Art Books for Video Games Are Bad Since They Are Very Polished

Having one time made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, specially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the fault of my ways. However, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," considering never, equally Rick Wakeman informs usa, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to feel the medium as an fine art course.

What stirs me to return to the subject area? I was urged by a reader, Marker Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC past Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is brilliant, confident, persuasive. Merely she is mistaken.

I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I accept the luxury of responding subsequently consideration. If you want to follow forth, I urge y'all to spotter her talk, which is embedded below. It's just xv minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.

She begins by proverb video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has e'er been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the not bad poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, merely my point is clear.

And then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo'south ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may exist closer to the chicken scratch terminate of the spectrum, I am foolish to presume they will not evolve.

She then says speech began as a form of alert, and writing as a grade of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, voice communication probably evolved into a class of storytelling and vocal long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of faith, and certainly of the cosmos of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even now filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cavern of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern French republic should only exist looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the start of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football game, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I concord. Just of form that depends on the definition of art. She says the near articulate definition of fine art she'southward found is the ane in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a manner that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although equally a chess histrion I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the fake of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from piece of work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Primal components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."

But nosotros could play all 24-hour interval with definitions, and find exceptions to every 1. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the cosmos of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? Ane could think of it equally endless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is non a tribal dance an artwork, still the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of private choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once.

1 obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say and so it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a moving picture. Those are things you cannot win; you lot tin can merely experience them.

She quotes Robert McKee'southward definition of adept writing equally "existence motivated by a desire to affect the audience." This is non a useful definition, because a dandy bargain of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are and then motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would debate that his novels are so motivated. Only when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would contend is better than the gustatory modality of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Dearest Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you tin perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at paw.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point defective a convincing definition of fine art. Just is Plato'due south any ameliorate? Does art grow better the more than information technology imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what nosotros might call the artist'southward soul, or vision. Countless artists take fatigued endless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, nearly are very bad indeed. How do we tell the divergence? Nosotros know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the role player, as David Koresh, defends his Co-operative Davidian chemical compound against FBI agents. The graphics prove the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the histrion must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a dandy game, only equally potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, she defends the game non as a record of what happened at Waco, but "as how we feel happened in our culture and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in contrast award the game a Fail in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am non proposing information technology equally art.

Her next instance is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, merely there'south 1 key difference...you tin can't die." You lot tin can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I tin can learn about my own by past taking back my mistakes in a video game. She as well admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

We come to Example 3, "Blossom" (to a higher place). A run-down urban center apartment has a unmarried flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to discover a residuum between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative involvement on the level of a greeting carte du jour. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do y'all win if you're the offset to notice the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal remainder is?

These three are simply a pocket-sized selection of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into artistic expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Braid" has had a "great market impact," she says, and "was the meridian-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclaim."

At present she shows stills from early on silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "every bit simplistic." Apparently, I'm hopelessly handicapped considering of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more avant-garde than her 3 modern video games. He has limited technical resource, but superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-upward gamers" promise for games that accomplish higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already existence made) "are beingness rewarded by audiences by loftier sales figures." The only fashion I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.

The iii games she chooses every bit examples practice not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No ane in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an fine art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 Earth Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Practice they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look upwards from the screen and explicate, "I'm studying a neat course of art?" And then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I get together, the components now forming for her dauntless new world of video games every bit fine art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Didactics, and Executive Management. I rest my case.