Back in 2010, veteran film critic Roger Ebert announced on Twitter that games could never be art, inadvertently declaring war on every gamer who ever legitimised their pastime by claiming it as an artform.
It was one man against millions, but Ebert had won before the battle even started - since the millions were fighting on a battlefield built by Ebert.
When Ebert says games aren't art, he's coming at it from a film critic's perspective, and from that perspective he's absolutely correct. Ebert's argument breaks down to two neat halves - quality and authorship - and on both points games come up short. Ebert, you see, is looking for the Mona Lisas and the Stanley Kubricks that videogames don't have.
"To my knowledge," he said back in 2005, "no one has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers." He's right, too. And he's right when he says "videogames by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."
This all comes back to "auteur theory" (author theory), a cinematic movement that started in 1950s France with critics and filmmakers such as François Truffaut. At the time, there was a widely-held view that movies could never be art because of the industrial, collaborative nature of their production. In response, auteur theory claimed that individual filmmakers could be identified as authors - placing film alongside accepted artforms such as painting, sculpture, music and writing.
GROUP THINKING
At first glance it's a model which seems perfectly applicable to videogames, but in fact it's difficult to apply auteur theory to even the indie-est of indie games. Some of the best games with the clearest stylistic, artistic, and creative visions of the last five years have been the work of dozens or hundreds of individuals, all contributing in a way that could never happen on a film set.
Portal's commentary tells a story of gradual iteration and refinement with contributions from everyone, right down to random crazies from the street. Valve love testing and spend months NDA-ing people and letting them loose on the Portals and Half-Lifes and Left 4 Deads to make sure players look in the right direction when something explodes, or respond to the art cues so they don't get lost. (Hollywood tests rough cuts too, and I'm sure plenty of critics would argue that any director who opens his film up to such a test isn't an auteur.)
Warren Spector underlines how collaborative games development can be: "What I try to do is make what I call 'the creative box'," he said at Gamescom 2010, talking about the making of Epic Mickey. "Here's the box that defines the game we're making. The team can fill the box with anything they want, but if they try to put in something that doesn't fit, I say, 'No! Not in the box!' I've put a couple of things in that box, but most have come from the team."
Comments
34 comments so far...
danfwarren on 23 Jan '12 said:
roger eberts a self important idiot. categorisation like this is as boring as it is pointless. and also subjective
buffig on 23 Jan '12 said:
Was playin Mario Galaxy 2 yesterday, then Dark Souls last night. Can't think of 2 games which purely embrace the video game medium more. Neither makes concessions to another medium, like films or TV. They take everything unique about video games and run with it. Neither could ever be a film and retain their unique qualities, they are video gaming in its purest form and for this reason they are their own art form and so utterly briliant.
StonecoldMC on 23 Jan '12 said:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/turner46022.jpg
http://images.artnet.com/images_US/magazine/reviews/robinson/robinson9-11-07-3.jpg
Or
http://www.worldofcharun.net/images/thumb/c/cf/Fourth_Age.jpg/240px-Fourth_Age.jpg
Guess which one is the video game art concept and which are the two real Turner Prize nominated art (which is subjective).
benedictm on 23 Jan '12 said:
I dunno. I've seen many a western in my time and none are as beautiful or well told as Red Dead Redemption
El Mag on 23 Jan '12 said:
Dunno, but I couldn't half eat an omelette now!
photoboy on 23 Jan '12 said:
At its most basic level, art is about emotion. People look at pictures, listen to music or watch films to evoke emotional reactions within themselves. Videogames evoke emotional reactions too, be it the simple happiness of rescuing the princess to the agonised indecision of cutting off a finger to save a child. These emotions are made all the more personal because they are happening to "you" rather than just some uncontrollable actor up on the screen.
Even a humble game of Tetris can provoke feelings of annoyance, panic and relief.
