Video Games as Fine Art

eisprinz

eisprinz

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One of the critical debates regarding video games is the possibility that video games can be art. Some believe that the nature of video games as inconsequential entertainment is too integral to the video game industry to have any breakouts that make serious literary or artistic statements.

Here's what's obvious:
-video games can contain some really pretty graphics
-video games can tell some pretty interesting stories

But just because something looks pretty or catches your fancy for more than five minutes doesn't make it art.

Where do you place the threshold between something that stimulates you inconsequentially and something that you consider fine art? Which video games, if any, do you feel cross that threshold?
 
The only games I consider art are:

Suikoden 1 and 2
FF7
FF Tactics and
A link to the past
 
Suikoden 1 and 2 are great examples. I also see FFVIII as art, not because its my fav, but I still love the graphics many years after its release. Vagrant Story and Breath of Fire 3 should be thrown in there too.
 
But what exactly makes you all consider one game art while others are just entertainment? If you place a lot of emphasis on the artwork, then do you exclude the classic games? Do you think how popular a game is defines its art value?

Furthermore, should video games compare to the standards of film and visual creations when being thought of as an art, or should there be a different aesthetic to the genre? (i.e. could replay value or ease of controls, things very specific to gaming, be considered a new component to the art aesthetic?)
 
I've heard that Okami is like art. But I haven't played it. So I would need to think about this in a hypothetical way.


Let's see.

Your suggestion that video games be held to the same standard as film would work --- except that I find most movies labelled as "film" are not very satisfying on an entertainment level. So it's not something I would hope for most games. Because, in the end, I want games to entertain me.

Art is something that moves the audience. Something that required creativity. Certainly a game could do that. But would it be worthwhile playing it?
 
Jehanne said:
I've heard that Okami is like art. But I haven't played it. So I would need to think about this in a hypothetical way.


Let's see.

Your suggestion that video games be held to the same standard as film would work --- except that I find most movies labelled as "film" are not very satisfying on an entertainment level. So it's not something I would hope for most games. Because, in the end, I want games to entertain me.

Art is something that moves the audience. Something that required creativity. Certainly a game could do that. But would it be worthwhile playing it?
Click to expand...

Well, one of the video games that people try to tote as art is Final Fantasy VII. No one can doubt the fact that many people were moved by certain events in the plot such as Aeris' death and Tifa piecing Cloud's thoughts together in the Lifestream.

Is this enough to consider all of FFVII art?

Are they just artistic moments?

Look at Disney's Fantasia - that was a big pioneering moment for Walt, because he was using animation abstractly as well as representationally in an attempt to prove that animation is indeed capable of being a fine art. And lots of people loved it.

So why not something like that for video games?
 
I haven't heard that about FF7 (makes me think I should play the game). There were aspects of FF9 and FF10 that were very artistic, but I wouldn't quite say that they were "art." Bits and pieces of them were definitely art. But on the whole, maybe making something that's a 50 hour experience into art just doesn't work.
 
So what about gaming do you think makes it unable to be art?

If something is entertaining, is it impossible for it to be art?

Some people say that the interactivity is what makes it not artistic, while some people say that the only thing holding video games back is the fact that they currently have inferior storylines.
 
I don't think that it can't be art. Interactivity doesn't preclude it as art. To date, I don't think that any mainstream games have really come close to what we think of as "art."

Art usually isn't about money. And video games are about making money. You would have to have a really visionary team working together to create something that would be both entertaining and artistic. And it would have to be profitable.
 
But what about cinema? I think there are lots of movies that ended up being critically as well as financially successful, such as the Charlie Chaplin films. Though his films seem like straight slapstick, they involve subtleties of abstraction as well as literary advances in his plots. (My favorite silent film is Chaplin's "City Lights")

I think video games can possibly achieve artistic growth in the same fashion: that they combine literary skill with visual skills.
 
The definition of art is so loose these days that you can consider practically anything to be art.

But as for fine art, I think the Final Fantasy series as a whole can be considered it. I mean, the graphics and sheer entertainment value of it is obviously phenomenal. The graphics for one are aesthetically pleasing, and based on my definition of fine art, I consider it to be so.

