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fruit on the bottom posted:I think part of that disconnect is that one group sees the word as carrying a connotation of quality while the the other group doesn’t, and that whether or not something is art is a separate question from whether it has any value. Yep, pretty much. My own take is that bad art exists, therefore the word "art" doesn't connote quality, importance, or meaning, and that means that a whole lot more things are "art" than just the "important" things people usually point to. Which also means I'm not terribly invested in the whole "can video games be art" discussion because, I mean, my take is that the definition of art is pretty broad so that's kind of a low bar to clear.
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Aug 22, 2018 20:57
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Harrow posted:The height of that craze was Bioshock Infinite I think. Games aren't art. There's interactive fiction i.e. non-game "games" and then there's games.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:00
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Videogames are some of the best art ever if you consider them against all the terrible art in history and not just the upper .1% that winds up in a real museum
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Aug 22, 2018 21:04
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"Game games" (lol) are art if table tennis or petanque are art.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:04
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If warhol is art then Bioshock 2 belongs in the louvre
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Aug 22, 2018 21:05
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Literally everything that has an aesthetic function is art and anything else tacked on to the term is just artists still having an existential crisis over photography
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Aug 22, 2018 21:07
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steinrokkan posted:"Game games" (lol) are art if table tennis or petanque are art. Or if baseball and NASCAR are art.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:07
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Formula 1 is art, but not nascar
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Aug 22, 2018 21:09
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BioMe posted:Literally everything that has an aesthetic function is art and anything else tacked on to the term is just artists still having an existential crisis over photography What is "aesthetic", smart guy? lol, "solving" an issue by opening an even bigger can of worms
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Aug 22, 2018 21:10
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Video games can be - and in most situations are - medium for other forms of art (e.g., written narrative, visual depictions, etc.), but are not themselves art.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:11
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Yeah the "what is art" discussion is entirely ridiculous and people need to stop looking at the word "art" as a compliment. Just accept that there can be bad art and that anything can be art if someone deems it that. If I find a dog turd on the sidewalk and say "this is art!" it is art. Does that make it anything more than a dog turd? No. I see art as anything that anyone finds artistic value in. You are not required to agree with them or enjoy it yourself or even think it's good. But arguing over whether or not something is art is completely futile.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:11
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poverty goat posted:Videogames are some of the best art ever if you consider them against all the terrible art in history and not just the upper .1% that winds up in a real museum Let's pretend games are art for a second, how would you rank Super Mario Bros 3? Like Terminator 2 is a near-perfect action film but you wouldn't rank it above, say, The Third Man would you? Super Mario Bros 3 is ranked pretty highly (and quite rightly) and is ranked above more story-driven/arty games, purely on gameplay mechanics. You can't do that with film and have something like Die Hard ranked above Citizen Kane.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:20
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steinrokkan posted:What is "aesthetic", smart guy? lol, "solving" an issue by opening an even bigger can of worms It's not even remotely a difficult concept buddy. Did someone design something one way because it just needs to be so to function properly or because they thought it'd look/sound/feel nicer? BioMe fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 22, 2018 21:21
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"Bodily awareness" in first person games is extremely bad, I'm referring to the type of movement where you're not just a floating, bunny hopping eyeball but are meant to feel like you have mass and arms and legs, one of the first games which did this was Thief Deadly Shadows but it's become sort of standard in FPS games, which is why I don't play them much anymore (does the new Doom have it?). It's extremely annoying and adds nothing of value. It's just like with platformers really: big or irregular sprites are bad for platform games because they make it unclear what the boundaries of your player character are and where you can jump or attack enemies, body mass in FPS games has the similar effect of making you feel insecure and wonky while playing.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:26
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Video games can make cogent statements about reality. MGS, for example, very much has a central thesis, all of those games attempt to make a philosophical statement about the world. Most games in fact have an explicit statement like that it's just usually very simple or dumb. Video games are actually well-suited to artistic engagement specifically because they're inherently interactive. It's just not what is done with the medium, typically. Nothing wrong with that.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:54
