I would like to know, it seems like society tends to view TV and Video games as a waste of time. That people who spend long hours on TV and video games should be doing better things. Yet, we never hear anyone looked down for making movies or liking movies. Movies and books seem to be idolized by society as a better art from. Why is that? Why do we treat those two mediums better than games or television?
Age of the medium.
Yeah, I think this is what it boils down to.
TV and video games are new enough that, until relatively recently, they were largely pretty primitive and mindless. So that, to people of a certain age, when you mention books or movies, they think of War and Peace and Huckleberry Finn, or Citizen Kane and Casablanca. When you mention TV and video games, they think of Gilligan’s Island and The Dukes of Hazzard, or Pac-man and Angry Birds.
Many, perhaps most (as per Sturgeon’s Law) examples of all four of these mediums are indeed a waste of time, in the sense that they leave you with nothing to show for the time you spent indulging in them. A good book or movie, however, can truly enrich your life: they can challenge you, educate you, touch you, and even change the way you see the world. There’s no reason TV and video games can’t do such things too, but examples are more recent and less widely known and studied. (Anyone who thinks TV and/or video games are all mindless crap should read Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson.)
Some movies and books are art. Most books and movies are the same sort of time-filling diversions that TV shows and video games are - and diverting your attention is the opposite of what art is about. Video games are, almost by definition, all about diversion; one can work some art into a game, but it’s a bit self-defeating. TV can be art, but mostly isn’t, and rarely tries - the treatment of its viewers as a commodity to be sold to advertisers militates against it.
We most certainly do - as I said, most movies are not art, and many are routinely criticized for pretending to be. Books, similarly, are mostly written either for information or diversion, though the publishing field seems a little friendlier to art than others.
MEDIA, damn it.
For TV, the argument was passivity. You just sat there not thinking (allegedly).
But movies are equally passive, right? Well, you don’t do that for hours and hours every day*. So they’re okay. :dubious:
Now we have video games. Hardly passive. But then the “hours and hours” thing applies. People read for hours and hours everyday, right? Then you get into the “But is it art?” debate. (Which Roger Ebert unfortunately got into without really thinking his arguments out ahead of time.)
It seems to come down to snobbishness.
- OTOH, people actually did that in the 30s and 40s.
Age of medium is part of it, but not in a purely prejudicial sense. Books have been around for centuries. Movies are only a little bit over a century old. Television, half that, and video games half that again. If we take it for granted that all four mediums have (per Sturgeon) a 95% suck rate, with books, we still have hundreds and hundreds of years of that 5% to draw from. If you wanted to read all the most significant literature from history, it would probably take your entire lifetime, if not longer. If you wanted to play all the most significant video games from history, you could do it in a few months.
There are some other factors, though. Television and movies, for example, draw largely from the same pool of talent, with television viewed at best as a proving ground for people trying to break into movies, and at worst a refuge for people who weren’t good enough to work in the big leagues.
Television and movies are also largely passive. Books require at least some effort from the reader to engage, and often some amount of skill as a reader to do so. If you want to read a book, you are, perforce, required to think about the book. If you want to watch a movie, you just have to sit through it. Movies can, of course, richly reward an engaged viewer, but it’s generally not necessary.
Video games are, of course, intensely interactive, above and beyond the other three mediums, but not always in a way that encourages the player to engage with the game. I spent several hours grinding resources in World of Warcraft last night, which was both relaxing and enjoyable in the extent that it required almost no thought from me at all. There are other games (even other parts of WoW) that require a large amount of attention and forethought, but the stereotype of the “brainless” video game isn’t without foundation.
There’s also a social aspect to movies that gives it a bit more cachet than television or literature. When you talk about a person who sees a lot of movies, you generally think of someone who goes out to the theater a lot. When you think of someone who watches a lot of TV, you think of someone who rarely leaves the house. Even though both people may be watching the exact same material, the fact that going to a movie gets you outside is generally viewed as a positive.
Games, again, often have an intensely social aspect to them, but online socialization is also very, very new, and society is still adjusting to the concept.
Lastly, books have one major edge over the other media. The written word is the best medium we have to communicate complex and nuanced ideas, which is hugely important in ways unrelated to the art world. If you want to really understand what’s going on in Ukraine right now, you’re going to need to do a lot of reading. There may not be much reason to prefer reading Game of Thrones versus watching it on TV on their own merits, but at least reading trashy genre literature is keeping you in the practice of reading, which can later be applied to “important” subjects like politics or world events.
Only in some varieties of English, obviously not the OP’s.
If you pressed most people who lionize film, they’d admit to a difference between mainstream (Hollywood) movies and non-mainstream (arthouse) movies, and say that arthouse movies are always better. The first is true, the second isn’t, but it points to an important divide: Arthouse movies are cheaper to make than Hollywood movies, and therefore don’t represent as much of an investment, and therefore can flop without causing a lot of shareholders to lose money.
This is generally true, in fact: Mass-market media is a pretty safe bet. It’s an investment in pre-existing broad social trends which are easy to observe and are slow to change. Since those safe bets can attract a lot of backing, they get the most advertisement, creating a self-feeding cycle. They’re the widows-and-orphans blue-chips of the media world.
Arthouse movies and similar, OTOH, are the start-up companies: Cheap buy-in, distinct risk of total failure in which you lose everything you invested, but potential for massive, meteoric rise and huge return on investment. Kevin Smith made his first film on a maxed-out credit card. The Beatles made their first albums on speed. Cheap, fast, and ultimately wildly successful.
