Are video games art?

Objectivity
With a video game, the artists vision can never be fully realized by the player

No, lines of code aren't art.
If you actually believe programming is art then you are genuinely autistic.

>Inb4 art is subjective
Fucking subjugate this!
*Unzips dick*

They are but its the equivalent of cavemen drawing on walls. We've only been making games for 30~ years. Vidya are still a very primitive art form

>le something something autistic

Nice rebuttal, you fucking faggot

But no media is free from that tho, you see everything through your own subjectivity, kwoledge and experience.

No, lines of paint aren't art.
If you actually believe painting is art you are genuinely autistic.
No, lines of text aren't art.
If you actually believe literature is art you are genuinely autistic.
No, lines of notes aren't art.
If you actually believe music is art you are genuinely autistic.

No, lines of letters are not art.
If you genuinely believe writing is art then you're autistic.

you can put the picture of the mona lisa in a video game, so yes they can be art

Is drawing and character design art?
Is music art?
Is writing art?
Video games combine all of that into one art form.
They are literally the highest form of art.

you could say the same thing about movies

who cares

"Anything other than videogames"

he gave the raid 1/4, his opinion is instantly dismissed

Most video games are made for profit.

Those weird paintings and sculptures that give hipsters and beatniks a hard-on are considered art because they're not tainted with corporate greed, maaaaaaaaaaan.

It is literally interactive art.

if you say something isn't art, it only proves how limited a scope of art one can perceive.

Everything is fucking art. Ebert in this instance was just pandering to concepts built by faux intellectuals who like to build canons out of literature and visual art that backs up their constructs and theories connecting art to psychology and psychoanalysis.

Why did Ebert always praise films that dealt with racism or prejudice as the best of the year? (Crash, the Color Purple) It was because his wife was Black.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

The thing is, with modern art (urinals, 4:33, Warhol's soup cans, etc) are meant to place those objects outside of their normal contexts and make you question them because of that. It's a very specific goal that the artist is trying to accomplish, and it's only one subset in the very broad art world.

People deride vidya as art because of the relatively immature community surrounding it. Aside from that, most people, like Ebert, just don't take the time to think about the different parts of video games that separate them from other mediums like movies and lit.

I think if a scholar or critic with an open mind was given a game to play that really made use of the game medium, that it would start conversation of video games as art. It's just that there is almost no overlap between the scholarly groups and the gamer groups and so games are usually ignored.

Tl;dr: people dismiss things as not being artistic because they just don't understand it

>Visuals, world building, and character design
>Storytelling, narrative, and acting
>Music and sound design
Some out of touch bloke with no face thinks he's qualified to tell me something is or isn't art just because he watched a lot of movies.

Video games, like film, are a culmination of many different forms of art that are put together to create a coherent experience.

Like in film, music, and books not every video game is created purely out of artistic inspiration and many are created simply to be dumb and fun or make a profit. But if movies are allowed to get away with this and still be art, why should video games not?

Imagination, skill, beauty, and importance are all subjective.

There's a lot more shit movies than good movies, and immaturity in the film industry as well.

Does it matter?

I think video games are art because they can recreate a subjective experience that cannot be described innately through literature. My definition of art is a mode of expression that exist within a oneiric vacuum.

Through the use of control, video games natively recreate visceral experiences similar to how we experience sensation through motor control (the cerebral process of sensing, seeing, feeling and moving) and how we perceive the world through the way we move through and gradually understand it in how we master our senses to extract information from the natural world.

This, a lot of people (on both sides of the argument) see games as movies with some light distraction in between, which a lot of games are. But the best games blend narrative and game so well, that they can tell a story using the game instead of despite it. Things like Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus do this well (even if they do have cutscenes) because they allow the gameplay to give gravity and credence to the narrative, instead of existing in spite of it.

that rules out all those movies with cgi :^)

Yes, there are cases of games being art, but the whole fucking discussion is toxic. These days, vidya are either one of three things,mass produced AAA commercial shit and embarrassing "mature" shit which tries to emulate your average shitty Spielberg shit and then shitty indie crap which relies on an art style to hide the fact it's actually a crap game.

People that insist that video games should and need to be art and more mature are ruining the industry.

youtube.com/watch?v=gN2zcLBr_VM

but there are standards.

Not being able to see the bigger picture and the art those lines create together makes you the autistic one user

>The thing is, with modern art (urinals, 4:33, Warhol's soup cans, etc) are meant to place those objects outside of their normal contexts and make you question them because of that. It's a very specific goal that the artist is trying to accomplish, and it's only one subset in the very broad art world.
The very specific goal Warhol had in mind was $$$$$$$$$$$

videogames can contain art
as in music, animation, images, prose, etc

gameplay is not art and never will
why does it matter though

>people never understand this
It's not, and never has been, about the "quality" or general art-y-ness of games. Just because art is bad doesn't mean it's not art; nobody would argue Kincaid didn't make art.

Ebert's whole argument was "art is a one-way message told in its entirety by artist to viewer; an interactive experience inherently cannot be art because the viewer has control. In art, the artist controls the experience and presents it; the viewer is necessarily a passive observer"

I'm not saying he's right, but his point was never "pointy shooty high score cannot ever be art it's too dumb HURR DURR"

no there aren't, they vary person to person

Wrong. There were classical standards, and to a lot of people these still apply, up until the beginning of the 20th century, when they were replaced by the impressionists, who, while some of its initial members went on to do some great work (because they were still inspired by classical values - see Monet, Degat), most of the work was purely to, as the name suggests, impress, or cause shock in the beholder. Political statements became the norm in art. Romanticism got replaced with "fuck everyone, I'm gonna draw/sculpt a police officer shitting on the street and call it art".