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video games are art but they are "low" art
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Aug 22, 2018 21:59
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Jim Barris posted:Video games can make cogent statements about reality. MGS, for example, very much has a central thesis, all of those games attempt to make a philosophical statement about the world. Most games in fact have an explicit statement like that it's just usually very simple or dumb. Video games are actually well-suited to artistic engagement specifically because they're inherently interactive. It's just not what is done with the medium, typically. Nothing wrong with that.  It's one of those things where the medium has quite a lot of artistic potential because of its inherent interactivity. Even when a game doesn't include "role playing" or any sort of narrative choices, a skilled storyteller can take advantage of the fact that players tend to identify as the player character in a video game (which is a different thing than identifying with a character in a different medium). And that's not the limit of it, either. And I'm not just talking about "walking simulators" or "art games." Games with more complex play systems have the same potential. It's just that there aren't a lot of particularly strong examples yet. I hate to bring it up but that old ludonarrative dissonance concept is actually a real thing. Gameplay can undermine story (and vice versa) when they clash, but at the same time, the most common genres of game don't really lend themselves to telling great stories through their actual play experience, either. It's why so many games that try to have prominent stories still have very clear divisions between "shootmans time" and "watch a movie" time. (Though I won't discount the idea that someone could use that dissonance intentionally, like a Bertolt Brecht "intentionally shatter your suspension of disbelief because that sensation itself is the point" thing.)
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Aug 22, 2018 22:01
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BioMe posted:Literally everything that has an aesthetic function is art it has to have been created by human hands as well. a pretty wild flower is not art, though a garden is.
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Aug 22, 2018 22:06
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1redflag posted:Video games can be - and in most situations are - medium for other forms of art (e.g., written narrative, visual depictions, etc.), but are not themselves art. That’s an interesting take. Would movies/television be defined that way too?
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Aug 22, 2018 22:09
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rather than get into a games as art debate let me say despite how well loved both of mine are despite how great some of the games for the system are the 3DS is a garbage piece of hardware and I can't wait for it to finally die, it's the last thing on the market with such an absurdly low resolution, and nothing even really uses the coolest aspect of the system anymore (the glasses free 3d is super cool, don't @ me)
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Aug 22, 2018 22:09
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food court bailiff posted:rather than get into a games as art debate let me say i hate the DS because it has lots of cool games, but the two screens make it annoying to emulate. they should bring back the gameboy, except it's like an NES classic and has all the games built in
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Aug 22, 2018 22:12
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Part of it is also that the artistic side of the creative team tends not to have much power in video games compared to things like movies and TV. In movies, you get things like actors or directors getting funding to make prestige or auteur projects in exchange for doing a big blockbuster, because directors and actors matter for the marketing of those blockbuster movies. The big names have power in that system. That's not the case in video games. Unless your name is Hideo Kojima, nobody really cares about the "prestige" your name brings and, hell, most people probably don't know your name in the first place. Projects don't get made and funded the same way, so even compared to the commercialized wasteland that is Hollywood, video games are just devoid of projects driven by people with actual, cohesive vision. It also doesn't help that the cost of making a video game with really high-fidelity visuals isn't going to vary as much as it does in film. If you want to make a quiet movie that takes place in a single house with tons and tons of detail poured into the set design, props, and background, that's still going to be a ton cheaper than a big-budget CGI blockbuster like an Avengers or Star Wars movie. But in video games, that gap isn't quite so big, because rendering that ultra-detailed house and creating all those art assets is still going to be a huge and expensive undertaking, not to mention the character models, animating their clothes and hair, motion capturing their faces, all of that. There are definitely cheaper ways to make games, of course, but it's worth pointing out that what makes a movie expensive to make vs. what makes a game expensive to make aren't necessarily the same kinds of things.
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Aug 22, 2018 22:13
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if you think kojima is the only wannabe auteur in gaming you are not paying much attention
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Aug 22, 2018 22:16
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All the early Zelda games were loving trash.
