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Videogames versus Art

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Started 2 years ago by DSB
Latest reply from Da Man

DSB
Member

I was reminded of the last videogames versus art thing I saw here on VG247, when I came across a German art students exam project, 1358 (KM), which is named after the length of the Berlin Wall.

http://www.1378km.de/

The object of the game is to play an East German border guard, and either shoot or let your countrymen run.

Like I mentioned in the last comment section, that's exactly the kind of concept that could bring videogames into art. Earlier I've mentioned JFK Reloaded as another option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK:_Reloaded

When you make a game that's locked down tight, offering that kind of focus, then I think you can justifiably call it art. There's no userfriendly excess included, there's no menus, there's no option to screw up the entire creative vision beyond firing, or not firing, which is exactly how it's supposed to be.

When you make a game full of save features, varying degrees of difficulty, menus, unintended randomness etc. I don't see how you could call it art, because it's so full of junk that doesn't support the vision, that there's basically no focused intent when you look at it as a whole. These games are different. But on the other hand they aren't all that entertaining as games.

Posted 2 years ago #
dirigiblebill
Member

I think the argument about "focussed intent" tends to over-estimate just how open-ended videogames can be. These things are finite, really - the number of choices you can make always has an upper limit - which allows for selectiveness on the part of the developer, which allows for the kind of statement-making you (seem to) identify here as "artistic". My two pence, anyway. I'd go into more detail but I don't have the time :p

Posted 2 years ago #
DSB
Member

The number of choices you can make always have a theoretical limit in real life as well, that doesn't make our everyday lives art - in fact that only renders them completely without sense or purpose, beyond what we decide to project into them.

You can't make art without intent, at least not without a reason for not having intent. If you create a pointless act, then you need a reason for that pointless act, otherwise it can only be defined as a pointless act, rather than art.

That's the problem with regular games versus the two examples. Those two examples have a reason behind everything that's in the game. The same can't be said for any "Games are art" darling that gets brought up in these conversations. They're full of filler, disbelief and unintended elements that have nothing to do with realizing a creative vision, and letting people experience it digitally.

The point is that, if those limited choices aren't completely defined and focused by an artist, if you can just dally around and ruin the entire vision, then where's the artistry? You've just created a piece of senseless, digital chaos. It's nothing special or profound, it's just pointlessness by design.

It might be great entertainment as such, it might have a good story and some amazing backdrops, but with no focus, intent or reason, you'd be hard pressed to compare it to all the amazing art which virtually without exception, is defined by those very things.

Ultimately, the challenge of focusing people regardless of individual psychology, when you don't have the advantage of dictating their experience in the same way as a sculptor, a writer, an audio engineer, a director or a painter, is what I could see as giving videogames an edge once artists do begin to use it more commonly.

Posted 2 years ago #
dirigiblebill
Member

Well, there's quite a bit you need to unpack there. What constitutes "artistic intent", exactly? Aren't there gradations of intent? Does the designer of, say, Time Cfuk (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754 - awesome game) have to be in conscious I-am-an-artist mode every time he/she approaches the keyboard? What happens when groups of people are involved, as they generally are in videogame development? Do they all have to think along precisely those lines for the work to qualify? Do the people writing the cut scene dialogue have to share a vision with the people coding the physics systems? Are variations on that vision permitted? How does one assess "intent", anyway - by reading the blurb?

"The number of choices you can make always have a theoretical limit in real life as well, that doesn't make our everyday lives art - in fact that only renders them completely without sense or purpose, beyond what we decide to project into them."

A theoretical limit is a long, long way from a quantifiable limit, which is what I'd argue you end up with in a videogame or any other form of expression - but allowing the point for a moment, surely the limiting of choice *does*, in fact, equal "sense" and a sense of "purpose"? Isn't that what you've been arguing here - that a finite number of options for the player/audience/reader/"liver" = direction = some sort of artistic message? (Which when applied to reality, gives us the teleological argument for God's existence (since videogames exist IN reality, of course, the whole distinction is fundamentally flawed :p)).

We need to distinguish between kinds of "choice", too. Sculpture, writing, music, film and painting are anything but "dictated" experiences - they don't proffer choices at the level of *function*, perhaps, inasmuch as they are (typically) completed, static objects rather than toolkits, but choice is always exercised in interpretation. Show me two men who agree, to the very smallest detail, on one of Yeats's Cuchullain poems and I'll show you a man standing next to a mirror...

