Video games can never be art.

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

all you do in a game is turn 0's into 1's.

i liked it till this paragraph. when you are composing electronic music all you're really doing is turning 0's into 1's and vice-versa so...

making music is worlds apart from playing a game

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

what..? there are some irritating assumptions in that post.

 

is a graphical "artist", who is used as a tool by a company called, let's say, Electronic Arts, really an artist?

uhh fuck, this smells like a pile of irony of the most cynical kind.

He's not an artist because he gets paid by a corporation? Because he's a 'professional'? Is that what your feeble mind is saying?

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

do videogames give you the freedom to explore? no, on the contrary. it is the opposite of what they do. games work by instrumentalising the player. you are playing a game, you become part of its set of rules. you "complete" the game that way. ever felt the urge to break out of a game's rules? this is why. Since video games are entirely deterministic, since they run on a deterministic machine, and this machine can not be human, you have to be a deterministic machine to play the game. "click here to continue". The fun in a game comes from the player failing at being this machine at first, and then gradually learning it. all you do in a game is turn 0's into 1's.

Welll.. you know, i kind of meant RELATIVE freedom, not Freedom to come out of your computer screen in to real life. Do rules make it not art, or something? Art can't have rules? I don't get it. My point was that it's like an interactive painting (touch the water and hear the wind blow and watch the clouds move.. but, that's all preprogrammed so it doesn't count?)

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

and lastly, just because something looks nice (…a painting..) it doesn't mean it's art.

That is not at all what I was saying.

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

a game like Half-Life is a mass-produced product designed to reach as many angry male teenagers as possible, you sock.

It's not art because it's mass produced? How so?

There are artists who make money in the world. Some of them create video games. I guess the guy that creates textures all day in Illustrator or creates 3d models in Maya isn't an artist because he gets paid to do it. What in the fuck? I'm really not that heated but yeah.

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

what..? there are some irritating assumptions in that post.

 

is a graphical "artist", who is used as a tool by a company called, let's say, Electronic Arts, really an artist?

uhh fuck, this smells like a pile of irony of the most cynical kind.

 

do videogames give you the freedom to explore? no, on the contrary. it is the opposite of what they do. games work by instrumentalising the player. you are playing a game, you become part of its set of rules. you "complete" the game that way. ever felt the urge to break out of a game's rules? this is why. Since video games are entirely deterministic, since they run on a deterministic machine, and this machine can not be human, you have to be a deterministic machine to play the game. "click here to continue". The fun in a game comes from the player failing at being this machine at first, and then gradually learning it. all you do in a game is turn 0's into 1's.

 

and lastly, just because something looks nice (…a painting..) it doesn't mean it's art. a game like Half-Life is a mass-produced product designed to reach as many angry male teenagers as possible, you sock.

There are some equally irritating assumptions in your post.

You assume that just because a game has rules, none of the moves a player makes in that game can be 'undetermined' or, as I would put it, creative. But that doesn't follow. Think about a sport, like soccer: There are rules that make up the game and define what the possible moves are -- but that far from determines how players follow those rules in order to win. Indeed, part of the joy of watching someone play a game is to see how the player's own decisions about how to follow the rules lead to surprising, efficient, unconventional, strategic or humorous ways of winning.

A game of the sort you are imagining would be more like Dragon's Lair, where your only choice is to press the single button the game tells you to push. There, there's only one way of winning, whereas in a game like Super Mario Bros., say, where you have to defeat enemies and score points, there are lots of ways to do so, including 1-up tricks, warps, Bowser-dodging strategies and ways of saving and using koopa shells. Nothing in the rules say that the player has to use any of those tactics in any one way, or even at all. Thus, the gameplay and the choices of the player are far less 'determined' than you think.

To put it another way, the fun in a game does not come from the fact that a player (eventually) learns how to win and then wins -- as you suggest -- but rather comes from how the player does so.

lol nerd rage

also I think close to all these games that consciously try to be art are such shit, but some earlier games are like fucking outsider art they're so fucking bizarre design choices etc.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/stargazer/stargazer.htm what the fuck am I looking at

and everybody's choices for 'arty' games are shit lol MGS4. I've never played Bioshock or Ico are they really such a big fucking deal or just nerd rage

Machinarium looks ok Braid just feels like it's screaming in my face 'is I doing arts yet'

I also agree with the artistic but not art thing. I'm not sure if I'm understanding this right but it is kind of too functional/things happen for game reasons not because of what the director wanted at the time. Like how the hell would you make blocking/reloading art

@ Encey: the how part is the art of it, maybe?