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Aug 22, 2018 22:16
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Harrow posted:Part of it is also that the artistic side of the creative team tends not to have much power in video games compared to things like movies and TV. In movies, you get things like actors or directors getting funding to make prestige or auteur projects in exchange for doing a big blockbuster, because directors and actors matter for the marketing of those blockbuster movies. The big names have power in that system. That's not true, lots of game designers have name recognition. John Carmack, Will Wright, Richard Garriot, Sid Meiyer, Shigeru Miyamoto, etc
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Aug 22, 2018 22:19
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food court bailiff posted:if you think kojima is the only wannabe auteur in gaming you are not paying much attention There are a ton of wannabe auteurs. Kojima is one of the few who gets to actually do it with a real budget. There are auteurs who make their games independently, of course, like Jonathan Blow or Eric Barone (the Stardew Valley guy), but I mean more in the vein of projects backed by large publishers or studios but really driven by a singular creative vision. Rutibex posted:That's not true, lots of game designers have name recognition. John Carmack, Will Wright, Richard Garriot, Sid Meiyer, Shigeru Miyamoto, etc Yes, and precisely two of those people are still making games with their names on them, or still making games at all. Will Wright hasn't released a game since Spore. John Carmack left id before the actually-released version of Doom 2016 took shape and now works for Oculus, not making games. You could add John Romero to that list, even, though I'm not sure if he has name recognition for anyone who wasn't around when Doom was actually new and then when Daikatana imploded. Actually maybe three if Shroud of the Avatar counts, I dunno. Richard Garriott was out of the game for a real long time but I guess he did actually release something recently, fancy that. In my defense it's not often that a Kickstarter MMO actually releases. Harrow fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 22, 2018 22:29
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food court bailiff posted:rather than get into a games as art debate let me say The 3D on the 3DS is really incredible and fun to use, it brings the games to life in a unique way and doesn't hurt my eyes or anything. This seems to be an unpopular opinion. !Klams posted:All the early Zelda games were loving trash. Counterpoint: the early Zeldas were the only good ones and the first bad one was Ocarina of Time.
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Aug 22, 2018 22:43
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goichi suda, tim schafer, yoko taro there are tons and you just don't pay attention
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Aug 22, 2018 22:45
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food court bailiff posted:goichi suda, tim schafer, yoko taro Chris Roberts literally directed the movie version of his video game.
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Aug 22, 2018 23:03
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miyazaki created the soulsborne series of games and directed all the good ones, and had a lot of influence over the one he didn't direct this idea that there aren't single vision big budget games is just....wrong. they're built up by a team but a lot of games have a really strong guiding voice throughout development and it usually shows. there are tons of designed by committee games too but there have always been auteurs in the studio world. someone listing a bunch and going "uh they don't make games anymore" kind of misses the point
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Aug 22, 2018 23:16
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fruit on the bottom posted:I think part of that disconnect is that one group sees the word as carrying a connotation of quality while the the other group doesn’t, and that whether or not something is art is a separate question from whether it has any value. More accurately, people who don't have any idea what they're talking about (the former) versus the latter, people who know what words mean. Second mistake would be to assume that art has to be made by an auteur (someone who brands themselves as an artist first) with no professed commercial interest. But art is inescapably commercial. The culmination of "are games art?" was pretty much when they somehow got Roger Ebert to comment on it in 2005, and people came out of the woodwork against his nonsense argument. He remained unconvinced by 2010. food court bailiff posted:miyazaki created the soulsborne series of games and directed all the good ones, and had a lot of influence over the one he didn't direct There is still debate on whether directors have true authorial responsibility over movies when there are also cinematographers, editors, actors, all sorts of other artistic professionals, and even producers involved, so people are going to still cast doubt on the idea of central video game authorship. Name Change fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 00:15
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I don't get the games=not art argument, sincerely. A finished game is the product of work from many visual artists, sound designers, composers, and actors. Individually, generally understood to be artists. Somehow, put together in their final product, it stops being art? What? It doesn't matter to me, i sincerely do not care if games rise to the level of something worthy of sitting in the Louvre, but it's art dudes.