This doesn’t help the average new up-and-comer who could be the next Hemingway or Miyamoto or Spielberg but is more likely a nobody who’ll never make a truly bankable product in their lives. Yes, yes, “art shouldn’t be a product”, we hear you late-nineteenth-century anti-middle-class sentiment. That doesn’t help you if you invested $50 million into the Next Big Thing only to find it was helmed by this generation’s Hal Warren.
Therefore, most people see the most-advertised-examples of the respective media, and because TV shows and video games aren’t taught in classrooms the way movies and books are, they have no counterbalance which says “Some books aren’t Twilight and some movies aren’t Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” That comes down to age, but just saying “age” isn’t anywhere near the whole story.
The attitude that TV is not art is a hangover by people who aren’t paying much attention to TV. Starting from the turn of the century, with shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, serious critics started mainstreaming the idea that TV was a serious medium, capable of producing works as great as those of any other art form.
We now live in a Golden Age of television and tons of great works are being produced every year. Many people now believe TV has become a better medium than film for telling great stories because the ecosystem, medium and support now attracted the best talent.
As for video games, while I accept that it has the potential for greatness, I agree with most critics that we’ve yet to see the “Citizen Kane” of the gaming industry and most games, viewed from an artistic perspective are lacking. There are the dozen or so indie games (and Bioshock) that people routinely trot out as groundbreaking and they do stand out, IMHO, mainly as molehills on a fairly flat landscape.
I will concede though, that I’m open to the view that we’ve simply yet to develop the appropriate critical framework to even talk about gaming from a artistic perspective and that things like the epic EVE Online battle deserve to be viewed with the same critical admiration as truly great art.
Still, if you restrict yourself to single player games (which is still a huge part of the market), it’s hard to dispute that it’s overwhelmingly low-brow and much lower brow than any other of the artistic mediums, bar pornography.
I think for years what held TV back was its business model. It’s hard to create great art if you’re interrupted every 15 minutes by an ad for kitty litter. I think it’s no accident that the rise of artistically-respectable TV shows has coincidenced with the rise of pay stations that don’t run commercials.
With games, the medium is still struggling to find its voice. I think part of what’s holding us back are a lot of assumptions about what a game has to be: It has to be interactive, it has to be challenging, it has to be winnable. As a result, most contemporary games keep you very busy DOING, but doing leave you much space for CONTEMPLATING.
There are some glimmers of change on the horizon. There’s a vigorous indie scene in games right now. Titles like Dear Esther and Luxuria Superbia are pushing the boundaries of “experiential” gameplay – they’re not challenges to overcome, they’re just experiences to have. The division of PlayStation where I work is actively pursuing new experimental ways to play. (Last year we won a bunch of awards for Journey.) We’re aggressively working to find and fund games that will expand the medium as an artform. On the personal front, I’ve got a book on video game criticism coming out next year that I hope will help shift the industry’s critical discourse away from “How do we make a game that’s fun?” to “How do we make a game that’s meaningful?”
Maybe in 20 years we’ll have a game that’s viewed as the equivalent of Beethoven’s “9th Symphony”. But there’s a lot of work that we have to do to get there.
Right, the critical opinion on TV has really changed in the past decade or two. I can’t find the cite, but I’m almost positive I remember The New York Times itself praising “The Wire” as being a work of true Shakespearean complexity. Similar kinds of praise have been heaped on “Breaking Bad,” “The Sopranos,” and other shows.
Indeed, it’s such a hangover that I honestly don’t know anyone who actually says this. Everyone knows MOST TV is junk, but I know of no one who would say that there are no worthy shows. People are certainly aware that there are television programs as artistically worthy as top cinema. The idea of “Breaking Bad” as a Shakespearian-style tragedy is so common it’s practically the definitive interpretation.
You know, I don’t even hear the ‘TV is crap’ attitude anymore from people under 70. Rather, I hear lots of intelligent conversation about Mad Men, Game of Thrones, etc. I don’t have time to start watching TV again, given the presence of an active 6 year old in my life, but if I did, it’s clear that I’d have plenty of good stuff to watch if I wanted to.
Because TV and video games are “fun,” therefore worthless. Books and movies can be, true, but the version being thought of here are the “highbrow” types: War and Peace and Berlin Alexanderplatz. Obviously, if we were talking Harry Potter or Avengers, that’d be different.
Video games have moved me, challenged me (emotionally/mentally) and affected me as much as any form of art has ever done. If at least some video games are not art, there is no such thing as art. Video games have made me laugh, cry, hurt, and feel genuine happiness, satisfaction, and pain. Just because Pac-Man and Mario aren’t emotionally moving, doesn’t discount the incredible depth and artistic expression and enjoyment in games like Metal Gear Solid, Phoenix Wright, Final Fantasy (and many other RPGs), Myst, etc. I would argue that certain video games are just as moving and powerful as the best movies, television shows, books, plays or operas. Some of my favorite stories ever told were told in video games.
I challenge anyone here who thinks otherwise to just keep quiet on your opinion of video games, if you’ve never played a game that had a deep, moving storyline.
Some people may feel that the same great stories told in video games could just as well have been told even better in a movie, tv show, or book, or whatever other form of art. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that such a game is art, and who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t be better. Maybe actually experiencing the story and having some interactivity/control over it makes it even more meaningful and powerful of an experience. And that’s what defines truly great art to me, and some video games absolutely nail it. Others try and fail. And others still are just mindless wastes of time, diversions, or entertainment.