Videogames are interactive art and are the future of mainstream entertainment on this planet. Who wants to watch Luke Skywalker blow up the Death Star when you can be the one flying the X-Wing?
adgr19 on 23 Jan '12 said:
anyone who claims that video games aren't art has obviously never played animal crossing
nee50n on 23 Jan '12 said:
I have a couple of comments on this. There is a real problem defining art purely based on authorship in terms of complete project. Why can't you have multiple art prespectives within a single whole. For example, in film you can consider art from multiple perspectives: the acting, the cinematography, direction, set desing etc. The problem here is the question of art and industrialisation or as the great Walter Benjamin's coined it: art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
The 19th Century Art critic John Ruskin is some ways first identifed the difference capitalism bought to art when he compared gothic architecture and renaissance architecture. For him the latter was the start of alienated productive art: ie, the workers who produced the great buidlings were set to work on the structures simply following blue prints laid down by the designer. ie, these workers were no longer artists but simply alienated labour. By comparison the artisanship in gothic artcitecutre was much more collabaratie: different artisans working on different aspects. For him this change was negative. So I don't think this definition of art (ie a single voice author) is very helpful.
Secondly, the real problem that video games have (and I agree questions regarding art are not important as this does not detract from their importance as a culture phenomanon which requires criticsm) is that they are for the most part boring, generic, targetted at the lowest common deonominator. If video games want to be taken seriously from a cultural perspective, and lets be honest I doubt shareholders care as they are mainly corporate money making exercises, they need to grow up a little. As with films, games are mainly targeting at teenagers and families.
Obscure_Metaphor on 23 Jan '12 said:
Largely gibberish.
Games as a medium have the potential to be 'art'... but then if you want to tackle this, you need to define art, or rather, demolish your understanding of it and rebuild from the ground up. we assume that any painting on a canvas is art... but why? we assume that there's nothing else you can do with paint and canvas other than create 'art'. So how did a medium automatically get artist approval? Then if you consider some literature to be artistic, but the instruction manual for your new hoover not to be, then you're really starting to talk about peoples understanding of art vs medium, not the over simplified question of "are games art?"
personally, I believe art is anything that can influence emotion to create an effect that could be considered artificial (or at least not of a normal idle state). This can be as abstract as I desire, and nobody can say I'm wrong, as my emotional response to a situation cannot be argued by anyone; I'm the only one feeling it.
Games have the potential to be art, because they can have emotional value.
Sleepaphobic on 23 Jan '12 said:
Games aren't art and movies aren't art. Those stupid gay things you see in galleries is art and who really gives a s**t about that stuff?
Fr33Kye on 23 Jan '12 said:
I guess i dont need to say nearly as much. I reject ebert's definition of art.
Yes most of the popular games are boring generic and aimed at the lowest common denominator, but this is capitalism, games are expensive, you dont sell you dont eat. Developers dont get to ignore how a game sells and they have to convince a publisher that there is an audience for it. It's not about growing up because games are made by adults and i'm sure many would enjoy branching out, they just cant do anything that isn't profitable.
BenThomasFoster on 23 Jan '12 said:
Some of the concept arts for games could be sold for millions if they were but made with paint and authored by a prominent artist name. for in this day and age made with finger paint and/or pasta and made by a someone who was a cancer patient.
Either way the best art i've seen is total war's concept art. this art could easily fit in with all the other ship pictures a masterpeice of gaming industry art
http://0.tqn.com/d/compactiongames/1/0/L/H/1/etw_ca011.jpg
wrightandrewjame on 23 Jan '12 said:
Here's the definition of "Art":
1. The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture,...: "the art of the Renaissance"
2. Works produced by such skill and imagination.
How can you say that games are not art when such immense skill and also imagination goes into creating them?
Wikipedia defines it as:
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect.
How can you say that games don't influence our senses, play with our emotions or engage our intellect? In fact I'd say by having this discussion (or any at all on the matter) that video games must be art. Just as not every painting is good art or high art, not every video games is good or worthy of high praise.
Let's not forget that the greatest artists the world has ever produced were not praised for their works until much later than when they were produced. The same was said for films that they too were not art, not worthy of comparison to the theatre and performing arts, yet with time they too have been accepted. Video games are a very young medium, especially when you compare it to other mediums and even more so in relation to human society. Culturally they haven't had such a significant impact, but slowly opinion on them is changing.
The only thing that stands in the way of video games properly being regarded as art is that games can become obsolete, unable to be played as time goes on. The means to play them becomes unavailable, which is something that no other medium suffers with. If we can find a solution to this problem, then maybe video games will be called art.
