Vidya as Art

ok

Games can be art. The problem is hipsters don't make art, they make modern art.

A work of art requires masterful execution in its creation and clear skill on the work of the creator(s). You can't queef out some paint and call it a masterpiece on par with the Sistine Chapel just because they were both done using paint in the same way that a hipster's shitty 20 minute walking simulator crapped out in Unity in one weekend will never be on par with, say Majora's Mask.

Small tangent on that, but I do consider MM one of the few examples of a game that could be considered a work of art. The gameplay is polished, the controls tight, the soundtrack excellent, and the world seems alive. In addition to being mechanically sound and genuinely fun to play, and the writing actually does make you feel for the characters in the world staring the coming end of all things in the face.

An artist doesn't need to parade their work around proclaiming "this is art." A hack does that in a pathetic attempt to try to trick the foolish or apathetic into believing it. An artist merely creates and the value of his work is readily apparent.

And yet it is.

The problem with art as a word is it has two different meanings, depending on where one comes from.
The classical definition of art, which I would file vidya under, is the use of craftsmanship to make something worth experiencing in whatever way that medium is experienced, i.e. an artful gun is not only good-looking, but also enjoyable to shoot.
The postmodern definition of art is based on expression, and while it may work for media that the audience doesn't directly feed into (print, painting, sculpture), it falls apart when the audience's involvement becomes part of the piece, as in vidya and /tg/.

I got my own question: Is pixel art real art?

Yes.

I wish you faggots would stop using the word "art" the same way a pretentious art student would. Being art does not imply merit, the perfect example is Transformers, the Call of Duty of kino. Made for stupid people who like explosions. Another example is Stephen Universe, the Gone Home of cartoons.

That's not the definition of art anyone is using. We aren't talking about art in the most generic, general sense.

What film did Ebert shit on?

Pixel art is the digital evolution of mosaics so yes and is fucking ancient.

Earthworm Jim always reminds me of Boris Velejo paintings.

Games aren't art. The people who like to argue that games are art are faggot manchildren who need their hobby validated by someone else. Video games contain art for sure. Music is artistic, visual designs are artistic, I'll even go so far as to say good (voice) acting is an art.

Here's an example: an artbook containing all of Picasso's work. Each page is beautiful and glossy, with crisp details and colors. The pictures are wicked fuckin art, but the book isn't. The book is a vehicle that simply gets all that art to you. Same with a music CD. Tchaikovsky's music is art, but the plastic disc you put in your car stereo is not art.

You're asking the wrong question OP.

The correct question is not "what makes a video game art/artistic?" The correct question is "what makes a video game good?"

The idea of art is subjective, and has kind of been ruined by postmodernism at this point to basically mean "whatever some retard with more money than sense will pay way too much for and put on display". That's not what game designers should be shooting for and they're idiots if they want to shoot for it.

If you want my definition of art though, it's a piece of work that either evokes an emotion or conveys an idea. A broad definition to be sure, but video games definitely fall under it (And a lot of postmodern "art" does not, ironically. At least to me it doesn't). The thing is, simple games can be artful just as much as more complex ones. Take, for instance, the classic arcade/Atari game Missile Command. The actual gameplay is very simple: you control a cursor. Press the fire button to shoot a missile at the cursor, causing an explosion. Use the explosions to destroy incoming missiles and prevent your cities from being destroyed. Go for a high score, since the game just keeps getting harder and faster until you lose everything.

With these incredibly simple mechanics, this game manages to both evoke the emotion of frantic desperation as the missiles start arriving faster and faster and you try to save what little you can, and convey the idea of a hellish, apocalyptic war, which is only intensified by what happens when you lose all your cities; rather than the usual "Game Over", you instead get "The End". It's a small detail, but one that makes a big difference in the tone of the game.

But that's an example of simple mechanics used for surprisingly complex emotions. The thing is, appealing to simple emotions is not a bad approach either. The visceral joy of tearing enemies apart and/or speeding skillfully through an obstacle course has been the goal of many of my favorites, like Dead Cells and Dustforce. These games are well-animated, have fun gameplay, and have satisfying rewards when you complete their challenges. And for me, that's enough. Is it art or artful? Who the fuck cares, fun things are fun.

They are.

No

Art

modern art

Paintings aren't art either: It's the combination of colors in the canvas that makes it art. Hell, we could go further and say that the chemicals that reflect light in different wavelengths so that the canvas creates the illusion of a three-dimensional form in a human eye are art.

