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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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 Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 5:31 am |
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I have been asked to participate in a podcast debate on whether or not games are art. This thread has helped me remember the main threads of argument! Thanks!
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 5:58 am |
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I've been thinking and writing about this matter over the past couple of days, and I came up with a pretty comprehensive outline about my stance on art. I think it cuts out a lot of bullshit. And lo! this thread has beaten its banks with such swelling current.
http://www.adilegian.com/ArtOutline.pdf
It's useful to sit down and rigorously drill yourself on what you honestly think about a given subject once every few years. This was this year's grille on Art.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 6:11 am |
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| JamesE wrote: |
| I don't agree with you all the time Adilegian but you're a really interesting person. |
That's all I want, really!
EDIT: I like the Winfred Owen. James Fenton's got a great essay on Owen's work, if you're interested. It's collected in the book "The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures." Hell, all the essays are really good.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 8:02 am |
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| Intentionally Wrong wrote: |
| Remind me again why it's important that we define what is and is not art, in this thread? |
It's pretty fun to talk about when everyone's interested in what others have to say. Which I am!
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 5:13 pm |
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| John Mc. wrote: |
| why does anyone care? if you find games rewarding, then fuck some art snob breaking into and slashing at your conceptions! |
Some people make art--its experience, cultivation, patronage, and creation--the core of their lives. Not everyone's asking (or answering) questions about the art-status of videogames from the perspective of a player-critic. We're pretty interested to discover how the medium relates to everything else we love.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:18 am |
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| MrNash wrote: |
| By definition games are art. They're forms of creative expression. Period. |
I've seen this appear as a problem, and it's an interesting split between two different definitions of art that I've not encountered before. At least, not this intensely.
Position A: Art selectively exists via various media. This means that a good painting is art and a bad painting is not art.
Position B: All media are art. Good instances of those media are good art, and bad instances of those media are bad art.
Am I getting this right? Because I'm trying to understand the state of the conversation. (And I mean "the state of the conversation writ large," of course—not just "the state of the conversation on SB.)
I took an Aesthetic Philosophy course my freshman year in college, and I've been in love with the branch of philosophy ever since. Beauty and people's uncanny ability to evoke its experience—as well as our ability to experience apart from deliberate stimulation—these are the most amazing things in the world to me.
| MrNash wrote: |
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 |
Thank you for this link! I'll check it out.
It's unfortunate that the descriptor "French" immediately puts me on my guard. I would say something like, "I wish the Germans were considered the cutting edge of Continental high culture—or someone, just not the French." But then I remember that old Germany tried to become the cutting edge of Continental culture with the cutting edge of a bayonet, so it seems less politic of a desire.
I just wish the French weren't so goddamn frou-frou in their scholarship.
| klikbeep wrote: |
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. |
I read this after I had finished reading James Fenton's essay "Men, Women, and Beasts," and there's a really good excerpt in there by D. H. Lawrence. It reads:
"The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, finished."
And I thought, "My God, this is how I think art works." The irony, of course, is that the running flame and the emerging and the flowing off are all cognitive experiences applied to the work by the audience. I think there's a necessary displacement, though, that sacrifices philosophical honesty for the sake of aesthetic honesty: unless we really posit the weight of our experience upon the object in question, we're participating in little more than arty narcissism.
Lemme give an example. Earlier this week, I got Mozart's piano sonata K331. I don't mean that I acquired it, but the order and movement and variation suddenly made sense. The thematic progression became evident as an abstract narration of emotion that used the theme for bones, and suddenly the music changed from merely present and pretty—but necessary, muscular, and very much earned.
What am I to do when I consider the experience? Do I lay the weight of epiphany upon the work or myself? Philosophically, I'd have to say that I cognitively applied the muscle on the thematic bones in order to establish meaning. Aesthetically, though, this doesn't really work. The power of the experience lies (or at least requires) that the music have remained static and unchanged—that I have the sense that I have, somehow, entered into a more right relationship with the music—and that I have discovered something that I, previously, was not.
I think that a certain kind of interactivity defeats all of this. Cognitive interaction is necessary to discover beauty, but physical interaction reduces the whole thing to an exercise in bland gratification.
I was excited to discover my girlfriend, who is beautiful and loves me. I would be less excited if I had cobbled her from a template.
I don't think it's freedom-hating to suggest that part of our best experience involves submitting to forces that we do not control.
| klikbeep wrote: |
I think art is just a boring thing for farts in turtlenecks who walk around in museums or whatever. I had to do this thing in a museum for school once and I just about wanted to die it was so boring. Jesus. "Somejerk Blahstein painted the Whatever in 1773 with oil paint and blah blah blah." Assholes.
Speaking as a gamer, I think we're moving beyond art -- way beyond -- and so to even use Art as a label does us all a disservice. |
I don't understand this very well. It sounds like you dislike the term "art" because it reminds you of some people you don't like.
