[kthorjensen]

[Predator Goose]

[Dracko]

It kind of is. Predator Goose, do you follow the comic scene? There are many things which have legitimised it times and times over, and well clear out of superhero territory most of the time at that. I'm not talking about the vilified "indie" comics either.

P.S. Opinions suck.
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[Predator Goose]

I've followed the comic scene till roughly 96~97. Got really bored with it, especially the standard lines such as superman, spider man, and the x-men. Since that time I've never seen something that interested me, nor has anyone brought to my attention anything close to those two works. I won't say I'm an authority on the subject, much more of a casual observer.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[icycalm]

[JamesE]

Posting in legendary thread/in b4 axe

[Shapermc]

Icy, you forgot the j/k and the winking smile.
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[JamesE]

that's probably because he's deadly serious

[Dracko]

[icycalm]

[extrabastardformula]

[Toups]

I've been mostly avoiding this thread for a variety of obvious reasons, but I want to chime in with this:

a) I really, really, really really wish people would get over the naive assumption that declaring something "art" is to give it an award which immediately elevates it above all other things. There's a lot of art that's just trash, you know! The idea of "art" honestly has less to do with a work's innate qualities and more to do cultural standards of the day. A filmmaker may make a trashy, exploitative trainwreck of a film under the banner of "art" and it may be accepted as such -- even if it's, you know, a terrible film. The underlying anxiety here is more whether or not our medium in question "games" will be taken seriously. And I honestly believe the greater underlying problem there is that games are interactive so they take a great deal more effort to learn and understand them. We actually DO have a growing and pretty healthy roster of "arty" games released in the last decade, and the movement to produce games like that continues to grow. We really just lack any real critical writing about them that actually understands the medium.

b) Read this post here and adjust your posting habits accordingly!!
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[kthorjensen]

[Predator Goose]

[boojiboy7]

[Toups]

[boojiboy7]

Don't cry Toups. Maybe he will read it now. Keep hope alive, sir.

[Mr Mustache]

Shakespeare and Mindgame are crap.






(more to come...perhaps?)
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The people are like wool to me

[kthorjensen]

[Toups]

Did you miss this bit right here?

[Predator Goose]

You can probably stop attacking The Crow now as well, because I'm not going to defend it. I only brought it up to correct an earlier post of mine, and it expresses my opinion. It's ok that you disagree with my opinion, and under different circumstances I might discuss it, but I'd rather see this thread get back on track, if that's even possible at this point.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[Rucio]

[The Drunken Samurai]

[dark steve]

TDS go back to the kids forum

[The Drunken Samurai]

NO U
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[Intentionally Wrong]

Mister Toups just became the winner of the thread, the board, and the fucking year, as far as I'm concerned. (I'm withholding "winner of the century" until I see how effective this new strategy proves to be.)

Dark steve, TDS, do you two want to be on double secret probation?
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[MrNash]

Constant discussion of whether or not games are art has really begun to wear on my nerves in recent months. By definition games are art. They're forms of creative expression. Period.

What people are really getting at when discussing "games as art" is whether or not they can be defined as high culture. Here's a quick rundown of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, and his studies into high and low culture:

http://www.jahsonic.com/PierreBourdieu.html

Using Bourdieu's criteria for high culture, some games can indeed be defined as high culture because of barriers that surround them, preventing just anyone from picking up a controller and enjoying the title right away.

When people say games are art, they seem more interested in finding examples of specific games that can be held up as crowning creative achievements. That's fine, but they're really on a quest to find high culture. There is low and high culture in most other creative fields (film, literature, music, etc.), and the same holds true in video games.
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The Armchair Empire

[Ben Reed]

I'd buy that video games are art in the "creative expression" sense but I don't know that I would call them art in the CONVENTIONAL sense, simply by virtue of the experience they impart onto the player is determined by ACTIVE PARTICIPATION -- by actively changing the state of the game in a way that will inevitably unique from someone else's experience -- but at the same time, their aesthetic experience, unlike a physical art form such as dancing or music, is not completely generated by the participant. Even if you're playing a cover song, you're doing it through the agent that is your own instrument, held in your own hands and controlled by you -- even if you pick up Brian May's own Red Special, the music coming from that guitar is ALL YOU unless you are Brian May himself.

Case in point: when two guys look at one of Michaelangelo's frescoes, they don't LITERALLY see completely different naked Greco-Roman people doing the pull-my-finger gag -- it's always God and Adam, and by definition you go from there. When two guys go to see Lord of the Rings at the same theater, one of them doesn't see a musical finale to the crumbling of Sauron's tower, excellently choreographed and with very impressive footwork on the part of Ian Holm as Bilbo.

But when they both sit down at different SNESes to play Super Mario World, their experiences in altering the initial state (i.e. the game without somebody at the controls are quantifiably different, down from where and when they drop, to the angle at which they tag the flagpole, to the pixel at which jumping Mario's fist makes contact with the ? block above him. Evven if the two play the same stage in exactly identical ways, jumping at all the same times, pressing the button at exactly the same time, the experience they generate will always be different simply by virtue of past, present, and future experience -- i.e. one guy might be a superplayer who's died only a handfull of times, but the other guy might be kinda bad at the game but somehow magically manages to pull an identical performance to the first player out of his ass.

