Video games can never be art.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

Roger Ebert argues that video games can never be art.

I tend to disagree, for reasons i will expand upon later. What does WATMM think about the whole thing?

hes losing his dieing mind inside his dieing shell, hes wrong, not gonna read it

i agree, but "dying"

lol thanks

why don teh firefox got problemo's with teh dieing on teh spell checks? I sure dunno I dropped out of school in 3rd grade

extremely short sighted

it goes without saying that he has probably never played an experimental video.

nor have I for that matter, but I'm sure they exist.

what a dummy

ok so I skimmed it. It's actually more interesting than I thought and not that bitter. He seems to be saying a game is not art because games have rules and it's possible to win or lose them.

I haven't thought up my response, but I think the gist of it would be that video games are something not seen before on this planet, so they simply need a whole new form of categorization. For example, I'd be curious if Ebert would consider a youtube play-through of a game "art", because it would essentially be a film? If the answer is yes, then he clearly needs to reconsider his reasoning, as he's admitting that by removing depth and dimensions from something it gains value, which is rather weird.

video games are now virtual life, simulated life. That's a brand new thing. It's as inaccurate to compare them to chess, as he does, as it is to compare them to painting or movies or music.

there's quite a few games that you can't technically win nor lose amirite?

i'm sure people said decades ago that cinema could never be art. then warhol and others showed that it definitely could.

i'm not a fan of gaming in general, but there's no reason why an interactive audiovisual medium couldn't be art.

frankly, i think you could argue that space invaders and pacman is retro-art.

anyway, there was an episode of the culture show on bbc2 about this ages ago. i'm not sure what their conclusion was, it was mostly sneering from mark kermode.

Well, I think you have good games and bad games, just as you have good paintings and bad paintings. I think some games can be considered art. The Legacy of Kain series [especially Soul Reaver 2, and Defiance], I would consider works of art because of the excellent story, voice acting, music, and gameplay. And then you have the dregs of gaming industry like most new FPS titles. If those games were movies, would he be more inclined to call them art?

Is he arguing that once you have interaction, it can't be art?

I'll chock it up to him being old.

i don't see why a video game has to be good to be art.

i agree, that's not relevant to the argument, however personally i feel the division between "art" and "entertainment" is more interesting than between "art" and "not art"

if you look at warhol's ridiculously long movies where nothing happens, somehow because it's not entertainment, it must be art. this seems to be a running theme in art videos. i don't see why any film couldn't be described as art anyway. same applies to video games.

i'm sure bohemian-looking students have discussed "what is art?" over and over again anyway. not a discussion i find interesting.

I agree with Ebert

you would. bloody cornish.

I don't think he has one cohesive argument, anyway. For example he says:

"Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste."

If he's somehow saying that only a single visionary can create art, then there are plenty of examples from the gaming world of people that everyone knows by name: Warren Spector, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, Fumito Ueda, etc etc. I think this is an extremely limited way of looking at things, but even on this level his argument fails.

ps: i want to watch Ebert play through ico and sob like a baby from his quivering sagging mouth hole

lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PnHzD1gPak

i didnt read it but maybe he has a point in saying that... i mean, how would it be possible to have a video game equivalent of say, picassos guernica? or a beethoven symphony? or a kubrick film?

there have certainly been video games as immersive and meaningful as Guernica and a Kubrick film, and conversely you could make Guernica or any Kubrick film into a game if you wanted. In terms of a Beethoven symphony, that gets back to my earlier point, which is how paradoxical and absurd it would be if you played a piece of music to Ebert that he acknowledged matched a Beethoven symphony in terms of artistic merit, and then revealed that it was a game soundtrack, would it somehow suddenly become "not art"? How can removing dimensionality and interactivity somehow make something more artistically viable?

edit: I'd also be curious to know if Ebert considers a Japanese garden art? Because that's essentially what a game is. Except it's harder to have a gunfight in a Japanese garden.

  On 4/20/2010 at 12:21 PM, lumpenprol said:

there have certainly been video games as immersive and meaningful as Guernica and a Kubrick film

what are they?

The man clearly hasn't seen A Slow Year -

[vimeo]9592601[/vimeo]

or LSD

Video game as art = Moon for Playstation.

Though it's in Japanese and not that accessible. That didn't stop me when I first found it years ago though.

I don't see how eBert can say they aren't art. Really anything that humans make, it's a form of art. Maybe not by his definition, but art nonetheless. He's just being stubborn on what he himself defines as art. It's too broad a word to say it's only one thing and another but not something else.

Edit: lol was thinking of eBay when typing his name

first you should know I think Guernica is a bit overrated, I've seen it in person and was moved but...also you didn't specify which Kubrick film ;-) 2001 is difficult to beat. That said...

I found System Shock 2 to be as engaging and frightening as the Shining. I found Deus Ex, Thief, Ico, Shadow of the Colosssus and a handful of other games had moments as powerful as the better moments in a Kubrick film. There are several moments in Deus Ex that I'd argue match the philosphical issues raised in 2001. Guernica is a bit of a tough one as most of its power comes from knowing about the real events that inspired it. It's like saying "what games is as artistically powerful as the Holocaust?" Well, really there isn't one, and nor is there a movie or painting that can compare to the real event, either. You could make a game that took place in a concentration camp, or involved being a mother digging your dead child from the rubble of a bombed out building, but I'm glad they haven't tried...In any case, if you pretend you don't know anything about the Spanish Civil War, I think you could make a comparison between Guernica and the nightmare sequences in the first Max Payne, for example, in terms of how disturbing they are. I actually don't find this a laughable comparison.

I think most people just have trouble seeing past the limitations of polygons. Somehow seeing Jack Nicholson emote in the flesh is more convincing and therefore more artistically viable than the confrontation with Shodan in System Shock 2, yet there's no reason why it should be. I think it's just that people's minds have trouble bridging the gap between the clearer mirror of reality that film provides, vs. the simulated reality of games. It's the same issue faced by comic books.

Overall I find it funny how certain canonical works have become semi-untouchable. Sometimes this is merited due to historical importance, but really, if you could somehow strip away the historical context of Guernica, what are you left with? A bunch of cartoony charactes and animals in distress. I'm more hard pressed to compare, say, a painting by Francis Bacon with something I find in a game.

  On 4/20/2010 at 12:55 PM, Bramsworth said:

Really anything that humans make, it's a form of art.

anything? really?

are there youtube vids or something of this moon game? id be interested in learning more about it.