There's a billion things I need to unpack there myself... This is the kind of topic that can spiral off endlessly. :/

Posted 2 years ago #
DSB
Member

My problem is that those limits aren't clearly defined. That's what I call a lack of intent. There's no purpose between each limitation, which is obviously because those developers never intended to create a clearly defined piece of art, they intended to create some easily understood entertainment, which only works if you play along by the rules supplied. That would be hard to justify in an art installation.

I think it's directly comparable to real life theoretical limitations, especially because it's so lapse in the average game. The principle is exactly the same, the only difference being the scale, in that life may have billions and trillions of theoretical limitations, whereas a game might only have millions. That's still far too confused to qualify intent in my oppinion.

I'm not going to get too much into what specifically qualifies art as art, because obviously that's always going to be an open debate. What you can look at, is what we know about art through our history, and if you want to leave it as open as possible, then art is that which can be recognized and justified as art, in the same spirit, on the same level and under the same terms. Basically what you can defend as art. To do that you need intent, and to prove intent, you need reason. That's not in most of the games that people call art, and why would it be? It was never meant to be art, it was meant to entertain.

Time Fcuk is a really fun and clever puzzle game. Does that make it art? It's hard to tell. I like the artwork and the tone of the game, but is art really as easy as making a great design? I'm not convinced, but it is certainly an example of a very focused piece of work. Unlike Shadow of the Colossus and similar games.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/mirosurabu/depict1

That's probably the flash game that has come closest to swaying me so far.

No matter which way you look at it, or how open to your individual projection they may be, every piece of art is a dictated experience. You might not see what the artist sees, but your experience is still completely defined through his focus, and any notion you're going to draw from it, will be a result of his creative vision. A painting isn't an ethereal realm of your mind, that's your own overdramatization - Really, it's just a painting.

There's no need to get into pedantics, because that's exactly where this spirals off into a proverbial mindfuck, which I think far too many gaming enthusiasts are very prone to doing - Probably because their background is in gaming, and not any of the more traditional art scenes. Art isn't supposed to be complicated, that's just you overthinking it. The less you think, the easier it is to qualify.

Posted 2 years ago #
dirigiblebill
Member

"I'm not going to get too much into what specifically qualifies art as art, because obviously that's always going to be an open debate. What you can look at, is what we know about art through our history, and if you want to leave it as open as possible, then art is that which can be recognized and justified as art, in the same spirit, on the same level and under the same terms. Basically what you can defend as art. To do that you need intent, and to prove intent, you need reason. That's not in most of the games that people call art, and why would it be? It was never meant to be art, it was meant to entertain."

Hmmm. I'm still not 100% on what qualifies as genuine artistic intent, or how one might assess it, and thus what's to stop e.g. a handbag being a work of art if the craftsman tells you it is, or the estate of Michael Jackson pulling the same trick with Moonwalker, etc etc. Also, don't fall into the trap of suggesting that art, however defined, is a historical constant. IIRC from my undergrad, Shakespeare thought that his poems were the more worthwhile, the more "artistic" (because less commercial or populist) part of his portfolio; nowadays, his plays hog the pedestal.

Just playing devil's advocate here, really - saves me from actually having any arguments of my own ;)

"No matter which way you look at it, or how open to your individual projection they may be, every piece of art is a dictated experience. You might not see what the artist sees, but your experience is still completely defined through his focus, and any notion you're going to draw from it, will be a result of his creative vision. A painting isn't an ethereal realm of your mind, that's your own overdramatization - Really, it's just a painting."

There are so many stimuli in the intellectual life of a community, so many inputs and outputs if you like, that attributing any particular range of interpretations to the "vision" of any one individual seems farcical - much as insisting that all those interpretations originate in the mind of the person experiencing an artwork would be farcical - unless of course you position "vision" on such broad terms as to be meaningless. What do you mean by "focus", exactly? Are we operating in the realms of conscious thought here - because if we aren't, the argument from intention runs into difficulties again.

"Art isn't supposed to be complicated, that's just you overthinking it. The less you think, the easier it is to qualify."

An... interesting proposition :) Doesn't it slightly cut against the distinction you've drawn between art and "easily understood entertainment"?

