Can video games be art?

Art, as Tacitus said, cannot serve a utilitarian function. It's "for-the-sake-of-which" is only "for-the-sake-of-art". It is because of this unique self-referentiality that people find it so easy to fall into the Trap Sexy has. No pun intended.

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Okay, so I'd agree with the statement that any man-made can be art.

But there needs to be a work within a given historical/temporal context that ELEVATES that man-made thing into art. It can only do this by trying to be art---regardless of what "art" actually is.

But this, I claim, is art. When something which already has a meaning in our world of signification takes on a new signification utterly apart from its usefulness or utility.

So can lolballpit.gif ever be art? It isn't now, but it only takes someone to create a work that subverts its current utility into the "utility" (nonesuch for art) of art.

Asking are videos games art is like asking is golf or curling a sport. Some people will say yes, others will say no.

Art to me is the expression of human skill and imagination.



What is a video game, if not interactive art?

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If Ebert can say not all films are art, how can he say not any game is art? Let him sit there with that train of thought while I go play Okami

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He also says they can never be art. That just shocks me. It's one thing to say there hasn't yet been an art game, but it's another to say an entire medium is incapable of art, especially when it involves so much artistry on every level of development.

That being said, there have already been art games, and there will only continue to be more as things progress and diversify into even greater realms of sophistication.

And personally I don't play videogames at all, but it is only a matter of time before something draws me enough to where I couldn't stop myself.

I recall discussing this with my friends at one point. Not only did Roger Ebert say video games can never be art, but so did Stephen King. I believe this is old thinking from boomers who have little to no concept of recent gaming and make brash presumptions on the form itself. Now as for myself, I'm not really a video gamer, I don't play video games all that much, but I'll still stand by it as a potential art form. I can give one good example of a few, Silent Hill 2. In the game they do a lot of artistic things to enhance psychological terror. Right of the bat they lay out the groundwork that, "it is much easier to go down the Hellish rabbit hole, then go back," by having your character step into a town by walk endlessly through a labyrinth of a trail, which sets the tone for the game. When you enter the apartment, you hear disturbing noises, not just from the soundtrack, but also from the enemies you face. Then there is a brief moment in that area where all sound comes to the halt. The synthesis of this is rather jarring and disturbing. I could go on, but the point is the game utilizes valid artistic aesthetics to build a truly terrifying experience. (Much better than the movie ever did, in fact, it seemed to miss the point completely). There are other games which I have found have artistic "story" value, I often champion Ocarina of Time for portraying a very romantic vision of a time-spacial-story. That's just one, and I have others. What is "Art" may be in the eye of the beholder, but I don't think anyone should judge a format, no matter what it is, without realizing all its potentials. Mathematics is sometimes not seen as "art," yet the truly great painters of the past realized its potential and utilized it in their own works, (I use the Mona Lisa as an example). Ebert and King and their kin seem to have shut their eyes to a potentially interesting emerging form of entertainment, and yes, I will say art. They come from a time where games were in its infancy, and upon seeing it, shut its future out completely. That's just my take on it.

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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage

This may sound a bit obtuse, but I honestly mean this. Everything is art. Every experience, good or bad, has artistic merit. The reason I say this is because as someone who creates, as we all do, life in itself is art. And art is a reflection on our very lives. All our conscious realities, all our subconscious dreams and fantasies, art is a reflection upon these things. At least, this is how I perceive the answer to this question.

I like Usual's stab at an art definition:

The 'everything is art' arguments don't work for me until some human hand intervenes. I like the above definition, especially in this gaming context, coz you can see how both of those things are at work in games (but equally, how the likes of Ebert might think they've been deployed better elsewhere.)

(And to be fair to him, the story in Braid did suck )

Games creators have skill and imagination in spades, no doubt, but LA Noire still isn't going to look as good as The Roaring Twenties, despite 80 years separating them. And storyline creativity is only just starting to flourish in the gaming world I'd say. (RDR was the first one where I felt interaction brought something new to an old narrative - coz all narratives are old in theory.)

I think because games are a whole new medium the bar has been set pretty high as to when they've attained 'art' level. (So ironic they're being made to level up this way ). We've seen what can be achieved in the various fields of visual & aural mimicry, of narrative 'reconstruction' of the world, and now there's an expectation those heights be hit while simultaneously being interactive. (And perhaps, by being made interactive, even exceed what's gone before?). Certainly that level of virtuosity hasn't been displayed as yet. (Altho possibly the interactive music/fx soundscapes of modern games are a genuine advance in 'audio art' terms?)

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I'd qualify my feelings on the state of play: I've experienced 'arty' moments in games - even games as simple as the recent Minecraft, where vision, sound, scenario and interaction combine to put me in a reflective state of mind. But because games are capable of yet more, and probably more sustained and novel pushes into these artistic realms, I'm still holding out before I'd say they'd truly arrived as art. (Art that can take its place in the daily drama of our lives, not just as morphine-tainment to blot it out, but as something that helps sustain and advise [Pretentious as that came out, I think we do expect that of our better art, no? ]).