Yes because there is more to Art then just the finished product. Artistry in itself is a process, the product in itself can be called a work of Art (as implying it was created by an Artist). But the product itself cannot be called Art without the creators intentional or Talos (Goal / Reason to do something). Being that I would define art as "a posses of seeking mastery", then postmodern art would not qualify because that purpose is to decay the fabric of society not elevate it.

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That seems like an adequate definition.

Regardless of any one single persons own view of what is,and is not, an art, if society at large is willing to agree that film is an art form then there is no reason I can think of that video games wouldn't also qualify.

This line of thinking is incredibly pedantic.

14 get

Rollin'

49 get

lets try that again
49 get

Main character get!
Who bitch this is?

Rollan b4 delet

IT'S HIP TO FUCK BEES

You can't have her

Is is also hip to fuck hornets?

I will have her, my memes are superior

A hornet is merely an edgy bee.

rollan

Games are art.
A lot of people seem to associate the word "art" with a lot of lofty ideas. They don't think something is art if it doesn't singlehandedly cause a cultural shift or it isn't photo-realistic rendition of a roman gangbang where every pore on the castrated trap is visible.
The truth is that most art is stupid. The big things that people think of when you compare video games to art are always things like The Inferno, 1984, or even the sistine chaple.
But most art is now, and always has been, primarily a distraction for rich people. A lot of famous art was just commissions, a lot of famous literature existed only to entertain, like Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.
Most art is forgettable, and will never be seen by you or most people.

TL;DR: video games are art, and being art means nothing. The real question is, can video games be good art?

...

Games are for fun, art is for being a faggot about. Art is the height of pretentiousness.

Revelant

My view lines up with

Conventionally I would say video games are works of art not only from the visuals and music, but also from the design of the game. However there are a lot of faggots, especially game journalists looking to elevate the social standing of their careers to imply that art is a status, or would abuse the term 'art' to detract from things they don't like- if anyone has remembered the 'you should be pissed about the game Hatred, etc because its' violence/sexism/racism sets video games back from being regarded as art' sentiment.

I don't think game design has standards either. It takes major technical issues for a game to be widely recognized as bad. At best, it's agreed that a game should be beatable, but I think that's ground floor in terms of basic standards.

Games aren't art.
They have art in them like a museum but they themselves are not art.

Roland SC-55

I made a stupid mistake

Pretty much this. Games CAN be art but like most things now, calling it art anything is just a warning sign of commie/liberal garbage. Why bother improving your techniques when you can shove pasta in your vagina and call it art? It's like the media, the thing itself has been cooped by kikes but that doesn't mean that the original product is now wrong or ruined.

They are art.

no

I want to fuck that Vampire.

Aren't VNs just pictures, music, and writing that you press space a bunch to go through? Were movies that you needed to hand crank actually not art but the first video games because you had to interact with them to go forward?

Thread is worthless, so here goes nothing.

Are tabletop games an art?

No they aren't. They use art as a means to represent the play space but they aren't made to be purely art.

A better question would be
Is a half a press really a half a press

Rolling

Pressing generally means exerting force onto something. By that definition, he would've have done one press of the A button at the moment he went into his described "holding" phase.

Rollan!

I'm impressed, not a single fuckable woman on that whole chart.

I thought we settled this. Yes, games are art. No, that isn't a mark of quality. And we should all keep quiet about if we don't want even more pretentious artfags invading our favourite passtime.

every bit of artistic media today has been castrated by profiteers, video games were just the latest and quickest in so

let's roll

Here we go

Roll

Yes of course I would consider games art. But what I love about games is that the player is an artist too. What the player does in a game can be as much art as everything else.

A player can attempt to play the game perfectly, play as fast as possible or find out how to do things that may never have even been intended in the fist place. The right player can make bad games fun to watch, or make great games even better.
This is why games with a heavy focus on cutscenes or walk and talk segments are usually shit because they actively limit what the player can do at times.

Fuck off. Games don't need to prove itself as an "artistic" medium. Not to mention calling it so removes any objective way to criticise them

eh,might,as well

They are art.

Tabletop games are not video games.

This is only true in the postmodern sense which we can all agree is a load of shit.

I've always thought of art as a physical manifestation of ability. Contemporary art emphasizes meaning almost exclusively. Now, Renaissance art also has meaning, particularly religious, but at the time it was nothing so obscure because everyone was part of an Abrahamic religion and is familiar with the Old Testament. As we become more secular, most Renaissance art will continue to become more obscure, but at its time and place, it made perfect sense.

