Since I've been bothered about all this art and games questions as well as been looking for some of the answers to my own questions, I went back and re-watched Kellee Santiago TED presentation on 'Are video games art?' topic.
I have always thought about Thatgamecompany's games as being inspirational on many levels: ideas, gameplay and art. Also, I think I'm starting to realise that game development at the end of the day is really still quite a new medium (especially from artistic perspective) and it is still going through a development/evolution phase. Some of it is obviously driven by technology (e.g. Witcher 2, L.A. Noire and other). People still experimenting what can be done with/withn games ( e.g. Flower, Braid and others) Also, as a game player myself I can not argue with Kellee that games can and does have impact on me because they do. Not all though. But the ones that do are my favorite ones. I also think that there are and will be a lot of games that can be described as 'mindless entertainment' but realising that games can also be messangers of: stories, ideas and other art opens so many new unexplored possibilities. I think it is very exciting.
At the same time , I have to agree with Dennis Scimeca that she may not have a presented a very good argument.
(You can watch Kellee Santiago 'Video games are Art, So what’s next?' presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww)(You can also read Dennis Scimeca's response 'When Bad TED Talks Happen to Good People: Kellee Santiago Got it Wrong' to Kellee Santiago presentation here: http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/21/no-kellee-you-still-have-it-wrong/)
I found it really interesting reading Roger Elbert's and Kellee Santiago's posts. She and other people did have a valid point in saying that if R.Elbert have not played a single computer game. So how one can judge if something is a piece of art if one have not looked at it?...
Some of the coments that followed both of these arguments were also very interesting. One of them really stood out though. It was a post made to made under 'Roger Ebert Asks a Good Question' article by a games developer Jonas Kyratzes.
I'll qote his post here:
"By Jonas Kyratzes on April 17, 2010 6:52 AM
OK, this is going to be long.
I am an independent game designer. And for a very long time now, I have been arguing that games are art. I have also been making games that are generally perceived as art. They are not the most successful games in the world, they are not commercial, but they are definitely games.
Most of Santiago's arguments are weak, and her examples are less than excellent. You have responded to several of them quite well. But at no point have you said why games cannot be art. What's wrong with games? Why cannot they have the same emotional/aesthetic/intellectual/other impact that movies, books or paintings have? What makes it *inherently* impossible for them to do so?
Let us start at the beginning, with the definition of "games". We mean here digital games, of course; but even that is not enough of a definition. Is Tetris, a game about falling blocks, the same manner of thing as Fallout, the complicated story of the survivors of a post-apocalyptic world? These are essentially different creations: one is simply a simulation of falling blocks with a set of rules, the other has story, characters to interact with, a world to explore and understand, and choices to make. Just because they both run on a computer doesn't mean they are the same kind of thing. Now, some people might argue that Tetris *is* art, and I feel that this is their right, but that's a different question, and one to which I have no answer. I dislike saying what isn't art; my purpose is to show some things that *are* art.
Your comparison to chess is simply incorrect. Not all games consist of this simple player/opponent - win/lose mechanic. Not all games force you through this kind of binary logic: in many games you are required to come up with solutions to problems, and deal with the consequences (both in gameplay and in story). Sometimes the consequences are purely moral ones.
At the end of Fallout 1 and 2, for example, you are shown the ultimate consequences of your actions, years down the line. This is a deeply powerful sequence, the result of interactivity, and has nothing in common with chess or Mah Jong. A computer game is not the same as a board game.
(Defining what art is is tricky, of course, and people have been arguing over it for thousands of years. What I find very problematic, however, is the idea of defining art as how good something is, rather than what manner of thing it is. Surely a Nicholas Sparks novel is art? It's not particularly successful art, but surely we cannot entirely discount it from being art? It fails at being good, not at being art. Anyway, this is more of a sidebar.)
Let's move on. If I remember correctly, one of your basic objections to computer games as art is that art is the result of the artist's work and vision, and controlled by the artist. It's true that this is what makes art, but who do you think makes computer games? Game designers do, and game designers are artists. Maybe part of the problem is all the misleading advertising of some game companies - "a game in which you can do whatever you want!" and all that. But the truth is that everything that happens in a game only happens because a game designer chose to create the game that way. Of course interactivity allows a certain amount of unpredictability, but all that only happens with a framework that is designed with a purpose in mind. And in a way, that certain lack of absolute control by the artist exists in every artform, in the space between the artist and the person experiencing the art. People don't always understand or experience or treat art the way the artist would like them to. The artist creates a clearly defined framework, and the audience finds in it what they will.
But the framework is very much there, in games as well as in other art. And it has a definite source: not the programmers or the executives, but the designer and the producer. It's not that different from a movie, really. The fact that there's a cinematographer, or that some movies are ruined by executives, does not mean that film isn't an artform.