But at the same time, unlike music and dancing, there are clearly defined rules by how much one can totally alter the content of the experience. Let's go back to the example of the Red Special -- even using Brian May's own guitar, you are not in any way, shape, or form limited to songs associated with Brian May. You could play Queen standards like Hammer to Fall, or you could do something entirely different and go into Zep's Heartbreaker, or you could just flick random strings at random times and make a whole lot of awful noise. If you're on-stage doing Swan Lake, there's no one stopping you from spontaneously stopping your pirouette and breaking out the windmills for your unwitting audience. But no matter how many times you boot up that SNES, unless you hack or otherwise alter the game -- and thereby create your own game -- you will always be limited in Super Mario Brothers. You can be Mario. You can be Luigi. But if you want to be Kirby, or turn it into a 2D SSBM, you're going to have to make your own game.

Bear in mind that this is not to say that video games have no aesthetic elements, and certainly not to say they are unworthy of serious cultural and academic appreciation. But I honestly believe that in order to properly appreciate them, you have to approach them from an entirely different angle than other expressive media. You are dealing here with the fusion of aesthetic elements and a rule-based system of competition (namely, a game) -- just picking one set of rules for judgment from one of those categories and applying them to video games simply won't work.

Thank you, and God bless America.
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[meauxdal]

[Ben Reed]

[Hot Stott Bot]

[klikbeep]

Video games might not be art, but they are certainly better than art. Take the Mona Lisa (considered by many to be the most important work of art). Although certainly pretty in its own right, that prettiness is locked within a static form . . . no amount of effort on the part of the viewer can change its smile, or adjust its hair color, or make it talk to you.

Flash-forward to video games. Now you are the artist, solving puzzles and powering up your character to gain the advantage. The tools of the trade (workstations, voice actors, chiptunes, etc) are used effortlessly to do this.

So while games may not be Art (I HATE THAT TERM SO MUCH) they are a lot better than it for the reasons above, a new paradigm for us all.

[Max Cola]

Eternal Sunshine was a good movie. I liked it!

Umm, art is silly. Trying to figure out a solid definition is silly too... there's a million of 'em.

I... don't really know what to say. Well, on the "games as art" thing, I recall an article in which Fumito Ueda stated that ICO was not created to be "a work of art"... it was just a game made in a unique way. Interpret that as you will.
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Everybody hurts sometimes

[Wall of Beef]

I think Hockey, Soccer, and Skateboarding are art forms. So why not video games?

Oh and I just watched "The Science of Sleep", and it was great!
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Tumblr

[klikbeep]

[Toups]

Brendan you should get on gmail chat sometime so I can ask you about ESL programs in japan okay.
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[SplashBeats]

Toups, no :(

[Toups]

Joe, YES :D
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[DarwinMayflower]

I think video games are good enough to be considered art insofar that there are enough wankers and pretentious critics out there debating a variety of useless opinions on which game is better than what...just like the art world.

However I think the true art of video games is in it's ability to mimic popular forms of media that are considered "art" and but at the same time not be totally overshadowed by that theme to make it less of a video game. To me, the concept of anything typically non-art be considered as art means that particular item trancends it's normal boundries of what it represents. I mean anyone could probably make a Picasso or Kubrick related/themed riding lawnmower which could be considered art...or kitsch. However I think by making the best riding lawnmower ever created, so great that even a non-lawnmower enthusiast could say "Yeah...that thing is a fucking beaut," that in itself should be considered art. Not in the traditional sense, but as a badge of honour. I guess to a certain degree if you were using a 5.0 star raiting system, something 5.5 stars would considered art. But that's how I feel about it.

But it's hard to define. I mean The Sims trancended all sorts of demographics and boundries; but I don't really consider it art. Much like I couldn't care less about Limp Bizkit's latest single as art. The pretentious fag in me basically labels SOTC as art (and I imagine most of you expected that) however who am I to judge really without the collective backing of thousands of other pretentious fags?

But in the end I think what most hampers video games from attainting true art status is that it's still pretty much an infant media; grade A screenwriters a lot of them are not. Zelda Twilight Princess's story read like something done a decade ago on video games, of which even FF7's storyline felt it was done 2-3 decades ago in film. Once video games depart from mimicking other art mediums, such as film, and manage to truely embrace the video game nature and the eventual evolution of it...then perhaps it might be respected as art or even beceome something entirely different. This isn't to say to totally get rid of other art influences, but to challenge what it means to make a video game and how to advance it without being a copy of something else.

[Predator Goose]

DarwinMayflower, your name is awesome.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[icycalm]

Ben Reed has this flashing avatar that prevents me from reading any of his posts. It is quite annoying.


edit:
oh thank god, new page.