andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2010-04-21 02:57 pm
andrewducker) wrote2010-04-21 02:57 pm
Art and Computer games
If we take as a starting point that art is "a designed experience which evokes emotion*", then I think that most games focus on "excitement" as the only emotion they care about. As most highbrow people would tend to look down on that particular emotion, it's not going to persuade them over computer games artiness.
Most games don't go much further than that - but I've certainly been made happy, sad, afraid, and thoroughly involved by computer games. They haven't, generally, been as good as movies at doing so, because excitement is so much easier for computer games designers to focus on, and the bits which produce other emotions tend to be quite filmlike or booklike (depending on whether they are produced by reading dialogue or watching a cut-scene).
My definition du jour of "game" is "a process which provides a challenge for a person to overcome". If you're choosing between options which provide multiple equally "good" solutions (i.e. dialogue trees that don't affect your success level), are they really part of the game? So we're left with two parts of computer games - the bits which are challenges to be overcome (which can produce excitement and feelings of achievement), and the bits which are evoking other emotions. If you exclude those two emotions from the range which count as proper art then computer games are a mixture of interactive art and game, without any crossover. If you do include them, then games are definitely art.
If, of course, your definitions of "art" and "games" are different to mine, which they probably will be, as I only made mine up half an hour ago, then your conclusions will be different. There are a bunch of definitions of "game" <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game#Definitions">here</A> and art <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art#Definition_of_the_term">here</A>.
Most games don't go much further than that - but I've certainly been made happy, sad, afraid, and thoroughly involved by computer games. They haven't, generally, been as good as movies at doing so, because excitement is so much easier for computer games designers to focus on, and the bits which produce other emotions tend to be quite filmlike or booklike (depending on whether they are produced by reading dialogue or watching a cut-scene).
My definition du jour of "game" is "a process which provides a challenge for a person to overcome". If you're choosing between options which provide multiple equally "good" solutions (i.e. dialogue trees that don't affect your success level), are they really part of the game? So we're left with two parts of computer games - the bits which are challenges to be overcome (which can produce excitement and feelings of achievement), and the bits which are evoking other emotions. If you exclude those two emotions from the range which count as proper art then computer games are a mixture of interactive art and game, without any crossover. If you do include them, then games are definitely art.
If, of course, your definitions of "art" and "games" are different to mine, which they probably will be, as I only made mine up half an hour ago, then your conclusions will be different. There are a bunch of definitions of "game" <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game#Definitions">here</A> and art <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art#Definition_of_the_term">here</A>.
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When I mentioned primary emotional responses, I'm thinking in particular of weepie movies. If they make people cry, then that's a strong emotional response but it doesn't mean they're art. It just maens that they're doing their job efficiently. The tears don't /belong/ to the audience, they've been /extracted/. Art tries to find something inside the audience that it can move and the emotional response comes from a genuine place within the audience.
For the record, I don't think there's anything to prevent games being art. I just don't know if anybody's achieved it yet.
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The problem is that some things are incredibly common levers that require no subtlety to their pulling, so that rather than building a complex and delicate instrument to tickle the precise spot in people they can instead jab in a plunger and just pump away. Strikes me as the same kind of thing, with the difference merely being one of subtlety.
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That's a very long and subjective conversation. Here's a short aphorism in the meantime, from Picasso: "Art is the lie that makes us realise truth"
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