Join us on Wednesday, November 1st for a chat with on the subject of games and art with Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Marc LeBlanc, and Eric Zimmerman.
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Channel: #gamesandart
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Hideo Kojima says “If 100 people walk by and a single person is captivated by whatever that piece radiates, it’s art. But videogames aren’t trying to capture one person. A videogame should make sure that all 100 people that play that game should enjoy the service provided by that videogame. It’s something of a service. It’s not art.”
And Roger Ebert says “To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers… for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”
Contrariwise, Henry Jenkins says “Computer games are art?a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless… The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century.”
Are games art? If not, why not? And if so, why? Is thinking of games as art useful or actually a hindrance for game developers? If games are art, what should our aspirations for the form be?
Participants:
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including the recently published Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and an Assistant Professor in video game theory and design at the Center for Computer Game Research Copenhagen. He is author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and numerous articles about games, and his prestigious and influential blog is The Ludologist.
Marc LeBlanc is a twelve-year veteran of the game industry. At Looking Glass Studios, he was a core contributor to several award-winning games, including the Thief and System Shock series. In collaboration with Andrew Leker, he developed Oasis, the 2004 Independent Games Festival Game of the Year in the web/downloadable category.
Santiago Siri is an Argentinean game designer whose work includes Football Deluxe and Utopia (forthcoming). He works for Three Melons, an advergaming firm that offers innovative branding through games. He is also a writer and theoretician, and his blog, Games as Art, is a resource for all members of the game community.
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and academic exploring the theory and practice of game design. He is the is the co-founder and CEO of gameLab, a game development company based in New York City. He is the co-editor of several works in the field, including Rules of Play, a seminal study of game design technique.
I like Hideo Kojima’s analogy with Taro Okamoto’s chair that looked like you could sit in it, but was very uncomfortable. It is art because it is designed to be appreciated without being functional.
Art is an object or thing without form or function that inspires others.
Games are functional pieces of entertainment that reflect the culture of the time. Games contain artistic elements, but are not art themselves.
Essentially Kojima’s stance is that as soon as something becomes functional is stops being art. That isn’t to say functional items can’t be appreciated or admired, but they are not art.
There is an interview over at IGN where he talks about this
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/714/714044/vids_1.html
I understand why people could easily consider games as art and why there is a desire for such a thing, but as much as I or anybody wants to believe that games occupy a higher place than other forms of entertainment it just isn’t so. Game creators are authors, not artists.
I was just about to make a very similar comment. I agree with Brook. I believe that entertainment is not an art category. Pieces of art can be entertaining, certainly, but it is not a prerequisite for art. But, as Brook as also pointed out, videogames (being a primarily visual medium) of course employ artistic elements, which sometimes seems to blur the line between art and entertainment.
Wait… so if something is functional, it can’t be art? So architecture can’t be art? The Sydney Opera is in no way art? Films cannot be art? Films are more often than not as entertaining as games, and if you wish to point out films which are not entertaining (such as, for example, Irreversible), I’m sure we could find some games with similar purpose.
The term applied art exists to cover things such as design (eg. Arne Jacobsen’s fancy but functional chairs), architecture, etc. It doesn’t cover film, music, or theater though, even if you might argue all three of those exist as much to entertain as to enlighten. Even Shakespeare had entertainment as one of, if not his primary, goals when writing his plays.
Would you not call Shakespeare’s plays art?
What about books? Sure, maybe the works of Tom Clancy’s don’t quite compare to the artistic merits of James Joyce (whose book “Ulysseus”, by your definitions, are as much art as anything given its VERY low entertainment value), but that is hardly reason to disqualify litterature as an art form.
Likewise, Mark Lester’s “Commando” with Schwarzenegger is arguably not very artistic, but movies such as Coppola’s “Apocalypse” Now or Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” manage to entertain and “inspire”, as you say, at the same time. At least I know I’m not the only person who thinks so : )
By your definitions, what WOULD actually be art? Painting and sculpture? Anything else…?
When discussing art I find that a clear-cut definition almost always presents itself immidiately, which is then used to evaluate whatever object the discussion concerns. Since virtually nobody can agree on what art is, it quickly becomes a struggle concerning the definition of art.
I for one hope this will not be how the discussion of computergames this wednesday turns out. It’s not to attack Jonas, Brook or Fabian I’m making this reply, but rather to present what I believe is a more fruitful alternative, so I hope you’re willing to hear me out.
I’ll go so far, that I’ll claim trying to find elements of classic art within games is probably fruitless if we are only willing to look at the surface of art.
The game-ness of games depends upon states that can be logically resolved within a turing-machine. This goes for any rule-based game.
Traditional art is different, since it does not have (easily accessible) game-ness, and it does not have the same kind of mechanical reliance (and thusly it appears vastly different forms)
Here’s the point (please excuse that it is in the shape of an analogy):
You will not recognize a car as a means of transportation upon first sight if all you have ever known to be able to transport people is horses.
In fact, if you are sufficiently pig-headed, you won’t be convinced that it is indeed a means of transportation even after actually driving the car yourself; you could simply return to your obsolete definitions, open your dictionary, and compare the four-legged creature to the car over and over, and never see the resemblence. This is how it is when you break into new grounds.
You might not recognize art in a new medium if you insist on comparing it to the surface, the definitions, of the old. In fact you are unlikely to.
Even when you’ve experienced it yourself, if you open your books and look over the definitions of art, you may yet decide that what you experienced was something altogether different; even though it could be clear to almost everyone that it belongs to the same category once a well thought out theory of a unified category arises.
We cannot rely on the old definitions, and we cannot even rely on our own feelings and experiences to discover similarities. But we can rely on our minds, and our analytical skills, to give us some clue as to similarities and differences; if we are able to provide ourselves with sufficient insight into the mechanics of both games and art, and if we approach the subject with sufficient rigor, I think we just might get somewhere.
Are we, then, able to approach the mechanics of art without looking up a definition in a musty old tome?, Are we able to understand the mechanics of games just like that?
In fact, I think we must, and that we are. You cannot really dissect a general concept as loosely founded as art, but you can dissect a specific piece of artwork, and note down what makes it tick. What’s more, since games, after the development of the computer, have requirred very exact dokumentation, implementation and design to archieve a desired result, analysing game mechanics should be like reading an open book, as compared to understanding artistic design.
So my hope is that the chat this wednesday will be concerned with trying to find similarities between games (as a concept or as specific instances) and specific samples of traditional art, and seeing how close the two concepts can get, and what parallels can be drawn.
Thank you for your time.
As a small addition to my comment, my personal belief is that not only does gameness contain the ability to deliver art, but in fact that a cousin of ‘gameness’ already does so in most traditional works of art.. but I’m definately looking forward to reading both Jespers and Zimmermans thoughts, to see if they end up in a similar, or altogether different neighboordhood.
Thanks for your comments, all. I will refrain from going into the discussion for the time being, and reserve my opinions to the discussion on Wednesday.
I’m confused.