[Ransom]

It's not Roger Ebert this time. Now it is Metroid fans!

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/12/games-not-art-after.html

It's an interesting mess. G4 tore Other M to shreds on artistic grounds - quite justifiably, I thought - and gamers didn't take very kindly to it. Some of the comments are pretty disgusting, actually.

The article makes the point that a majority of gamers consider games to be little more than toys. It's probably accurate; certainly whenever the games-as-art debate rears its head somebody's bound to say they should never aspire to be anything but fun.

But what I find most alarming about this situation is how it speaks to the state of games journalism. I found Heppe's critical analysis refreshing, and even if it's partially just fanboys defending their sacred cow the backlash is worrying. It's a pretty damning example of gaming culture's insularity. Any industry is going to have a hell of a time maturing in an environment where criticism is not just rare but rejected out of hand.

[karajorma]

Games are art. And art is always surrounded by serious critics and pretentious tossers trying to read too much into it. And the critics of any piece of art are always attacked by fanbois who love the artist and refuse to hear a bad word about them.


About the only difference here is that cause we're dealing with games we're reaching a demographic that has larger pool of fanbois and a smaller crowd of pretentious tossers.

[General Battuta]

It'd be interesting to see what book or film review would be like if fans lined up fanatically behind specifically publishers or studios.

[Galemp]

Halo?

[Hero_Swe]

Games that strike a chord with me are art in my view.

[Wobble73]

Some games are art and some games aren't. Some graphic novels are art, some are just comics!

Dependant on the viewer of course!

[AlienTermite]

I think modern 3d games can be considered a work of art to a certain extent. I mean, what about the people that are creating 3d models and animations for use in games? Even the guys in this community that create Freespace total conversion mods and have to create totally new ship models and things of that sort... are they not artists in their own right? Some definitions of Art (from dictionary.com): "skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature,"  and "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." Sure, games are meant primarily as a means of entertainment, but I think that there are a lot of games that possess many of these qualities.

[The E]

If games aren't Art, movies aren't either. Discuss.

[Rodo]

Everything that takes more than 5 hours to make is art : Fact
But not all art is artistic: Fact
Most people that read this will go : Fact

[qazwsx]

The controls were horrible and the storytelling minimalistic, but there was just something about Shadows of the Colossus that felt amazing, I didn't have "fun" as such when playing it, but was spurred onwards to play by some other motivation, just riding round the wilderness felt fantastic, I didn't care about progression, and only completed the game out of curiosity to see the next colossus I would be facing. In my opinion, SotC is a work of art.

[Roanoke]

I think modern 3d games can be considered a work of art to a certain extent. I mean, what about the people that are creating 3d models and animations for use in games? Even the guys in this community that create Freespace total conversion mods and have to create totally new ship models and things of that sort... are they not artists in their own right? Some definitions of Art (from dictionary.com): "skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature,"  and "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." Sure, games are meant primarily as a means of entertainment, but I think that there are a lot of games that possess many of these qualities.

If anything I would say earlier games were more artistic. Limitd tech meant more improviseation and certainly more abstract content.

[Flipside]

Films aren't art either if you examine them in the same way as computer games, they are simply rolls of celluloid, the art is in the Story, the acting and the sets which are copied onto the film via a scientific technique.

No-one asked what Mona-Lisa's motivation was...

[NGTM-1R]

Art is such an inherently subjective category that attempting to define anything as artistic is useless to the discussion of its merits.

Technical execution is the only valuable metric.

[Sushi]

Why do we even care?

[Polpolion]

People act like you can examine the artistic qualities of a video game the same way that you can a movie, book, or painting. You can't. People can say that the story is artful, or the sound track is artful, or the graphics are artful, but that's all just garbage. That's like saying the font of a book is artful. While it's true that each such facet can contribute to the holistic value of the game, by itself the story, music, and graphics mean very little. Simply put, there is art in video games but people are looking in the right places to find it. (Even then, "art" is a rather arbitrary and meaningless term)

[General Battuta]

People act like you can examine the artistic qualities of a video game the same way that you can a movie, book, or painting. You can't. People can say that the story is artful, or the sound track is artful, or the graphics are artful, but that's all just garbage. That's like saying the font of a book is artful.

Seems like a perfectly valid statement to me.

A game can be deconstructed like any other work.

[Flipside]

Personally, I'd say that programming is more of a craft than an art, however, what goes into games is Art. Like movies, the actual skill of pointing and using cameras and lighting is more a matter of craft-knowledge, knowing which shots work, knowing which lighting provides the best effect, all of which are more a matter of experience and precedent than artistic discovery, whereas the backdrop, the music and the effects are more artistic in nature. That's why I don't consider either of them 'art' as such, merely a culmination of several artistic items bought together using technology. A Painting is a piece of art, an art Gallery, which is a collection of paintings, is not.

[mxlm]

But what I find most alarming about this situation is how it speaks to the state of games journalism. I found Heppe's critical analysis refreshing, and even if it's partially just fanboys defending their sacred cow the backlash is worrying. It's a pretty damning example of gaming culture's insularity. Any industry is going to have a hell of a time maturing in an environment where criticism is not just rare but rejected out of hand.

Bingo. What we can learn from this is that games journalism is **** because gamers want it to be ****.

I mean, maybe you don't. Maybe I don't. We're a minority.

[Lukeskywalkie]

Technical execution is the only valuable metric.

What are you, Vulcan?

[NGTM-1R]

What are you, Vulcan?

No, merely right.

Besides, technical execution gets pretty subjective when it comes to the interplay of various elements itself. However, unlike art, it does not exist only in the eye of the beholder.