[EDIT - On reflection, it seems 'reflection' is a big part of my definition of art ]

[Extra EDIT - Just didn't know where to put this ponder on the neat 'conceptual stories' of games putting novel twists on their own architecture (and why they're not art yet to me)... 'Imagine if time ran backwards'/'gravity was upside down' etc... it's entertaining, but the reflection is in the mirror you're looking at... erm, as it were . They're not causing you to reflect on the nature of the real world so much as spelling out an 'alternative' to their own norms, which are currently constructed from a far smaller vocabulary than the wider world we all know. It's more 'imagine if pacman was a girl' / played differently, than 'imagine the trials of a transgender teen' or what have you.]

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Yikes. I had no idea this thread had exploded. There is some fantastic stuff here.

I really think we have to rule out the "everything is art" explanation. Not because it's really wrong (though I'd say it's more that everything can be art, potentially, or have art-like qualities), but because it's useless. A word that encompasses everything is not a very valuable word, and it doesn't really answer the question of the thread so much as it brushes it aside and declares it a pointless question. So I think we have to operate, for the purposes of having a useful discussion, under the idea that any definition of art has to exclude some things.

planet already said most of what I would have said in response to winter's post. I don't disagree about any of those specific examples but we can't just say "I like this and people who don't like it aren't actually human beings." That's just a very forcefully stated opinion, and while subjectivity plays a necessary role in this, this sort of response reduces art to a completely subjective thing, which means art is anything anyone decides is art, which puts it right back in the "everything is art" camp.

Two really good thoughts that stand out for me, so far:

This is a very good question, I think, and I like your race car example, because it really clarifies the point being made. But it prompts an equally interesting question: if a game is not art because it doesn't exist without a player's physical interaction, does that mean a) that there's no such thing as an interactive art exhibit?, and b) that the game would be art if you posted a video of someone else playing it, and you simply watched it like a movie? Meta, I know, but it underscores how hard it is to define this sort of thing.

Also:
This. This this this this this. I wouldn't say we have a useful definition of art that really encompasses the idea, but this is one of the better ones mentioned so far, I think, because it both excludes some things, and it contains a mechanism by which random things can become art at a certain level. Thus, a game's purpose is to entertain, but certain games can take on a meaning above and beyond that purpose.

The more this discussion goes on, the more the old quote holds up: "Art is like pornography: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."

On a pragmatic level (as much as the butterfly chasing of definition is fun too ), it just occurred to me that great art doesn't normally get made by committee. Or at least not many examples spring to mind (great films being one exception to the rule, but their scarcity highlights how much chance, or an overbearing auteur director, seem to be required for mass collusion to spark an 'inspired/inspiring' act of creation).

The number of 'media' involved in computer games means they're always going require a big crew, and be up against this factor (as well as 'common denominator' marketing to recoup the big initial investment - not normally "art's" best friend either ).

I don't know how much to read into that, except insofar as there are simply more art forms that are logistically simpler when done by one person. It'd be hard for people to take turns painting, for example, and even if they did it'd be very hard for the area painted by each to match the subtle, personal styles of the other, even with great effort. And since most people don't want weird paintings where each quadrant looks different from the other three, it seems as much a practical necessity as anything. I'd also suggest that filmmaking represents more than a small exception; if most films aren't great, it's only because most art in general isn't great.

By the by, I forgot to mention that I also thought planet's point about things being art "automatically" was very clarifying. A painting, even a mediocre one, is considered art by basically everyone whether they find it moving or not. There's sort of a double standard there, because video games and other mediums less commonly accepted as art seem to have to meet a qualitative baseline that other mediums don't.

Put another way: you're not art until something from your medium is unquestionably art, at which point even the mediocre stuff in your field seems to suddenly qualify. Painting is undeniably an art form, thus paintings are basically always art, but merely art of varying levels of quality. So when the next generation's "Shadow of the Colossus" comes out, it may have a retroactive effect where we look on this generation's games as art, just much cruder, less impressive art.

And I, too, find it kind of amusing and kind of pleasing that "Shadow of the Colossus" is part of a sort of Godwin's Law (in it's original form) in relation to discussions about video games and art. As the discussion goes on the probability that it will be mentioned approaches 1, and you usually don't have too wait long.

I guess the 'commitee' idea is just interesting on the grounds that so much of what we consider classical art stems from individuals with a 'unique vision' etc. (Painting, music composition, novelists etc). But like you say this could just be limitations of those mediums. (I wouldn't say film is a small exception, by the way, so much as an interesting one - the pitfalls of 'commitee' art included )

Ay, planet's social acceptance/'added meaning' definition is onto something for sure. I guess we'll know computer games are an art form when we all agree they are (Or at least, when the numbers of people decrying them as crass nonsense diminish )

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.

The creepypasta link is broke, but if it's the 'mystery figure in the mist' one, then yeah, that seems to fit with the Minecraft vibe. The 'what's over that hill' thing. (And the fear of mysterious death lurking on the edge of perception ).

