The few times I've played
Minecraft, I definitely had an "artistic" feeling about it. First of all is its purposeful use of---by today's standards---extremely low quality graphics. It
is somehow
affecting at times. Especially after coming across this fascinating
creepypasta about it, I can't help but feel there
is some sort of "intangible" aspect at work.
Perhaps many games with much greater graphics could never achieve this by their form alone---to focused on THE GAME
(which you all just lost).
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I've heard some interesting takes on great art based around the historicist definition...
1) A work that can be redefined in
any era (Shakespeare, Mozart, etc.)
2) A work that changes the very meaning of art (Duchamp, Beckett, etc.)
3) A work that creates or reveals its line of predecessors retroactively (Kafka, Wagner, etc.)
But I like to stress 3) over 2) or 1) because I think it is precisely because of people like Rothko or Duchamp that people get too focused on this "everything" idea. Artists holding their role will always be fringe, by definition of their craft. That is their location and role in the space of art.
For me, what is more fascinating is why
so much art is based around mimesis and judged on those criteria alone. Paintings, films, novels. Visual representation and story telling are probably both the first, and therefore most persistent forms of art in human history.
But why this insistence of orbit around narratives---mimesis of life? I can't help but think there is something necessary on a "spiritual" level about the process of narrativizing reality through art as a way of opening up reality's possibilities.
One of the things I thought about recently was how there is nothing more useful and utilitarian than being itself. Existing is, in effect, a kind or bare coping with your environment---doing what is needed, what works. I think the idea of instead turning that existence into a narrative de-utilitizes reality itself, allowing the space for interpretation, reflection, emotional response, etc.
In other words, art
opens up anything it takes into itself as art. It frees that thing from its place in our world (any cultural world) and allows it, the individual work, to define a unique world around it. A painting is not just a representation of our world; it is the world of the painting itself. Even further, a photograph is nothing more than a snapshot of reality. Reality is too complex. We can only just barely cope with it. But if you close off reality into a frame it frees this part of our reality into something separate---a reality of its own, untamed by necessity.
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I suppose if you put it this way, all you need to ask yourself about videogames is whether or not it opens up the game into an open reality.
I notice a lot more mention of the kinds of games where you are constantly exploring an environment rather than more direct, OVER 9000 POWER LEVEL games where it is always evident you are playing.
But this is all very shaky, I'll admit.