, movies, books, music, what have you, are about escapism. It’s just another medium.
Liberal arts student have debated what art is as long as there have been liberal arts students - and even longer. I think dictionary.com misses the point when it involves the concept of “beauty”, which is even fuzzier. Dictionaries don’t make the rules, of course, but since they go by common usage, maybe beauty is a a very common denominator for many people as to what “fine art” is. I searchewd for art first, but was swamped with results, but the site gave a link to “fine art” which seems to be the topic at hand.
So where does that leave me?
There was a guy who did an exhibition at an art museum i Copenhagen some years ago, where he put gold fish floating in water in a blender (I know there’s some flash animation like this, but the art exhibit preceeded that, IIRC). Of course, it raised an uproar, but the very point was that for anything to happen, it required the participation of the audience, which was the artist’s intent.
So there is art that not only acknowledge the existence of an audience, but actually require it and its participation to create art.
This is why I’m surprised by your post, lissener, since one of your ongoing arguments about Verhoeven is that it wouldn’t be art, unless there was a gullible and clueless audience in the theatre. I seem to remember you saying that the best way to see [one of his films] was to imagine yourself in the projector booth, above the audience, seeing not only the movie, but the reaction of the audience as well.
Following that argument (which I agree with, but not when we’re talking about Verhoeven), it follows that there is indeed art that require participants to make it work, not just spectators / readers / listeners, but someone who actually influences what happens to the thing presented by the artist / producer.
So yeah, video games is art. It’s just that most of it is crappy and not many producers have realized the potential yet.
I have played video games that were 100 times more satisfying than assorted books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched, visual art I’ve looked at, music I’ve listened to, and so on. And the opposite.
If you consider that part of the Hollywood movie-making machine aims certain movies directly at 13-year-old boys, consider that part of the video game industry aims certain games at adults. Would I prefer to invest 2 hours immersed in an extremely complicated Grand Theft Auto game, or in some stupid cliche-heavy movie about a robot combat airplane that “becomes” intelligent?
For every half hour spent in an art gallery to become more “cultured” looking at bad art that is supposed to be deep, is that half hour more valueable than a half hour playing a game like Grim Fandango? Is looking at cookies glued onto a used spiral notebook hanging from the ceiling somehow more valueable than the sensory-baffling experience of Rez?
These may be thoughts to consider, but we’re talking about either a different medium for art which sometimes produces really good things in terms of art direction, sound design, music, story telling, the overall handling of the character you are playing as and their objectives, and which originally just put dots on a screen you were supposed to shoot at with other dots. Would anyone have forseen games like SuperMario or the Grand Theft Auto series or the Sims in terms of gigantic “virtual” worlds to explore when making Space Invaders? Would anyone have forseen the stylized art of games like Grim Fandango, or Myst, or Rez, or We Love Katamari when making Qix? Did anyone forsee creating elaborate sound design and music for games like the Silent Hill series or God of War or complicated music-oriented games like PaRappa and Rez when working only in 8-bit?
There have been huge advances in video games in 40 years, all in areas of art, sound, visual detail, and game play objectives. Ebert seems to want to claim that video games are not art and not story telling and not sound-design, and then say that such things are “craft” and not art. Video games are combinations of many things, specifically craft AND art, just like films. And it took much longer than 40 years in the development of filmmaking to arrive at great films by the directors Ebert mentioned. Early filmmaking was seen as novelty and cheap titillation. How long did were films around before the creation of something considered great, at the time, and not in retrospection?
Or we can just say that video games are games, and games by their virtue cannot be art. And that is another debate.