  On 4/28/2010 at 11:11 PM, THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON said:

  On 4/28/2010 at 10:06 PM, phling said:

all you do in a game is turn 0's into 1's.

i liked it till this paragraph. when you are composing electronic music all you're really doing is turning 0's into 1's and vice-versa so...

indeed but, the game won't continue if you don't flip a certain switch, which is a rule of the game. this can of course be loosened and multiplied to many switches, where you need to flip only some of them to win etc.

then on the other side of the spectrum you get media creation tools (garageband, photoshop, max/msp), where the rules are very loose… and yet, even in a general purpose programming language, where you can create any media you can think of, you have to degrade yourself to think and act like a deterministic machine in order to communicate with the computer. it is definitely shaping the outcome innit?

so i'd say the more strict the rules are, the better a game you have, if you loosen the rules you get a greater void to fill by a human algorithm, which can result in creativity.

this guy's book Software Is Taking Command is interesting… free pdf download:

http://www.manovich.net/

oh god best game

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/snaxson/snaxson.htm

mafted: there might be a misunderstanding between our definitions of artist?

my artist is the continental-European one, who does the impossible by using skill and techniques to create (and this is the important part) previously unthinkable compositions, and who does not need a prefix such as video-, media-, 3D- or Background-. The "free thinker", the explorer.

  On 4/28/2010 at 11:58 PM, phling said:

mafted: there might be a misunderstanding between our definitions of artist?

 

my artist is the continental-European one, who does the impossible by using skill and techniques to create (and this is the important part) previously unthinkable compositions, and who does not need a prefix such as video-, media-, 3D- or Background-. The "free thinker", the explorer.

lol I'm trapped in a paradigm and can't get out!

arent we all to a certain extent?

  On 4/28/2010 at 11:58 PM, phling said:

my artist is the continental-European one, who does the impossible by using skill and techniques to create (and this is the important part) previously unthinkable compositions, and who does not need a prefix such as video-, media-, 3D- or Background-. The "free thinker", the explorer.

there's no such thing!!! name it!

  On 4/29/2010 at 12:56 AM, Z_B_Z said:

arent we all to a certain extent?

we are art

  On 4/28/2010 at 11:40 PM, mafted said:

@ Encey: the how part is the art of it, maybe?

I think it's hard to say in this time in art history, because (if you believe some art historians or philosophers of aesthetics) our 'modern' era is characterized by being a point at which there are no obviously accepted conventions for what makes something a compelling work of art in a given medium, so not only is there a question of 'how' someone is playing by the 'rules,' but there is a more basic question of what we should understand the 'rules' to be, in the first place.

I know that's not very concrete. Two dudes I think are cool & smart talk about it here and here, if you are interested in reading more on this idea.

  On 4/29/2010 at 1:03 AM, karmakramer said:

  On 4/29/2010 at 12:56 AM, Z_B_Z said:

arent we all to a certain extent?

 

we are art

 

well, brule is, to be sure..

btw, i was responding to chengod, not the topic.

  On 4/29/2010 at 12:56 AM, Z_B_Z said:

arent we all to a certain extent?

pfft speak for yourself.

  On 4/29/2010 at 12:16 AM, chenGOD said:

lol I'm trapped in a paradigm and can't get out!

will this get you out though?

lol!

LOL!

lumpy comes correct.

  On 4/29/2010 at 2:38 AM, lumpenprol said:

fuck yes

Allow me to retort.

Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.

Roger Ebert concludes that he should never have mentioned video games in the first place

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html

  Quote

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

  Quote

My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.

interesting read (as usual with ebert)

he admits he's ignorant of them yet .. ahh jesus. any craft is any artform in itself, fuckin snob.

maybe he's threatened by the fact that games are becoming interactive movies.