Going back to contemporary art, the second image attached is from an exhibit at a contemporary art museum I recently went to. It took me some time to recognize it was actually a crudely drawn map of the United States, but beyond that I couldn't decipher why each state had a number. I ended up asking one of the curators about it, and it turns out that the numbers were the number of hate groups in each state. Also throughout my time at the museum, I was shouted at twice for accidentally touching exhibits worth tens. One was a wall I leaned on and the other was a series of pieces of paper with a little bit of tin foil attached scribbled over with yellow Crayola marker that I initially thought was done by some elementary school children, as the museum I went to had an art class for them, was actually a ten-thousand dollar representation of the current state of libertarianism. I shit you not, the third file attached is a recreation of part of it in paint.net and I'm willing to bet money that mine is neater.

Those are assets for tax evasion, money laundering, or as collateral in case anything bad happens.

I would say the only major argument for an artistic interpretation of gaming should fall on the gameplay.

For a game to successfully be an artistic piece of gameplay it needs to be headed by an artist, the project needs to be lead by a single visionary who knows how to shape the entire project and he needs heavy control.

The problem with modern games is they've switched from the "waterfall technique" of software development, where you have a plan, you have a project lead and everyone works towards a final, defined goal to the "agile technique" wherein the entire group has a say and the project continuously evolves and iterates, the final product potentially looking nothing like the original design documents.

On the one hand, this allows the game to chase current fads like a junkie chasing the dragon in an attempt to snatch up whatever pie is currently most popular. On the other hand this also means the commie faggot failed art students who previously would've been painting floor textures and modeling furniture are now able to affect the direction of the game's production. It's plausible that big groups aware of which teams that behave this way may offer incentives to employees to help push a game in a given direction, i.e., for diversity or some other bullshit political method.

A big part of why so many games these days that are still good are either japanese or indie is because neither of these tend to follow that "agile technique". Japan largely remains in the traditional methods of things, per their stereotype, but more are moving away from it, like SquareEnix. Indie teams just don't have the time or resources to risk deviating from the original plans.

gimme gimme snek pussy

Oh how has the art world has fallen, now i don't mind the divergent branches of art, since exploring the boundaries of art is very much appreciated. However, i think the fact that modern art has devolved into nothing more than a blank canvas for the """""""artist""""""" to project his utterly diluted and incestous ideas is like shitting on the whole legacy of what the western culture was.
You're don't have a root you can go back too, You don't have a sane composition in you work, You care jackshit about other people to appreciate your art. All you care about is your goddamned ideas

fuck i need some sleep, i can't even form coherent sentences.

Games are not inherently art. They are games first and foremost, entertainment. Games have the capacity to be art but not every game is art. Madden and CS:GO are not art, but you can easily make an argument for SoTC or Dark Souls being art.
This is why video games transcend art and are better than art. Because it can be art when it wants to be, but it doesn't need to be to have value.

If I remember correctly, Kojima said it best: A video game is an art gallery, rather than an art piece.

Is an art gallery not also art?
Is the organization and selection of works, or the drafting of the floor plan people must navigate, not the creation of an experience?

anything but bugs or snakes anything but bugs or snakes…

No, an art gallery is not art. It's a vessel for art. That's like saying an art book is art. The fact that it's an art book doesn't make it art. It's a book that contains art within itself.

I think art begins where practical service ends. For example, architecture itself isn't art, but its decorations are (such as statues and murals)

Yeah, but what if the art book has a set of art all of which compliment each other and therefore can be appreciated even greater?

I think classifying anything as art is cancer. My reasoning for this is that it literally adds nothing of value to said thing, besides giving some sort of self smug satisfaction that you like(or pretend to) something classified as "art".

Postmodernism is just a natural step in art, where everything can be done via Cameras and Photoshop so now artists that use paint and shit have to move over to the more obscure, to the artwork that questions the condition of man, otherwise they have no niche

So Videogames and Art
Why can't it be both?
Games can be both fun and bring questions on humanity. Games can be fun and mindless and videogames can just be an interactive method of asking the questions that art normally does.

Attempting to analyse every game as a piece of art loses a lot of the mechanical craftmenship and attempting to analyse every game as a time waster is removing the artist from the scenario.