To say video games are less art than movies is ridiculous, especially with the huge teams behind game companies these days. People really underestimate how much thought goes into games. You could say, press the A button to jump. But how should the jumping animiation look? How high should the character jump, and how fast should he fall? Depending on these characteristics, all the areas will have to be designed around how the character moves in order to not only make the game possible to beat, but enjoyable as well. Seeing how a well-done game, with all its intricate control mechanisms and their interaction with the each environment, is just as amazing if not more so as seeing how the camera angles and lighting impact each scene in a movie. Is there really more creativity involved in the placing of the camera than the placing of an item to collect? I challenge you to play through a game like Metroid Prime for Gamecube and say that video games are not art. They’re not movies, and I’m annoyed with how most games these days try to be movies. One of my favorite examples of a game whose narrative would only be possible in the video game format is SNES’s Earthbound (if you’ve played the final boss of the game you’ll know what I’m talking about).
Games are games, and are to be judged on an entirely different level than movies. It may be hard to consider something like “Monopoly” art, but the current video game is to Monopoly as Jurassic Park is to a flip-book of a dinosaur eating a stick figure you made in math class.
I expect more from Ebert. Although he is an old fogey, he knows a lot about film. And even a basic knowledge of film history is enough to see the parallels with the early film industry.
The first films were nothing more than tech demos. They existed to give the projector (which was what everyone was interested in) something to do. Nobody thought to use film to tell stories until much, much later. It took even longer to figure out how to tell stories well- even the idea that you can shoot two things in two different places and cut them together and people would think it was the same place actually had to be discovered.
And at every step of the way there were naysayers. Nobody thought people would sit through the first feature. Nobody thought sound would be more than a gimmick. Nobody thought animated features would work. Through the years, cinema has gotten more and more sophisticated and new complexity is added every day. For example, twenty years ago a jump cut was a jarring mistake to be avoided. Now it is a tool used to tell stories. Film theorists consider film to be a language that has slowly gone from describing simple concepts (much like the first written works were tally marks and other bland commercial records) to possessing the ability to make great works of art.
Video games are the same way. They are an infant industry, and their ability to grow is directly connected to technology (much like film- the invention of cinematic lighting, synced cameras, etc. have done as much for film as an art form as 3D graphics have for video games). It’s about at the point in film history that the earliest silent shorts were at- lots of dreck, the occasional bit of amazingness, limited emotional content and a lot of wavering on what the best format is. But games have great potential to creates works of art of a nature that we can only begin to guess about.
And there are places where you can clearly see that potential. I remember walking around Battery Park in Deus Ex. Years later, I visited New York and walked around the real Battery Park. It was the weirdest sensation I’ve ever felt in my life. I “knew” the place so well and had all these memories connected to it, but I had never set foot there. That’s something amazing. Just as it’s amazing that the sounds from Zelda are so much more evocative than any movie soundtrack has ever been. Or how no video game has ever been as sad and lonely as Shadow of the Colossus- a game which quietly makes you question if you are doing the right thing by playing it. And it’s incredible how complete the world of Katamari Damacy is- it competes asthetically with any kind of art there is.
Anyway, the point is there is so much to explore. We’d be fools to discount video games at this point.
There are many different genres of videogames, some of which are not valid comparisons to a movie or a book. Some videogames nowdays are almost more like interactive movies. Others are more like a sport, like online first person shooters or real time strategy games (Counter-Strike and Starcraft being classic examples, respectively). Those genres are like comparing paintballing to a movie – it just doesn’t make sense. Others far outclass the best action/adventure movies since you are the adventurer, uncovering the age old secrets or saving the world – e.g. any game from the Mario or Zelda series, really.
I’m a videogame guy and the best video games are far, far better than the best movies. I might watch a really good movie 5-10 times at the most, whereas I could play my favorite games for hours upon hours. Add in an online aspect and online buddies to chat with – especially with a microphone – and you get a game that can be played for years on end with little to no boredom.
One of the text adventure games I really enjoyed was Infocom’s Zork. I never finished it, or came close to finishing it, but noodling around in the caverns of Miskatonic University gave me that same quaint/horror feel that reading Lovecraft’s original stories did. Maybe it wouldn’t have managed the trick if I hadn’t already read plenty of Lovecraft prior to playing “Lurking Fear” but I feel the game was a fairly accurate rendition of the Lovecraft stories. I didn’t feel it was any less an artistic statement than the Lovecraft stories because I got to choose what kind of gibbering eldritch horror I faced.