By contrast, I like the term "art" because it reminds me of experiences that I loved.
This sounds like rejecting church doctrine because you didn't like the phoneys in Sunday school, without actually drawing a relationship between yourself and the tenets of faith.
I don't understand why people hate art—rather, hate the idea of art—and want to best it with technology.
| DarwinMayflower wrote: |
| 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. |
I agree with this completely.
Though I'd like to add (without being deliberately snarky toward you, DarwinMayflower) that the notion of "videogame criticism" will become a lot more credible when its professionals demonstrate versatile experience with traditional arts.
I mean, shit, do you know what it sounds like when every person who talks about videogames-as-art only compares them with films-as-art? It sounds like a bunch of dejected film students who don't see anything interesting being done in film, so they're moving onto videogames as "the next revolutionary thing." Nevermind the whole history of human culture and civilization that preceded it!
Art is an act of psychical necessity. It is imperative. I translate Old English poetry and prose. These were written by (almost always) men who would live very short lives—by men whose reckoning of value in life was how well one died—by men who would likely die from sickness, frost, or political enemies. And, even though their daily existence gave them every right to drop everything and embrace nihilism, they wrote poetry to give themselves pleasure and to discover some meaning in their lives that extended beyond the blunt slap of a prow on frozen waves and blood on the deck.
In other words, I think that anyone attempting to establish videogames as art will need to seriously invest him(her)self in putting videogames in the context of human cultural history. It's a big task! I'd like to see it done, and maybe help a little in my own way.
| Ben Reed wrote: |
| We are dealing with something fundamentally new here, and I believe we must treat it as such. |
I disagree. (Largely for the reasons explained above.) 99% of post-modern philosophy and critical theory is based on the fallacious idea that "we're dealing with something fundamentally new here," ignorant of the fact that many (almost all) of our current issues have been recognized and addressed (however insufficiently) by philosophers past.
I really think we'll do much better if we accept that we're our parents' children. (Metaphorically speaking.)
(Hell, literally, too, some of us.)
| Hot Stott Bot wrote: |
| And the same is true of movies, plays, television, music, etc., and most media. It all has its functional elements, and I don't think that having a funcitonal element precludes the notion of "art". |
Other than my philosophical problems with games' functionality (briefly explained above), I've got a personal one. I think a lot of other people share this, too.
I have certain expectations of functional experience. They are two in number!
(1): I will learn a practical skill from the experience. This is an immaterial benefit.
(2): I will have something to show for the experience. This is a material benefit.
Videogames don't do either, and the functional experience becomes (mostly) cognitive clutter after I'm finished with the game.
Example: I am currently building a Mosin Nagant sniper rifle. I will probably pay—total—$100 for the parts needed to build the rifle. I currently have almost all of the bolt assembly built, and I have practiced assembling and disassembling it several times. The work has given my hands a feel for the proportions of the parts, and it has familiarized me with the mechanical processes that will occur very very quickly at a very very near distance from my head when I use the rifle.
This functional experience will teach me patience, actual hand-eye coordination, and it will allow me to experience the pleasure of sharp-shooting at targets: a rural, domestic art.
Why should I invest time, energy, and money in a videogame that will require the same level of work, but that will not reward me with the same material or immaterial benefits as would building a rifle?
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 10:51 am |
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Back!
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| The current head of my grad program is in love with the French, which means I end up readinga decent amount of French criticism. |
You might have written this before, but I'm curious: which discipline are you seeking your grad degree under?
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| I know some of it is translation issues, but a lot of it certainly seem to be from the original writing. |
Yeah, I hear this. A friend of mine once explained why this is, but I have forgotten the exact reason. It has something to do with the French culture's means of presenting itself.
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| Now, as for the viability of the ideas, well, yeah, not always great. Like I said, fun and interesting occasionally. |
I'm with you on this, too.
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| The more I work on SH2 as some sort of work to examine (which as of now consists of a lot of notes I take and random thoughts in my head that will hopefully become more concrete over the course of this week) the more I realize that you are exactly right on this Adilegain. Just the issues of this game alone are not merely ones of film (though as a game it iclearly owes a large debt as such) but involve the psychology of the player him/herself, as well as issues of realism in videogames (which got me thinking on this project in a different way, since I am taking a seminar on literary realism right now) and possibly a whole bunch of other stuff. |
I'm really interested to see the direction you take this work. I started playing SH2 again in honor of FKW, but I wasn't able to get past the entrance to the apartments. I'm a little too easily spooked these days.
The environment is just... it uses the natural world in ways that wholly support the industrialism of the Otherworld, and that sort of dilapidation strikes a sharp key with me. For example!
Also, seeing this red wall upon entering Silent Hill totally makes me feel as though I'm entering the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks.
