Here's the logic: What goes into a game? Very few don't include any visual art, music, prose, or acting (or the 3d or voice equivalent). Even that old ADVENTURE was primarily prose! So at the very least, games are made out of art. So of course games are art, right? Some will ask if there is a higher art than what is calculated from the mere components of the game, if it rather comes together to create some experience as art.
Portal is an object lesson in interactive storytelling. We in the media are so fond of shaking our heads, scratching our beards and looking for the "art" in videogames. Well it's time for us all to shut the hell up. This is it. It’s in this finely crafted, lovingly rendered piece of short-story literature.
This is from an article by Rabbit Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs. It's a good review of Portal (except I think he took the comments by GLaDOS about androids a bit too strongly — and he later almost admitted that in the comments section). But it also discusses the artiness of video games. It's pretty good. Oh yeah: I do believe in the experience-as-art.
After I mentioned Portal and HL2:EP2 on my "normal" blog, I had second thoughts about whether it should have rather been posted to Radical Ideals. It is, after all, about art. But I wanted to get across to my normal technical audience with that one; heck, not only does that blog have a far larger readership than this one, but video games are tech, right? Well, consider this post my atonement.
Half Life 2 has a much wider repertoire of artistic merit than Portal, but I think Portal much better hits one with a fist full of pure, distilled STYLE.
3 comments:
You didn't answer the question: are games art?
Thinking of the ancient games that *I* grew up with (tag, cricket, chess, go, snap, monopoly), the answer isn't so obvious.
I haven't read the article because I don't want spoilers about Bioshock or Portal.
I'm not sure that I understand what "experience as art" means.
I can't conceive of an artwork which consists solely of raw experience.
And I assume you aren't just saying that encountering a work of art is an experience. That would seem too obvious.
Are you are saying that a planned set of events that are likely to cause certain experiences can be art, even when these events are interactive? If so, in what sense is this different from considering theatre, dance and song to be forms of art?
Thanks for commenting, jml.
Yes, I think games are art. I'm not sure how you didn't get that from my post. I didn't explicitly answer it, but even your further questions go on to seemingly understand at least my position that games are art.
Also, I was relying on context to imply that I'm talking about video games here, not cricket. The answer to that one is *not* obvious to me. :-)
About a day after I made the post I gave second thought to my discussion of "experience as art" (no, really, I'm not lying). It seems a bit wrong. Let's see if I can fix that.
As you say, it's obvious that art is intended to be experienced. What I'm trying to say is that a game is art in a way that is greater than what you can experience by opening up the resources file and looking at all the beautiful graphics and listening to all the emotion-inspiring music. The whole thing comes together to make greater art, in a way that is perhaps similar to the way that an animation or film is more than a bunch of frames that are put next to each other. It's more than just the pieces that are traditionally, indisputably art. What I really wanted to be talking about instead "experience as art" is "planned interaction as art".
The planned interactions that are a part of a game are also a part of its art, and while theater (one of the items you listed) has planned interactions, they're all one way. The things you listed are all passively experienced. Now (for the first time?) an interactive art form is getting enough focus and is being so refined that critics are being forced to think hard about it (Roger Ebert still thinks games can't be... "high art").
If you want to draw similarities to history, then perhaps you should be pointing out things like interactive theater, and, well, I can't think of anything else right now. Have these other interactive art forms ever been so popular or focused on by critics?
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