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Aug 23, 2018 00:23
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Jim Barris posted:MGS, for example, very much has a central thesis, all of those games attempt to make a philosophical statement about the world. MGS's story is giant pile of trash.
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Aug 23, 2018 00:33
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The problem with the claim that games=art is that it's a yes/no oversimplification. The fact that too many gamers seem compelled to view things as binary is part of a much larger discussion. Games contain art; they contain amazing textures, impressive 3D models and compelling music, but the whole package is not art, it's more clearly viewed as a collection of art that attempts to tell some kind of story. So no, games are not art, but they contain art.
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Aug 23, 2018 00:35
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YagotmeIdidit posted:MGS's story is giant pile of trash. True or not, that is irrelevant. Also we are all eating the trash all of the time. The trash is ideology.
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Aug 23, 2018 00:36
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Harrow posted:Part of it is also that the artistic side of the creative team tends not to have much power in video games compared to things like movies and TV. In movies, you get things like actors or directors getting funding to make prestige or auteur projects in exchange for doing a big blockbuster, because directors and actors matter for the marketing of those blockbuster movies. The big names have power in that system. That's simply untrue, video game studios have easily as many (if not more) big names who are basically no different than big-name film directors when it comes to influence over a project
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Aug 23, 2018 00:42
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Rutibex posted:That's not true, lots of game designers have name recognition. John Carmack, Will Wright, Richard Garriot, Sid Meiyer, Shigeru Miyamoto, etc Perhaps you are thinking of John Romero instead of John Carmack? John Carmack was never much of a game designer, but he was one hell of a game engine programmer. Literally every Source Engine game, every id tech engine and every Call of Duty game still contains code that Carmack wrote personally.
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Aug 23, 2018 00:45
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bioshock infinite is good art and a bad game
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Aug 23, 2018 00:48
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basic hitler posted:I don't get the games=not art argument, sincerely.  food court bailiff posted:this idea that there aren't single vision big budget games is just....wrong. I never said that they don't exist, just that creatives have less bargaining power in the games industry than they do in film. Someone like Yoko Taro is able to make his weird auteur game specifically because someone else was willing to pull for him, not through any pull he has on his own, for example. And there absolutely are people with that pull on their own--I mean, From Software made Hidetaka Miyazaki their president, after all, and his work on actual games is what got Satoru Iwata in charge of Nintendo--but it's still less common. Not totally unheard-of, but not enough to be the norm. Your examples did make me realize that it seems to be more common in Japanese games, though. I remember there was a big thing when Konami fired Hideo Kojima where people were all "Japanese gaming companies hate it when there's one big name people attribute things to" and I just had to be like "Nintendo is right there." Not to mention Koji Igarashi of Castlevania (and now Bloodstained) fame, or Hironobu Sakaguchi (also known as the guy who directed most of the good Final Fantasy games and then Lost Odyssey which is also really good), or Yasumi Matsuno (dude basically handcrafted Ivalice), just to name a few more. Though to be fair, all three of those guys are now either working in mobile games or relying on crowdfunding so maybe they're not the best examples today, but whatever, I still know their work and as we've established I'm not very smart. It's less common in the west, though I guess I'm ready to be proven conclusively wrong about that, too. Again, not impossible or never ever happens, but not common, either (unless you go out and do your own thing with your own funding like Tim Schafer). Harrow fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 01:14
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QuarkJets posted:That's simply untrue, video game studios have easily as many (if not more) big names who are basically no different than big-name film directors when it comes to influence over a project no, except in indie studios, there's no analog for the power of a well known hollywood director. it doesn't matter who you are, if you publish under EA, activision, or ubisoft you are under the thumb of people who can and will override your vision or whatever to shove in exploitative dlc, gambling, lovely anti-piracy measures like pointless always-online components, and other monetization actions that perilously affects the quality of the final product. Nobody got to tell kubrick to make his movies more accessible or dumb them down or whatever once he became famous. kubrick isn't exactly indecipherable or anything, but that kind of uncompromizing vision is unheard of in the AAA video game world. indie studios, yeah though.
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Aug 23, 2018 01:17
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