PevMaster on 23 Jan '12 said:
I agree, Roger Ebert's an a**hole. I used to like him very briefly, but then I realised that his reviews are a load of bull****. WHY would anyone give Cody Banks 63%??? WHY would you give The Golden Compass full marks??? He seems to like giving bad films good scores and being a jackass.
Beebop10 on 23 Jan '12 said:
Worth mentioning that for most AAA games around 50% of the total budget is spent on 3d artwork
.
vitorfernandes83 on 23 Jan '12 said:
Most games are not art, but same thing can be said for most if not all new movies. Making a few corridors and buildings is not art, but when you look at Mario Galaxy or Pikmin, Metal gear, yes, I could call them art, every time I play them I say to myself, Bloody genius games. When I play call of duty or watch something like the Transformers movies I say, yeah I could have come up with better if I had the power to do so. An example of art in cinema is Avatar, yes, a bad script, but still a very artistic movie, the way they design Pandorra, little details and ideas, very well done. Many people say an artistic game or movie have to have emotion, I disagree, it's all in making something different, a mixture of ideas that work perfectly. Play the forest part of Killzone 3 and then play any part of any call of duty, it's the idea and the use of it, thus the forest part being so memorable and I can't even recall any part of call of dutys or battlefields and so on. Think of the first metal gear, I can remember every single part of the game even today, I call that a work of genius, ART, think of Halo, the setting, music, story, ART. You wouldn't want to see a Picasso painting with a tree in the middle of a white paper, it's how the things blend together so well and show originality even on an unoriginal setting. Pikmin is the best example ever, I thought for myself, how could someone come up with this?
TheLastDodo on 23 Jan '12 said:
Some games are art, some games aren't art. Life goes on.
/end thread
Thwacht on 23 Jan '12 said:
There are only two qualitative definitions of art. These two definitions are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and neither provides satisfactory results, but they are the only two definitions that do not crumble under considerations of context and subjectivity.
The first definition is the traditional one: Art is what the people in power say it is. If the patrons and publishers and critics and established artists agree that it is "art," then it is. Otherwise it is not.
The second definition is the philosophical one: Art is anything purposefully put forward for aesthetic consideration. Metaphorically speaking, if you put a frame on it and hang it up for people to look at, it is art. Not always "good" art, maybe, but definitively art.
Author theory, as put forth by Ebert (and the author of this article), provides only a quantitative definition, at best. It may provide a context that allows people to argue about what may be more or less "artistic," but it does not define what is and is not "art."
It is ridiculous to argue that products of collaboration cannot be art. Are Lennon/McCartney compositions unable to be art because more than one person contributed to their creation? It is just as misguided to say that the visions of game designers are less creative or artistic or thought-provoking, regardless of how many graphic artists and programmers it takes to bring those visions to virtual life
In other words, that Ebert can recognize a Scorsese-directed film, even though an entire movie crew collaborated on it, does not really provide any additional information about the film. It only tells us that Ebert is able to recognize Scorsese's vision in the final results. The important part is the unified vision, not whose vision it is or how many people had to work to create it.
How is this any different from a gamer recognizing a Miyamoto game, or even a Blizzard game? If the "author theory" is based on the requirement of a unified, recognizable vision, why should it make any difference if that distinctive vision is synthesis of two Beatles songwriters, or a movie director with a scriptwriter and film crew, or an entire game development company?
It is not any different, at least not in any rational, objective way. Yet the author of this article seems to surrender entirely to the first definition of art: "Art is what people in power tell you it is." This may be a solidly defendable position, but ultimately, as a working definition, most of us in the real world find it almost useless.
The art of a song is understood through the hearing of it, not in reading its writer credits. The art of a movie comes from watching it, not from being familiar with the director's earlier work. The art of a game is in playing it, not in observing someone else play it.
svd_grasshopper on 23 Jan '12 said:
this feature isn't art.
but you should apologise for it.
kmcroc on 23 Jan '12 said:
Roger ebert is a blow hard, a relic from a time when people gave a F about what crittics had to say or cared about thier opinions. As Roger is'nt time for you to take that dirty nap that you have been eluding all this time.
laminated0 on 23 Jan '12 said:
Well being an artist plus having been an art student I strongly disagree with this man. By very concept games originate from art, hence they are in fact a conceptual form of art realised in a 3D setting, they are an evolution of the concept from which a game comes. As with every form of art not all of it can be considered 'good'. All games have at least a basic artistic beginning the end product may not be a masterpiece but it is the same with drawn art, not every piece of art ever made is considered a masterpiece and hung in a gallery protected 24/7, but that doesn't make the art no-one sees any less 'art', it's the same with games not everyone is a masterpiece but when the ones that are come along, you *know* that you are playing and watching something special.
