Game for a Skeptic

[Frogacuda]

There's art and there's high art. Transformers 2, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, and Modern Warfare 2 are all art. They all attempt to communicate feelings and engage the audience. They aren't high art and they rely on trite, proven devices, but I feel like people are asking for games to be a higher standard of art than we expect from other media just because there are games that stray further away from conventional artforms.

[StriderKyo]

I'd say that as a form of art or expression or even storytelling, videogames are no where near as developed as movies, books or music. There are only a handful of examples which do try and elevate themselves above being anything more than pure entertainment.

However, video games are the highest form of entertainment. They offer a depth and complexity of pure entertainment that is unrivaled.

I guess if you're delineating between forms of expression purely along the lines of the pleasure principle. I'd still probably say music has it beat.

Compared to other forms of art gaming is still in its childhood phase. Even with abstract games like The Marriage I don't think there's anyone that's reached the level of profundity of a Mark Rothko.

I think that has everything to do with the type of person this industry attracts rather than the form itself. "Gaming" is interactive film on a formal level, as much as some want to reject that definition. (of course, that gets into the whole "what is film?" debate, like can a single frame constitute a film, etc.)

[Fe 26]

my thoughts:

1) I do not think that there is an ideal game to change the minds of people like the one that wrote the original article. His argument isn't even against video games, it is against adults doing childish things.

If you give him a game that anyone can pick up such as tetras he will write it off as childish because it has no deeper meaning past solving a puzzle over and over again. If you hand him something that tells a story he will write it off for either being too hard to play or because the sci-fi/fantasy story is for children.

2) I don't understand adults that obsess over being adult. Real adults don't care. You do what you gotta do, then you go home and have fun. Fiction for children is a wonderful thing. It is some of the most pure art that humans make. Entertainment for children is the result of distilling culture, and presenting all that is good. It is the things that they must know, if they learn nothing else. It says "These are the things you MUST get right. THIS is what you must know."

C.S. Lewis put it better than anyone else

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

[Fe 26]

I understand what Yeller is getting at. There is a certain type of social retardation going on if you meet anyone and the first thing out of their mouth is "oh I'm <insert hobbyist here>"

But then again, it also takes a certain type of social retard to comment on that when this kind of conversation comes up. The same can be said for people who share these kinds of comments when jrpgs or anime come up. Or women, fags, or niggers.

[kingoffighters]

Show him/her the Wii and one of those wiitard games. Nintendo is smarter than you.

[jyoung]

For Frog and Yeller:



Disney Dad knows what's up.

[Fe 26]

Nintendo is definitely trying to change things. They are pretty sharp in how they are advertising to adult moms.

Showing that the video games bring you closer to family - check
showing that a product will give you joy close to an orgasm - check

[Nash]

If you want to get into the debate as to whether video games are art, then you have to set your criteria right. You can't argue either way by using standards from movie, book, music, etc. Each form of media is created and consumed differently, and therefore has its own standards for how its artistic merit is perceived.

Also, art isn't just a form of expression, so you can't just use that as a general standard. Art is also the production, quality, and principle of a medium. Therefore, if you want to argue for or against video games as art, you have to take into account all of those things but as pertaining to video games, not to movies or books, as an entertainment form.

[Fe 26]

If anything Andy Warhol ever did is art, so are a couple video games.

People who claim video games can not be art are just snobs. Such arguments are founded on the basis that something built for a purpose can not be art. That tools can not be art. That a house can not be art. Or a Car can not be art.

Which is nonsense.

[rezo]