I’d disagree slightly - the art of video games lies in all of these things - the narrative (if it exists - and if it doesn’t, its non-existence), the graphics, the sound, the gameplay - and how they interact with eachother - all contribute towards the final effect of the game, and the art lies in all of them.
should read
One of the text adventure games I really enjoyed was Infocom’s Lurking Horror.
Jeebus, all day today my posts have been coming out garbled. This isn’t even the worst. Feels like I have two right brains.
I thinks Ebert’s point that video games are inferior to most movies and literature is a valid one. And I just spent most of three days playing Star Wars Battlefront 2.
But it should be noted that most video games are superior to movie reviews… 
Thsi really has been a good thread.
Obviously, it is just colossally, stunningly ignorant to say video games cannot be art. Artistic expression can take most any form; it’s preposterous to say that it must be limited to the forms you’re used to.
I would add, though, that even those who are defending videogames as being currently or potentially artistic might be really missing the point. Games like “Final Fantasy X” are being defended as artistic because they’re a lot like movies. Why do video games have to be like movies - with linear, cinema-like plots and fictional characters- to be art? Sculpture isn’t like movies; is it not art? The assumption so far, both pro and con, appears to be that art in video games must necessarily be the art of cinema. I just do not understand this sort of thing at all, as posted by RealityChuck:
This is both ignorant of the way video games actually work these days (supporting characters are not any more two-dimensional than you’ll find in most movies and plays, and it’s not actually true that the player-character is a tabula rasa) but so what if it is? Why are we simply assuming that art CAN’T include the observer as an active observer? What a strangely restrictive view of art, that it must always be played to a completely passive audience. Is the play “Peter Pan” not art because the audience is asked to clap to save Tinkerbell?
Video games will truly attain the status of ART when their creators truly use the medium of video games to express their opinions on the nature of humanity and the universe - not when they just try to make them look like movies.
Not at all.
I think Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy II, III, and IX, Phantasy Star 4, and Legend of the Dragon as examples of sublime fiction writing. I think, for example, that the characters Frog and Magus in Chrono Trigger contain infinite more complexity than say O-ren Ishii from Kill Bill Vol. I.
- Honesty
At my school, the University of Texas at Dallas, there has been a growing tendency to take games seriously. They have recently developed a curriculum called Arts and Technology, which is an interdisiplinary study in humanities that can apply to just about any attempt to find the aesthetic value in emerging media, but which most students see as also being a major in creating video games.
Our Professor Frederick Turner advances a notion that in fact beauty in any art form is a kind of well-played or well-designed game, so that it is profitable to look to games for clues about how it is that art functions. I find this fairly convincing, at least to the extent that I understand what he’s getting at. That is, imagine the fun you get when you’re playing a game that is neatly balanced in risk and reward, in which you enjoy finding the sweet spot in allocating resources for optimal return, in which for every reward you get you had staked something that mattered. Now imagine I’m not talking about a game you played, but a painting you painted. You dealt with the medium on its own terms – the color and viscosity of the paint, squeezed the tableau of your imagination into the confines of a flat rectangular canvass. Even if you lose, there is a certain satisfaction in the attempt.
Furthermore, I have attempted to apply it back to the kinds of games I enjoy – both video games and Roleplaying games. Both are games that generate stories – not just the ones that the designers (or GMs) self-consciously attempt to tell, but the ones that arise out of the spark they lend to the imagination. The game generates an aesthetic experience. It can’t help but do so. The question becomes how to master this the way people have mastered other art forms.