Lapsing into the realm of actually-saying-something-for-myself for a second, I think over-thinking is one of art's chief pleasures - in fact, I suspect it's the reason for its existence. Such a wonderfully slippery, fractious, bewildering term - if it could be nailed to a statement as straightforward yet opaque as "because the creator intended things that way", it would become tedious, and fall out of use.

Whatever else art is or does, it provokes debate, and debate is always worthwhile :) Thanks for the links - I'd run into Depict before, great cat-and-mouse vibe. Coma is in the same ballpark... http://armorgames.com/play/6286/coma

Posted 2 years ago #
DSB
Member

All great points.

I wasn't proposing that art is a constant. Like I said, it's pretty much impossible to nail it down. I do think it has a certain spirit and some kind of weave that keeps it all together, as well as one or two more common traits. For example I'm schooled in music, but I can very much relate to any other creative medium. There's no difference between me in a studio and a designer in a games studio, we both share the same burning desire to create. I've also dabbled in writing, and I don't feel any differently whether I'm chopping away at a poem, or a song in a studio. Not that that's art, but I believe there's the same faint bond between a lot of artists.

The idea was simply that you had a lot of examples to choose from throughout history, to use as a yardstick.

What qualifies as intent? In the end, that's always going to be between the artist and his audience. I'd say that actual intent is that much harder to really disprove, than a lack of same. Again, the defence-principle. Personally I like to think that with a little bit of reference and experience, you can often see when you're looking at the work of a man brimming with talent, and obsessed with his visions, and when you're looking at someone who's pulling it out of his ass. It's the difference between Charles Bukowski and a generic drunk wanna-beatnick. Art is always going to be like the Emperor and his new garb. Is he really naked, or isn't he? And most likely, opinions on that will always differ.

I just personally think that the case is so much easier to make when it comes to the commercial videogames, because of the factors I've mentioned earlier. Flash and Unity games are awesome on so many levels, and often a lot tighter, but I when look at a lot of the games that people call art, usually they're just very pretty and trying to be clever. Some do stand out though.

I don't use figurative language, however. I never go into very many meta-levels unless they're completely apparent. As you can probably tell by what I've said so far, I like to take a pragmatic approach to most things, and art is no exception. To me the definition of vision I posed above is simply cause and effect. The artist and his work is a constant alpha - He's not responsible for your projections, but he is responsible for creating the source through his own vision. It would be farcical to say that there's only one valid way of looking at it, though.

By focus I'm talking about the concentration an artist dedicates to his vision. Of course some artists don't achieve any sort of enlightenment on a piece they're working on, until it's done, and you can always find an anomaly to any rule you might propose in art - But there's definitely a focused state of mind there, no matter what they're doing. This is what places artists above mere entertainers to me. They take these grand, raw visions that are in their minds and then they flesh it out, either to perfection, or to profound imperfection. Whether it's one or the other, it still has reason behind it.

I don't think it did cut between the distinctions. Both can be easily understood, and still entirely different. Entertainment is more of a common product, it has a commercial and practical purpose. Now you're really putting me on the spot, because what does that make art? The closest I can get to the way I feel about it, is to say that art is usually a lot more than that :P

Posted 2 years ago #
Da Man
Member

the way some folks 're trying to analyze the so called art thing is like scientists attempting to analyze Qur'an. they ended up rebelling against nothing... I'm not trying to be pretentious here, just describing things the way they are.

even if these days Shakespeare's plays hog the pedestial, how did that change anything? his works didn't become any different whatsoever, what matters is his original intent to express himself in a certain way, not whom he thought it's aimed at. it's like describing Nietzshe 's philosophy as 'popular stuff', because every single idiot today quotes him.

.. art isn't just about getting endorphin rush (which is what all entertainment is about), it isn't about quality narrative or metaphors. it's something deeper, something spiritual that lets you analyze yourself, in the same sense that psychoanalysis is, albeit in a more accessible way. it's the most simple thing, and one that remains constant since before Middle Ages.

the way dirigblebill describes 'countless' interpretations of artistic works is like saying there's no such things as 'good' and 'bad', or all people are equally insane/mentally deviant.. seriously, it's like misinterpreting what psychedelics are about because of Ken Kesey's book.

Posted 2 years ago #

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