It's funny that even caustic critic Yahtzee (vid) ascribed (paternal) life lessons to it. (Mainly the way it makes you grind, and occasionally blows your **** up in an arbitrary fashion).

It did just occur to me that one thing that's 'arty' about Minecraft is that it leaves to your own devices to such an extent that you enter a fugue state . So perhaps to a degree we're doing the heavy lifting? (Plenty of successful visual art seems to leave the viewer room to come to their own conclusion tho i guess).

Certainly it's doing something cunning in recreating the basics of a world (well), from day cycles, food needs, and death by fire/claw/misadventure, while leaving plenty to your imagination, both in visual and narrative terms.

In that sense it's a 'snapshot' of the world, as you put it. (And hell, it's definitely not utilitarian - it's the opposite. It's all about play - and could make you lose your job )

It definitely seems to be the sandboxes games, and the cinematic storytelling RPG games, that get the biggest shouts for the art tag.

Still psyched for the Herzog caves?

But now you're talking about an affected/created thing with the kids picture. The way you and Dog were talking earlier made everything art off the plate. As the big Y said, we can't even split a brush hair if we define 'Art' as 'Everything'. That makes Lady Gaga's doodoo art. And I don't want to go there

Interesting on Ebert not having journeyed much outside the silver screen. (PS no he hasn't played any games thus far. But then what can you do with a man who listens to books )

(PPS yeah I dig much of what he has to say on film too)

Okay, so I read it and I thought it was boring. It went nowhere. Neither Roger or Kellee Santiago had much going for them in this blog. Roger says that no video gamer will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form -- I'm sorry, Roger, are you even alive? Is more than just your voice gone? Video games are already an art form and have been for over 20-30 years. In my opinion, all video games being created now are fighting each other competitively to be the best. Many will fail, but some will stand the test of time. Why are so many people still interested in classic Nintendo games from the 80's? This is the power of that new artwork. These things are sticking with people. They will probably be around for a long time. They will become classics. The original Super Mario Brothers game will be like some old, early black and white movie that people still love. It will still be in existence when those of us in our 20's reach our 80's.

But Roger doesn't care. They don't speak to him. Despite the accusations of video games being for fat, lazy kids, most video game enthusiasts I know of are thin and fit and active. Video games require you to be a very kinesthetic thinker -- gamers seem to be more in touch with their body, I think. Roger Ebert, fat and bloated all his life, does not look like a video game nerd. He is a complete caricature of the movie reviewer -- living life through fantasy and popcorn. Living through words and sights and human behavior and feelings -- not movement, not action, not power. He is sedentary, mentally and physically.

Video games are like dreams -- full of visuals, full of weird things, but unlike movies, you get to be the one in control. You are moving around, as if in a dream. Video games are like artistic representations of dreams. Dreams don't go away, just as life doesn't go away, and life is the great reservoir from which movies and songs are pulled from. I actually had a very cool video game dream the other night that had me waking up with great inspiration.

I'm quite bored now with talking about all of this, but, to sum it up, Roger Ebert's just not a video game man. And he is not the final word on video games as art. Someone will prove him wrong one day, if it hasn't already happened.

Would Dave Couse consider video games art?



Probably not until Hideo Kojima dies...

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Nice thread....lots of good constructive comments. One of the best definitions I've seen: Art is something that stimulates an individual's thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. That being said, yes, a video game can be art.

To Golgot:

When I say everything is art, I mean it as a form of artistic frequency, experiencing the frequencies around you and making them into art. Everything in this world is an inspiration and even the most mundane things when looked through a certain lens can provide inspiration for a higher art. That's kind of what I was going for with that statement.

1) Not everyone is freaking Dog Star Man and capable of being inspired by everything! 2) The capability within the world for art is always first imposed and delineated with a social/linguistic category before it can become actualized as art. In other words, art always requires some human declaration. 3) I would even argue, as I have already briefly done in this thread, that a life is simply not art---in fact, the very opposite---which is why we are so enthralled with fictional narratives that parallel and replicate lives. 4) Art always creates a new 'reality' apart from the reality from where it came. It is not simply reality as such but a reality FOR reality.

GSM, I've got nothing against seeing the world as miraculous/inspiring, and ergo being all art 'in potentia', but I'd still say most common uses of the word 'art' talk about what happens after a human hand has got involved. And I guess we're trying to drill down into what the word means generically as much as to all of us individually.

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PS if acceptance/cultural currency is the key to all this, then certainly I see the word art used with increasing frequency in the games reviewing world. Which is becoming a more mainstream world in many ways. It might just take one breakthrough arty 'blockbuster' to jump into the mainstream and cause a redefinition of the medium as an 'art form', as Y/PN suggest?

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PPS It's thoroughly wrong, but I've convinced myself that my architectural potterings in Minecraft mean I'm a digital Nek Chand. I could argue that it's the artistic iterations of real landscapes/materials that drives this behaviour, but then I'd be getting too meta-pretentious by half