Other art forms are a good place to start looking for clues, but it must be remembered that each medium exists because of what it can do that no other medium of expression can do. A number of such features could be picked out for computer games, but interactivy will rule them all. But I would not encourage the idea that we should kick authorial control to the curb. The player enjoys a sense that there is an overarching plot, that not just anything goes. It is a very bad game if nothing you do really means anything. Something that matters has to be at stake, and for a story-telling game, that burden is the same as that for fiction – the character that you attempt to identify with has to want something, and you have to care whether that character does or not.
I don’t know that there have been any games that you could say compared favorably to the catalog of great novels or great films, but I would call Planescape: Torment superior to the vast majority of novels and films. And you can add to the list Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum, Baldur’s Gate 2.
Game designer checking in. I agree with a lot of what people have written so far in this thread. We’re a very young medium and we’re only now reaching the point where we have the tools to seriously engage the player emotionally.
For example, until recently most facial animation rigs weren’t sophisticated enough to express anything other than the most basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, etc. If you wanted to create a character who was, for example, laughing to keep up his courage but was actually scared stiff inside, you couldn’t do it, because you didn’t have the tools to animate it. The tiny shifts in the muscles around the eye necessary to pull off a subtle character moment like that just were beyond the technology.
We’re also handicapped because unlike other new media we haven’t had a good precursor to draw from. The movies didn’t invent themselves from scratch, they drew heavily on the stage tradition that preceded them. With games it’s much harder. We’re not inherently a narrative medium, so while we can borrow a few techniques from books and movies, most of their collective artistic wisdom is useless to us. Most non-narrative forms are either fixed in time (painting, scupture) or non-interactive (dance, music) so they don’t map particularly well onto games either.
(Why games are a non-narrative medium could easily be the subject of another lengthy post. Suffice it to say that while games are often enriched by the addition of a narrative element, narrative is not an essential part of gameplay and the demands of one are often at odds with processes of the other. Ebert correctly eludes to this problem, but fails to realize that by the same criteria one could declare opera to not be an art form since the narrative in opera is grafted onto the musical performance rather than being an intrinsic element of the music itself. But I digress.)
Interestingly enough the closest artistic precursor to videogames seems to be formal garden design and theme park design. Both disciplines are concerned with constructing environments that are structured to elicit responses from an audience that wanders freely within them. You can tell a story with a formal garden, leading a visitor through a series of emotional highs and lows, evoking in turn wonder and melancholy and contentment, but it’s a very different type of story than the one you can tell with a 400-page novel.
(I’ll point to **Ico ** and Shadow of the Colossos as evidence for the relationship between landscape architecture and videogames. They’re two of the most moving games created to date and both gain most of their power through the way the player moves through the environment.)
But, unfortunately, there’s very little serious critical literature on the topic of park design. The masterworks are too few – Brown, Olmstead, Disney – for a language of criticism to have evolved. So now we find ourselves in a situation where we’re inventing a new artwork from the ground up. We’re groping in the dark. Occasionally someone will stumble upon something useful and true and a beam of light will shine through illuminating a new way forward, but it’s slow progress.
I’m really not into video games - nothing against the medium, simply, they bore me. But I definitely see them as an artform, just like all other cultural products, and I definitely think there is the potential to be a game that can be considered the equal of the greats of literature. All games present values and ideas, if only in their parameters. When a great game arrives I imagine it will transform the world of gaming, both in the way games are made and the way people regard them, much the same way Tolkein had an enormous impact on fantasy writing.
I haven’t seen anything that could compare to the greats of other media, but even with my limited interest I’ve seen things that point in that direction. Grand Theft Auto, for instance, may not be very deep, but the world it creates and its glitzy amorality approaches a seductiveness similar to good gangsta rap or mob films. It’s not Tarantino, but it is comparable to similar films of that genre.
The gaming industry keeps getting near-misses on its “masterpiece”.
Half-Life 2’s near-perfect immersion lets me remember scenes in the game, months later, as if I was there. I could almost smell the game during some points I was so into it.
Planescape: Torment’s introspective storyline where every tiny action had an effect on the outcome. No grand save the world plot here, just looking for the not-so-simple answer to a single question: “What can change the nature of a man?” made me think more than pretty much any movie ever has, and more than a good 90% of the books I’ve read did as well.
