Shorter Games and Art

[tablesaw]

I wrote something about games and art, inspired by (lashing back at) Brian Moriarty's "An Apology for Roger Ebert," presented at last month's Game Developers' Conference. And then it got eaten. So instead of an argument, you get the bullet-point takeaway:

• Scopenhauer's artistic aesthetics were dumb, and Moriarty and Ebert are dumb for adopting them.
• The player of a game is not the audience of a game, just as an actor is not the audience of a playscript, and a musician is not the audience of a score.
• The player of a game is an artistic collaborator, who works with the intermediate product provided by the game's "creators," to produce art which has no audience.
• Games lack an audience not in the traditionally understood manner (nobody is desires to or is able to observe the art), but in a profound and fundamental way, in that they cannot be understood except through entering collaboration. Any product produced by the
• The traditional definition of art requires an audience, and that is a flaw in the current conception of art.
• It is possible that the role of the player is not as a collaborator, but as a medium for the creators (albeit a medium that leads to oblivion, rather than an audience, as a destination).

There. Now you figure it out.

Comments

[springheel_jack]

This is the dumbest debate in the world. It's upsettingly dumb. Obviously Ebert was right, and the bizarre intellectual contortions geek culture is going through to try to find a way in which a game can be art are really laughable. Or maybe a form of performance art.

The best response is, who cares. Not everything good is art.

[tablesaw]

And not everything art is good.

But are you responding "who cares about games?" or "who cares about art?"

[springheel_jack]

No, "who cares about the question of what is art."

I do, because I know something about the history of art theory, but I don't see why gamers do. It's a silly label for them to want. What does it get them?

[tablesaw]

Well, there are gamers who know something about the history of art theory. The post that got eaten actually had a brief summary of the art theory I read as a Theatre major. And I first heard about this was at the blog of Emily Short, who was taught Classics in academia before the market crashed. Of the commenters there, I know that Sam Kabo Ashwell was a philosophy student as well.

Being classified as art does provide some political influence. How much is arguable, but a case currently under review by the Supreme Court has the possibility of delivering opinions touching on how or to what extent a game is speech (though the question of the case focuses mostly on the relatoinship between violence and obscenity). Still, counsel was pinned without theory trying to answer Scalia about what precisely in the videogame was the speech before Roberts moved them on.

But then, the gamers who want the label—or, probably more likely, the gamers who demand others use the label—don't seem to care about the question either, only that the answer go their way.

[springheel_jack]

Whether a videogame is 'speech' according to the constitutional definitions of 'speech' in US law is of course an uninterestingly different question.

Those discussions are great for mentioning philosophy and history of ideas while doing none. That "Mason" guy is especially offensive in this regard: five points for mentioning Lessing! Minus fifty for doing nothing more with Lessing than mentioning that the "Lacocoon" essay exists!

Of course, the only possible appeal is to dada. The classical theorists of art would have scoffed at the idea that a game could be art. They didn't even think craft could be art.

[springheel_jack]

Or: okay, fine, it's art. So?

[fridgepunk]

A? The? If? To?

[tablesaw]

What does any medium gain from being understood as capable of art? Cultural capital that can be more stable should the market fall through and more accessible to those outside the market. Integration and cross-pollination with art theory. All of which is only truly important to those on the margins, as with any media industry. But those people do exist.

[yeloson]

Shrug. For me, art is an intentional media that produces entertaining experiences, feelings, and thoughts (variable in what's entertaining to whom, and how, and why) but games are art as far as I'm concerned.

A good cooked meal is art. A well designed carnival ride is art. Whether it makes you a better person or simply entertains you with fart jokes, all of these things are art. Crappy art or good art, whatever.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I bounced off this in a couple of directions:

http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2011/04/inevitably-i-am-drawn-into-the-games-and-art-thing/