Just because games are interactive doesn't mean they're not art. Games are not *random*. The interactivity is part of the design, often the very essence of the design. And think of what it allows the designer to accomplish - it allows us to draw the player in, and make their choices be choices with consequences. It allows us to create an *experience* in a way that other artforms cannot accomplish. It is different to watch someone fly and to actually control flight yourself. And when the player is truly immersed, they are not just playing a 3D version of chess or Mah Jong - they are flying. Do you not see the possibility of an aesthetic experience there? Do you not see that we may be after more than just a simulation?
There's more. Many games have stories. In many of these stories, choices can be made. These choices are a lot more complicated than "go left" or "go right." Players can interact with characters, can choose what to say to them - and if the game is well-done, if it is good art, they can feel the same amount of emotional attachment to these characters as they can in a movie. More than that, they can feel even closer to these characters, because they feel that they truly talked to them.
Games allow us to tell stories that other artforms cannot, because they allow us to show choices and consequences in a truly unique way. The player walks into a town in which multiple parties are warring for control. Which side does he/she take? What will the consequences be for the characters, for the town itself? What is the moral thing to do? What is the expedient thing to do? The player is going to see, step for step, what the consequences of their actions will be. It's a lot more than just "I won" or "They won" or "Now there's a blue flag on the top of the screen."
This isn't theory, it's what really happens in games.
And even if the stories in some games aren't interactive, if you cannot make choices that alter what happens - don't you see the aesthetic and emotional potential of an artform that actually allows you to interact with a world, that allows you to experience a place as if you were truly there? I don't know why Santiago would pick something as crude and pathetic as "Waco Resurrection" when there is so much that is impressive and beautiful. Exploring the underwater city of Rapture in Bioshock, walking through the depressing and scarily beautiful landscapes around Chernobyl in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (related to but not based upon the wonderful Tarkovsky movie), or watching a Pegasus fly around its nest in Quest for Glory: Dragon Fire, these are emotional and aesthetic experiences that are quite unique, simply because they are actually interactive.
I'll be arrogant enough to cite one of my own games as an example now. I wrote a game called "The Museum of Broken Memories." It's set in what appears to be a museum, but is something more akin to a metaphor or a state of mind; it's hard to explain in a few words. Each room has exhibits, and each room allows you to travel into another part of the game, in which you experience a story fragment. It is, essentially, a game about war and the consequences of war, about the difficulty of moving on, and about the ability of art to set us free. (It involves no shooting of any kind.)
And it is absolutely essential that this story is told as a computer game. It is otherwise impossible to create the experience of walking through (well, clicking through) a museum, of being able to take your time to look at the individual exhibits and images (which all interrelate). It is impossible otherwise to allow the audience to experience the fragments in the order of their choosing, which is essential to the experience of being stuck in that museum. And, since the story fragments are all told in different styles and from the perspectives of a variety of individuals, it is essential for the player to actually *play* these story fragments, to move through them by choice, experiencing their worlds and stories. Without these interactive elements, the very concept of what the Museum is cannot be experienced.
I'll stop talking about my own game in a second, and I'm sorry if this sounds arrogant, but over the years I have been contacted by a whole bunch of people who had extremely powerful emotional experiences by playing the game, including the parents of soldiers, who felt that it really got to the heart of what had happened to their children. Is this not art? It may be flawed, no question about it, but if it's not art, what is it?
You seem to believe that the only focus of games is to win. This may be true of some games, and is certainly true of games like chess, but it's not generally true of all computer games. The rules in computer games are what allows them to be interactive - it's no more, in some ways, than the rule that in books the sentences ought to be printed one after the other. The rules allow the experience. But it's the experience we play for, not the rules or the winning. In fact, with many games, "winning" is entirely the wrong term. Would you say you "won" when you get to the end of a movie or book? No. Many games end when the story ends. You can get to the end of the game, but you didn't win some kind of contest, as in chess. You finished the game, like you finished the book.
"Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case."
Would you be surprised if a movie executive made that kind of list? Would you then discount film as a medium for art? The above list is anathema to many game designers, it represents everything that is wrong with the world today. But just because some people have - with good intentions or bad - hijacked the idea that "games are art" in order to sell more, that does not mean that games are not art. And it does not mean that there are not games out there right now, from fully commercial ones to small independent works, that truly make use of the medium to create an artistic experience.
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Ebert: Your comment is very valuable.
As to your final question,: No, I would not be surprised if a movie executive made that kind of list. But I would be surprised if Bergman did." 4/17/10 11:27pm"
(Roger Elbert's post 'Video games can never be art' can be found here: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art)
And to R.Elberts statement "Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form." I want to say: " I think you are wrong".