Morrowind’s massive, beautifully made, open-ended world. Every single item was hand placed, from forks next to peoples’ dishes down to the tiny mushrooms growing on a tree far from where most of the people who play it will ever visit. And yet it still was able to give players almost total freedom in the game world.
I’ve never played ICO or Shadow of the Colossus, but I’m pondering buying a PS2 just to try them out, simply from the semi-reviews they’re getting in this thread.
Taking games with effects on the player such as these and refusing to say, in the very least, that they are the hint of an artistic medium is ignorant to the extreme.
Here, IMHO, is the major reason games both have not put out a “masterpiece” yet, and are not considered art.
The gaming industry is just barely climbing out of the ocean onto dry land. If you compare the gaming industry’s maturity to the maturity of the movie industry it is still decades away from reaching the point where movies started having sound. Would anyone still be taking movies seriously if they were only able to look at the first films that were put out in their bland-colored, poorly-acted, soundless glory? I doubt it would be the massive industry it is today.
Personally, I find this absolutely fascinating. Something that’s growing to rival the movie studios that’s evolving almost completely on its own with only the tiniest foundation to build on? I can’t wait to see what it’ll be like in 30 years.
I must say I disagree a bit with your theme park precursor, though. They may have some of the same parts as games, but I believe a closer analogy would be Cowboys n’ Indians.
The “designer”(child playing) would have a touch in every single facet of the game of Cn’I. In his mind he’d have a view of what his horse, guns, indians, outfit, landscape, etc looked/sounded/felt like and imagine the toys he was playing with fit to that. He’d create in his mind what he thought a fort should look like, and try to emulate that with pillows and blankets. When he got shot he’d pretend to die in the way he imagined he would die. Every single tiny aspect of his play would reflect how he imagined Cowboys n’ Indians should be. And it would be different for all the boys playing. Similar in most aspects, maybe, but different still.
That is how I see the game industry. The dev creates a world or story and decides what will happen, the artist forces his ideas onto the world and decides how it shall look, AI prog decides how things should act based on his experience. On and on with each person of the development team adding their own thoughts and ideas to the world they create, until it is deemed finished and handed to the player to enjoy.
In this way the game itself is, in essence, a conduit to the dev team’s imagination; a way of them saying, “This is how we imagined this, please try it, and feel it like we do.” Moreso than any other art form before it gaming has finally allowed people to imprint their imagination onto a medium and allow other people to touch, feel, move, act as they imagined; while still allowing the player input in their decisions and thoughts. I defy Disney or FOX with their movies to say they can do that.
And THAT, IMHO, is why Ebert is full of shit. 
Apples and oranges. While there’s a lot of overlap between the two media, video games are a completely different experience.
Sure, there’s never been a “Casablanca” or “Citizen Kane” produced by the video game industry. But then again, when was the last time some kid died while watching a movie?
Wasn’t there a spate of Russian Roulette Deaths after “The Deer Hunter” came out, or is that just an urban legend? I know there was an episode of 24(it’s TV but same concept) where there was a warning because of a Russian Roulette game therein. A lot of people tried to blame the Columbine High school shootings on “The Matrix” and “The Basketball Diaries”, among other things. I don’t see the WoW thing being any different. Being an idiot apparently applies no matter what you’re watching/playing.
I agree with most of what’s been said. Game developers are only now getting a feel for what they can really do with the tools they have, and artistic works are very much possible. Some games mentioned here like Myst, Planescape: Torment, and others would qualify as art for different reasons in my opinion.
Though it’s somewhat faded away, I would also point out Neverwinter Nights. The game itself is only so-so, but the powerful engine and toolkit they give you to use is a perfect example of a canvas on which you can create your own stories. A lot of junk has been made with that toolkit, yes, but the potential for an absolutely engrossing, thought-provoking game is there.