This man should apologise to every artist in the games industry.
jaguarwong on 23 Jan '12 said:
Ok, what the hell is going on?
There was an almost identical article to this published over at Eurogamer last week...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-16-who-framed-roger-ebert
Chris_Shanahan87 on 23 Jan '12 said:
Zelda disagrees.
Imaduck on 23 Jan '12 said:
As an art student basically all my life in 1 way or another - this guy is a f**king moron to my mind.
Balladeer on 23 Jan '12 said:
Art's a heavily subjective concept anyway. The Turner Prize, as mentioned on the previous page, is a case in point.
Regardless, I have three words for this man: Okami, Muramasa, Journey.
Budly Moore on 23 Jan '12 said:
First off its wrong to compare games to fine art, games will never be fine art as they're not intended to be fine art. There have been many artists that make work using games, that look like games, that are interactive like games, but, ultimately they are fine art. Games are the subject or medium or inspiration :-
Cory Arcangle
Brody Condon
Langlands & Bell
Feng Mengbo
So if games are going to be art, you'll need to approach the subject from the unique aspect to games. And its not the music, the story, the visuals, the voice acting, the concept art (lol), the clever facial animation's, the physics. Its your interactivity and control (gameplay).
How can gameplay be art? I don't know.
My theory is, as I control the events in the game any 'art' is inconsequential to gameplay (it only enhances the experience), unless I wanna create art (as an artist, you can create art in, with or about games). Which I dont cause I wanna play a game.
verynaughtyboy on 23 Jan '12 said:
Is it art or not? To me it is just a label. Gaming is my favourite hobby wether it is deemed / classed as art or not. Call it what you will, give it any badge, gaming is awesome and nothing changes that.
Also, if I consider something to be art then it is and no one has the right to tell me it's not... but Ico was definitely art!
PMIKE5 on 23 Jan '12 said:
Intriging view point, but art is subjective. Articles like this remind me of phrases people coin like, "Speaking as a woman--" or "As a Mother--" They're speaking for all women and mothers by saying this, but I'm sure many would argue that their case is different to theirs.
So to speak.
... I'm not sure I've made any kind of sense here...
verynaughtyboy on 23 Jan '12 said:
Don't worry, good point, you made total sense.
Legend Turtle on 24 Jan '12 said:
Craig David is the greatest musical artist ever because he sings his name at the start of every song, so you can always tell it is his vision in the "work".
Old Skool Gamer on 24 Jan '12 said:
What a knob, games need to be quality with high replayablity factors, no bugs and no rip off DLC content, only free.
Too much crap out this generation, its only about money.
nico1911 on 24 Jan '12 said:
Every year are released hundreds of games. Of these only few are good enough to be memorable in some way, for the plot, the gameplay, the soundtrack. And these few games usually age very bad. Retroplaying appeals to peaple over 30 (as i am) who want to get back to their past. On the other side a great movie of the '60 is still great for everyone. And even a mute movie as Metropolis or Nosferatu is still enjoyable by anyone. I've seen them and, for sure, I wasn't around when they were played in theatres.
I think games are great form of entertainement, but even the best aren't works of art. I agree if the best of them are saw as good industrial design. But I wonder if Bioshock will age well as a classic sportcaror as a good movie.
richardr on 24 Jan '12 said:
All forms of entertainment should aspire to be as good as they can, and that's where the art side of it comes in. No aspiration would basically mean we ended up with a lame slew of dullard first person shooters (which we do get) but nothing else. Same with films. No aspiration to be better in one way or another = Fast Furious films and no attempt to do anything else.
xxx128 on 26 Jan '12 said:
Please have a seat. Take a deep breath now. Are you sitting? Ok... There are actual more games out there than just fifa soccer and call of duty so get your head out of your arse.