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Art, I happen to study it as practitioner, is absolute bullshit, it is about artificial- the name inherently implies- anything that is not nature but created by human practise. Some games are, some are not, Some paintings are, some are not.

Quite simple, do the world a favor and never refer to something as Art. It devalues the word. Just explain why it’s good according to your opinion.

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The most interesting part of Hocking’s essay is that Ebert’s arguments, as represented there, could equally be applied to unmistakably artistic films, if anyone bothered to do it. (bonus! a blog that discusses a first-person perspective movie, with a title derivative of a film penned pseudonymously by Ebert)

On the other hand, exploitation has a proud tradition in movies too. Hitman’s not any less art than, say, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Just as some genres of video games have their little arms races in scenarios (a few years back, didn’t half the FPSs on the market have a scene involving a 747?) and contrived plots to match the technology (err, we need a supersuit of some kind), so do movies (and they’re neatly summarized for you in any number of “making of” features).

But the continual comparison of cinema and video games gets irritating, especially for those who don’t know their history. Cinema today is not what cinema was before television. Before television, “going to the movies” meant not just features, but cartoons, travelogues, newsreels, even musical interludes.

So games don’t have to be the analogue of feature films. And, like movies, there will be a bulk of “genre pieces” that follow the fashions, and make a bunch of the money. But there are also short features, concept pieces and quasi-ludic experiences to be had. Bickering over the definition of art has no point.

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Now what we have? a lot of bandwidth, some almost affordable game engines, a chance to build a studio without actually renting an office thanks to internet and some direct download services that can cut the Ubis and the EAs out of the picture entirely. We have a nicer situation than most of the independent moviemakers of the last century.

Also, I think we need our Cahiers du cinéma, a relevant game magazine that actually changes the way games are made. But this will be waaaay harder.

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Would Dada have been considered art in the 1700s? Or Warhol or any medium of modern expression.

In a way it’s kind of exciting to even have this argument. I have a tiny peeny weeny sneaking suspicion that Ebert thinks games ARE or could be art and just wants to get people to argue it out until the games are elevated to the highest level… but prooooobably not.

It’s like we get to experience the dawning of a new art movement… Maybe they’ll write about it in art history books 50 years from now.

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“I think it would remain clear that I was an artist for having created ‘paints that constrained the set of possible paintings achievable to those that dealt with a set of themes I had chosen’. ”

I don’t think that this is clear at all. The act of placing constraints of what can be accomplished with your creation does not, per se, makes it art. Its not a direct, causal relationship, by any means.

To use a subset of his own symphony analogy, The creator of a musical instrument, say a violin, has made something that can be used for creation within some fairly rigid constraints imposed by the nature of the violin. Yet not all violins can be seen in themselves as an expression of art. A Stradivarius maybe a work of art, whole and entire in and of itself. But most violins are not. They are, at best, works of great craft and skill. At worst, mass produced tat.

Now, for the record, I think the following:

a) Games can be art, just as any act of creation can be, but aren’t automatically so.
b) the vast majority of games are not art.
c & d) repeat a and b with the word ‘films’ in place of ‘games’.

I’m just not convinced that Mr. Hocking actually did anything to actually rebut the equally floored arguments of Ebert. Which is a bit of a shame. Were I are to take Ebert to task, I would think that there is a case to be made that interaction is a primary, essential facet of what we call art. That interaction may be as simple as looking, or as complex as drawing the bow just so across a strad or even crafting the flow of Darwinians across the face of the fractal maps, but the interaction with the user/audiences is, I would argue, essential to something being seen as art. And that just for starters.

I’m left in the rather annoying position of agreeing with Gillen again (damn it). His take on this was much sounder than Hockings. Although, again, Anna Karenina as simulation? Good grief…

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Back when Bioshock came out, trying to package this very debate for digestion by a non-geek audience. Needless to say, I don’t think it was terribly well read.

Anyhow, I’m only posting the link for the sake of full disclosure, as Clint shoots down most of the ideas I thought were “totally rad” with the nonchalance expected when shooing away an insect. In other words, you really shouldn’t bother wading through it.

The point I’d still stand by, though, is that games are ultimately designed for no other reason than to make money. While I absolutely agree with his “paintmaker” thought experiment, any kind of artistic content a game has is there for one reason only: to help it sell copies. It’s like an appealing label on a cereal box designed to catch the eye of children of a certain age demographic. But why can’t there be a kind of artistry in that? Well, maybe there can, but it’s certainly not “high art,” which I think is what this debate (and Clint, definitely) is stabbing at.

Oh, and if you do (for some reason) decide to read my pabulum, know that it was rather brutally “edited for length,” and “contains spoilers.” The one edit I feel the need to point out is near the end, where I crib a Keaton/Bergman analogy from somewhere (I think it was Clive Barker, but can’t remember anymore), and my acknowledgment of that was axed, apparently because I didn’t steal enough of it.

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