A good example of this that isn't video games is Monopoly, which was originally designed to be anti-capitalist in nature and has had jokes saying that it tears families apart, however, as a time waster it's a pretty good game, the rules are easy to learn and can be expanded upon, meanwhile, the game is also brings out that primal greed in all of us.

Basically, let games be one, or the other, or neither art or fun. Dismissing a game for being or not being art ultimately spoils the medium.

The spine or the cover would be the art, while the book as a whole is still a vessel for other art.

You do realize photo's and photo editing can also do this?

...

No, they're not art. They contain art, but they are not art.

I used to try to make the argument that gameplay itself could be considered a new form of art - because a finely crafted game with responsive elegant controls, well controlled pacing, and an adaptive difficulty that always pushes you *just* to the breaking point of your skill threshold before backing off and then ramping it up again… it can be transcendent.

However… if gameplay is an art form, then apparently nobody seems to know how to do it right or purposefully yet. It's certainly not commercially viable. And unlike modern art - it would take a considerable amount of skill to craft reliably and in a way that most people would be responsive to. It would require as much effort on the part of the player to manifest, as it does the game itself, which is not something the masses of passive consumers is going to be able to accomplish. As such, you can't just shit out any pretentious half-assed effort and then hide from criticism behind "interpretation".

Texture work, music, cinematics, story… all those more traditional forms of artwork were merely be flavoring - spice to the true meat of the work to be enjoyed. Instead, the whole order is inverted - because it's easier for developers and players both to think in terms of traditional art forms, so all that surface level bullshit ends up getting center stage - and it's the gameplay which suffers, relegated to merely defining how the player interacts with that art.

Garbage.

Sure, games can be called art. But it bothers me when art is called games.

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Attempting to gateway art is the refuge of the intellectual halfwit who wants to make a super secret club of people who "get it", a practice that started with supporters of the original impressionists (but at least the impressionists could make something nice to look at) and championed through the modern day by anyone wearing a beret.

Are games art? Do they have the potential to be art? If any have the potential to be art, then all must be art. To declare some art and others not is to place a line in the sand, a cutoff point between what balance of elements make it art or not.
As all games are creative endeavors, they are all art. Even if they are shit. After all, when you were 5 your parents stuck your drawings on the fridge with a magnet, right? Because it was your art.

The difference between painting and photography is the information given. Photographs are moments in time. They aren't owned by the photographer or really all that representative of his mind, they are simply things that have happened. Paintings, on the other hand, are entirely controlled by the artist. They give insight as to what exactly the artist values. Courtroom sketches are the best examples I can think of, because they're moments in time and only show what the artist wants to show or can see.

Vidya can be art. It'd take a while to explain how though.

The reason art has fallen into decay is because of postmodernism and relativism. To pin the blame on "elitists" entirely is stupid and wrong, especially when people who have "sekrit klubs" based on a deeper understanding of the field exists in EVERY SINGLE FIELD AND ASPECT OF LIFE
This is just a lazy excuse not to analyze games on a deeper level than just its surface. Holla Forums itself is a "secret club" of sorts, except here, its us 'getting' why and how games can be good or bad and why the current climate for the industry is so horrible.

Well, yes.

benis

While I have as much contempt for modern art as anyone, this baby is the equivalent of any image board fanboy calling their taste objectively superior to others. Art is subjective, however much it upsets those of us who dream of a world where the natural world supports reinforces our own beliefs. Those who get together the biggest group of friends together decide what is the most valued kind of art.

That "graph" of declining standards is hysterical.

Scat and feet are the worst fetishes, though.

Yeah art is subjective but now you get men shitting on canvases and calling it art, the situation has changed. The word art has been subjected to so much bullshit it needs to be defined and held to some standards else it'll completely lose it's meaning.

The one time I needed that fucking flag to stay.

You're right user, standards haven't declined at all!
Now excuse me while I take a huge dump in public on this abnormally large Cheeto puff in a wig and get praised for #ResistingDrumpf

no
dubs

check em

games are not art. they never will be art. you only want them to be art because you want to justify wasting your life playing with toys, just like how game journalists wish games journalism was actual journalism.

I don't think that was ever the case user. It's more about whether they can actually be taken seriously, as in can it convey though-provoking questions or philosophies.

keep trying user, you'll get it someday

From Scalia and the Supreme Court, protecting vidya from censorship.

Photographs can be posed and can simply be objects arranged in a certain manner. Likewise, the focus, lens, colors and render can further be adjusted and even the film altered afterwards as the artist likes.

roll

k

no bugs plz