Look up Académie des Beaux-Arts.

I don't really understand his argument for interactivity.

To understand the statue of David as Art, the viewer is required to interact with it in that they have to walk around and view it from different angles.

The same argument can be made for films. More often than not I am not looking at the entire frame objectively, but small details and parts of the image my mind clutches onto because my subconscious is more used to those specific semiotic codes than taking the entire frame as a whole.

Just because someone can point a camera at whatever they want in a game doesn't mean that an artist's expression isn't maintained because they're looking at it from an angle that the player wants to see.

You're bullshitting and you know it.

denisdutton.com/bell.htm

Devs thinking video games are art is what put the industry in it's current hole. Fuck them, vidya is not art and never will be, nor should it be. That's how indiefags get away with making shit like Gone Home and get a free fucking pass. For every good walking simulator like Journey there are 20 shitty ones. Fuck it, I'll sacrifice the one to eliminate the 20.

Classical standards were always being defaced and played with before the 20th century. It is just that the artists were executed or thrown in jail

That, and "classical standards" varied hugely between times and countries. The Ukiyo-e woodblock printing which was popular in Japan up until the 20th century would have been seen as not constituting art by Western realist artists at that time, while consequently realistic painting was not seen as art in Japan.

You make a game if you're so sure of yourself pussy

The problem is with the game logic. Sure, the audio and visuals can be considered art. After all, we name records and films among them. The writing can be art, as we name other stories. What of the game logic, then? Can things be said about the rules of Quake deathmatch? What about the platforming physics in Super Mario Bros?

>The Ukiyo-e woodblock printing which was popular in Japan up until the 20th century would have been seen as not constituting art by Western realist artists at that time

Give me a source for this.

Vidya is not art because no renowed artist/critic says anything about it. That's the whole point of the urinal, the definition of art is meaningless.

I hate that, fuck Dadaists

Very valid points here. There are trends in games nowadays to poach of other art forms. There are games with too many cutscenes or the dominance of still-images over interactivity.

oh look, this thread again
and no one mentioning him retracting that
again

I'm talking about European art. France, Germany, England and what became Italy were the center of the art world up until the 20th century.

>People that insist that video games should and need to be art and more mature are ruining the industry.

Video games are already art. Those faggots just believe it needs to "mature" to be RECOGNIZED as art. Of course, they're completely wrong as they wouldn't recognize fine art if it bit them in the ass.

Who care, the definition is subjective.

>Listening to a dead sellout film critic with no jaw for his opinion on video games.

Pro tip: The opinions of old farts who have never even touched a game in their lives hold no weight next to developers and people who actually play video games.

Who gives a shit what David Lynch and Robert "Chinless" Ebert have to say about video games? I'm sure most of us can agree that many games can already be considered art (Dark Souls, Pathologic, SOTC, Deus Ex).

Toys aren't art.

ok i'm an artist and
>sculpting
3D models use the same techniques/methods its just digital
>painting
textures and skins are made the same way, just digitally
and that's just the 2 most common forms of traditional art, made with the exact smae process as a renaissance painting, but instead of egg+pigments, it's all inside a computer.
>story telling/writing
it's harder to acheive with a game, because you have to balance interactivity with story progression.

>let's just ignore that the concept stage that a game goes through - literally every traditional art form is used before the game goes into development. they sculpt real models, they paint pictures of characters (each has to represent the character and express a certain feel tot he character (same as art)
Thing with painting a picture, is you paint shadows and lighting... In a game is much more complex and the process is more mathematical, but the outcome is beautiful and often makes games look 1000x better.

as an artist it's 100% clear to me video games are art. Art is just something a human has created, to cause an emotion to occur in another person, really.

TLDR only a brain dead fuckwit, with no understanding of computers and digital media, would spout some shit like "video games are not art" they are literally un-evolved shit-tier humans, that probably have dial-up internet and windows vista + a smartphone they use exclusively for calling/texting.

Everything is art unless I do not like it.
This post is art and needs to be framed ASAP.
Every other post in this thread is not art, I fucking said so.

I know he had cancer, but that is one fucked up looking jaw.

this is a definition I can agree with. Watching Tsuchiya drift can make someone think that he's mastered an artform. I think that the OP is intending to ask whether or not video games is a fine art, which is more narrow in scope pertaining to painting, music, and that sort of thing

This is pretty close to how I feel about it.

Games are art, but the biggest problem in modern video games are fuckers who try to imitate other forms of art.

It's like, you could make a board game about having AIDS, full of emotional fluff, but the mechanics don't offer much for user input (IE: You die at the end no matter what), and there's not much room for playing it a second time.

But board game players get it, and would immediately notice that the game played like shit.

This is the problem with vidya. Vidya developers and critics want to feel like grown-ups in a grown-up industry, when in reality, they're grown apart from what made vidya great. This is why most of the young kids are turning to iphone games. Sure, they're microtransaction infested garbage, but they're pure games that have somewhat fun game mechanics.

"Art" itself doesn't exist.

Art is just a pretentious term that insecure autists use to feel better themselves, their work, hobbies, etc.

They also use it because they feel the need to justify themselves to other normies who mock their tastes.

That's why "art" varies from person to person.

t. philistine