I guess it's different for each person 'cause some might consider the whole game to be art whereas others won't.
But looking at the FF series as a whole, I consider it a masterpiece of an artwork.
 
I suppose that I'm very critical about what is labeled "art." About a dozen years ago I took a drive over to the Modern Art museum in Los Angeles. There was a lot of junk there that I would just not call art.

There was one exhibit where the "artist" had taken dead birds and decapitated them. He replaced the heads with stuffed animal heads; and took the other miscellaneous parts to make similar hideous figures.

:|
 
Sounds like something we do in AP Studio Art. xD

Yeah, that's the thing about it. There are so many things people call art that it's hard to find something that you can't call art. That being said, it's obvious that there's a lot of people who call video gaming an art form in itself for reasons who knows what.
 
Jehanne said:
I suppose that I'm very critical about what is labeled "art." About a dozen years ago I took a drive over to the Modern Art museum in Los Angeles. There was a lot of junk there that I would just not call art.

There was one exhibit where the "artist" had taken dead birds and decapitated them. He replaced the heads with stuffed animal heads; and took the other miscellaneous parts to make similar hideous figures.

:|
Click to expand...

Yeah. I don't consider post-modernism to be art either. And really, if you look at the history of post-modernism, it wasn't even supposed to be art - it was anti-art. I'm all for Stuckism, lol.

Maybe I should ask how people define art and how video games fit into that spectrum.
 
... I am willing to go so far as to say that there are games that are "masterpieces." Final Fantasy 9 really struck me as being a masterpiece of story-crafted-with-game. There are also some Zelda games I might put into that category.
 
eisprinz said:
Maybe I should ask how people define art and how video games fit into that spectrum.
Click to expand...

Yes, please. :D
I might define my concept of art as different from your own. xD

My definition of art is anything that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and to the senses. Art portrays life, not the other way around, and that being said I stick to only those that portray physical beings in a realistic light as art. In other words, if it looks real, it's art.

Exceptions in video gaming just go to Final Fantasy. I usually play stuff like NFL Madden or Call of Duty, Medal of Honor; all realistic games.

EDIT: LMAO eisprinz. xD
I'd like to nap, but the teacher puts on loud marching music. xD
 
I think problem here is that many people when you say word 'art' authomatically think 'painting' or 'sculpture'....and nothing else.

I say, that anything that includes imagination and creativity is art...that goes from pictures and paintings, movies, books, games, music, play, ritual, dance and so on.

But games are very complicated form of art and this is why people, just cannot put them in the same pot as a painting; or just cannot decided if they should be considered as such...because they are clasified as fun and enterteintment, it gets confusing...they might look visualy pretty but that does not mean it is art, they might have an fantastic music through them but that does not mean much either.

Recently I have seen pictures of the exhibition of the 'art from video games' (cannot remember where it was and what games where)..would you then consider then any exhibited game is a piece of art..or just that one little frame from it that they choose to show?

Now, in my opinion, those those pictures on its own are artistic display of what is posible visualy to achive with a video game, it does not say much about the games itself. It is a just one pretty picture put up on the wall.

The game is an art piece as a whole....

Last year I visited London Science museum exhibition Game On, which exhibited games and consoles from the begging of the gaming industry and history; covering many aspects of video gaming and one of those was exhibiting games and consoles as form of art, also as soemthing educational and not just as another form of blind mindless pretty looking entertaintment.

Games are interactive. Video games like any for of a game in general is a form of play, a play that sometimes becomes almost a ritual in some aspects. Game creates a 'circle of play' between the game itself, space where it is played, a player and actions needed to be preformed for play to be executed and a world that game creates in itself where the act of play needs to be preformed; these factors then make player to feel and interact with a game on levels that is completelly different from interacting with only a painting for example or even a film or a book.

You cannot exhibit one frame of a game a call it an art. You can but it is not a game you a presenting, you are presenting just one small part of it. This is where Game On exhibition got it right. You must exhibit a whole game, as it is, on a console and you must let it to be played. The act of play is the most important part of a video game, if you cannot play it then video game stands for nothing. You interact with a game, and this special interaction happens rarely with other forms of art....
 
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