I also like how the fetishism in the Silent Hill games seems to relate to anthropological work in those fields. Reading Frazer's The Golden Bough opened up a different level to appreciate a lot of the stuff that's happening in the games. The section in The Golden Bough dealing with fetishistic handling of umbilical cords, for example, made a huge chunk of Silent Hill 4 more comprehensible.
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| I was initially approaching this project from a pretty much literary perspective, and that isn't going to work, simply because games don't work as that. I mean, there is part of that there, but there is a lot of other stuff going on that that approach can't encapsulate. It kinda makes doing this seem like a lot of work, but it interesting in that I am going to have to place the game in a lot more context than merely arguing about a piece of literature. |
Yeah, this is one of the ways in which I think that serious work in videogames is going to need to develop an internal vocabulary. (I think someone posted a thread about this earlier.) One of the deficiencies of much post-structural criticism (in my point-of-view) is that it consistently applies the same cognitive approach to media that ultimately get treated the same, despite the fact that they're different in their parts. In the end, it seems to serve little more than to validate the critical slant (or the critic) rather than enlighten anyone about the work.
I think that the dual ends of criticism ought to be (1) to indicate what made things are good and (2) to explain why those made things are good. "The Age of Criticism" is, I think, a name applied to our time because the lines between artist and critic have become blurred to the point that the critic can seem as aesthetically generative as the artist. (Most times, of course, criticism only generates more criticism.)
Anyway, I think that your work in this regard would be valuable. Right after I played SH2 a bit, I lamented to my girlfriend that the term "mature game" only ever means "a game in which you see lots of gore or sex, or in which you deal drugs." Of course, mature people don't usually dally in those affairs; they think abstractly and from experience. I think the GTA games are almost totally shit, and I'd love to see a game respect my intelligence. And this doesn't mean self-absorbed RPGs (looking at you, Xenosaga) that attempt to invert notions of Western iconography.
| DarwinMayflower wrote: |
| But it does make me wonder how my suggestion for the direction for video games to be perceived as art should proceed or what it's final product shall be. I don't have the answer, I just know the direction it should take. And I wonder if we as gamers would benefit from the advancement of video-games into art or if we'll encounter something that would kill the industry outright. |
I think this is spot-on. The thing is, criticism only generates artistic creation when it poses a challenge to an artist on the terms of his craft. When you get down to the level of craft, the idea of "art" becomes a little more superfluous because it's generally out of the person's control. You devote yourself to your craft, and sometimes art comes of it. (So I think.)
In poetry—when in workshops, when showing my poems to friends, and when looking at friends' poems—we don't invoke the name of art when we help each other. Rather, we ask of ourselves, "How can this poem be better?" You can change craft; art comes as it will. So, in context of games, the question changes from, "How can we make games more artistic?" to "How can we make games better?"
This is a question that I doubt will get many real answers on the level of corporate sponsorship.
| DarwinMayflower wrote: |
| In order for video games to advance artwise, we do need more traditionally art aware people in the industry. However this does bring up an interesting chicken and the egg predicament. Should video game criticism's crediblity change in order to change the credibility of video games? Or should the video games change before the credibility of video game criticism advances? |
I think that a huge chunk of the problem might lie more in the current structure of the game industry. It's difficult to imagine a medium as carrying artistic potential when its strongest presence comes in the form of a money-making industry.
Almost all of the traditional arts started on the personal, local level. They later became incorporated, so you wind up with publishing houses, theater troupes, symphony hall managers, and so on. In other words, the traditional arts first existed as creative occupations before they even allowed for the possibility of administrative occupations.
Video games have developed almost oppositely. Their creative and administrative occupations developed simultaneously. Anyone who has worked in a creative field knows that the administrative wings know next-to-nothing about the sweat and blood required to work creatively.
This calls the relevance of such criticism into question. Criticism—no, good criticism—carries special importance with creators because it aims to discover the essence of a craft. Granted, critics try to discover what is good about a craft from an outsider perspective, but that outsider perspective can be very valuable to a creator who is intimate with the creative process.
Criticism has almost no relevance on the administrative levels.
Let's say—hypothetically—that serious, non-bullshit game criticism is written and read by a team of developers. They get a game idea that’s unique, and they set out to make it. Pressure from the administrative level of the company supporting their work could destroy the risky ideas that the criticism helped generate, thereby nullifying any effect that criticism could have in the first place.
Games need less trademark ownership and more personal ownership on behalf of the game creators. I think the creative atmosphere would change, which (I think) necessarily includes the relevance of criticism.
In conclusion:
By the way, Boojiboy: I've decided to try playing back through SH2 on Easy. Maybe that will help my nerves this go-round.
Anyway, I've got hardware that'll let me record movies and take screencaps, and I'm glad to help if you need a specific image captured for reference.
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