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Can games, electronic and otherwise, be ART?

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18 Nov 2018 20:43 #286385 by DarthJoJo
This was a discussion I had with a friend some time ago. Regarding video games, he agreed they could be art, using as an example something that sounded like a point-and-click adventure set on a train. I wasn’t excited about that answer as the game was only art insofar as it shared characteristics with literature or film. I believe that any definition of video game as art must include Tetris or its worthless, though I haven’t found that definition yet myself.

Regarding board games, he disagreed that they could be art as they depend on a single force overcoming and defeating opposing forces. Same for cooperatives, but there the opposing forces are the player and designer.

Obviously both have aesthetic qualities that can be judged on their own as art as visuals or miniatures or whatever, but I want to know whether the unity of mechanics, rules and presentation are an art themselves. I think they must be as they can be satires like Modern Art or High Society, but I lack the language and argument to express it.

I know the answer to this question won’t matter to whether we enjoy these games or not, but I do believe it is worth pursuing. Are we engaging in Art when we play Starcraft and Cosmic Encounter? Call of Duty and SEAL Team Flix? Tetris and chess? Or are they merely product and pleasant distraction?

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18 Nov 2018 21:23 #286389 by the_jake_1973
In as much as one can find art in the collection of valves and pistons and gears than make up the engine of a Ferrari 250, a particularly elegant collection of art, mechanics, and theme could constitute art.


The Grizzled may be my most 'artistic' game, but perhaps I feel that way because I was a soldier.


Art is where you find it. It is not defined by someone else for you.
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18 Nov 2018 21:26 - 18 Nov 2018 21:35 #286390 by Frohike
Something that shapes social interaction with representational models, shared/imagined diegetic events, supportive visuals, tactility... can certainly be an artistic medium. Part of what makes this medium distinctive is the players ability to inhabit the diegesis while also being perfectly aware of, and increasingly fluent in, the registers that construct their experience. In this way, I think that the architecting, design, and readership of games has brought about an interesting popularization of dynamics that Bertolt Brecht had aimed for back when he was developing “epic theater.” This sort of tandem awareness tends to break down some of the representational patterns that have governed more traditional art (for instance Foucault's analysis of similitude vs resemblance crashes in interesting ways with what's going on in The Grizzled: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/53627/not-gas-mask ).
Last edit: 18 Nov 2018 21:35 by Frohike.
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18 Nov 2018 21:33 #286391 by Black Barney
Roger Ebert was super against games ever being regarded as art and was an internet warrior against them when he wasn’t trying to figure out how to eat a Twinkie.

Some of these games hire dozens if not hundreds of artists to work on them. I don’t know how the end result couldn’t be considered anything other than art.

It’s no different than a movie. You hire artists to design parts of your movie or game, both require artistic direction. The end result is a piece of art.
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18 Nov 2018 21:38 #286392 by mc
A whole lot of boardgames are VERY derivative, or have derivative aspects.
But that's very true of art anyway.
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18 Nov 2018 22:14 #286395 by Shellhead
I think that games are capable of rising to the level of fine art, but maybe nothing we have seen so far reaches that level.

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18 Nov 2018 22:26 #286396 by hotseatgames
I have seen Pete pull off some shots in SEAL Team Flix that were definitely art. Or bullshit. One of those.
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19 Nov 2018 00:01 - 19 Nov 2018 09:45 #286399 by ubarose

Shellhead wrote: I think that games are capable of rising to the level of fine art, but maybe nothing we have seen so far reaches that level.


I think Demono might fall in that grey area between applied art and fine art.
Last edit: 19 Nov 2018 09:45 by ubarose.

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19 Nov 2018 01:13 #286401 by Sevej
What's with this obsession to get games admitted as art? I'd take games over art any time... But of course that's just me.
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19 Nov 2018 05:16 - 19 Nov 2018 05:22 #286432 by Whoshim
My personal definition of art, at minimum, is: art is anything that has been done with an aesthetic purpose in mind. I think that the purpose matters more than the quality of the outcome.

This means that I view board games, chairs, and mostly everything, as the artistic expression of someone.

Now, I am also willing to admit that we find things that were not done purposefully to be artistic. Some accidental splash of paint while working, a broken down building, etc. We find some sort of pleasure in things like that.

Do I think that board games will receive the recognition of the theater, paintings, and the like? No. Generally, board games are mass produced (though the print runs can be small). I think that pulls it out of what people generally conceive of as art. Some expensive, unique chess sets may find inclusion among the cultured as art. But that is due to the quality of the sculpting and to the cultural weight that chess has.

I don't think that mechanics will ever get that kind of recognition. Game rules do not touch the heart strings like movies, literature, and paintings do.

EDIT: Also, (aside from abstracts like Go) Napoleon's Triumph is the most holistically artistic game I have run across. The map and pieces come together so nicely, and the rules, once learned, are so smooth. They step out of the way, and you can just think about what you want to do, where you want to maneuver, without getting hung up by the rules.
Last edit: 19 Nov 2018 05:22 by Whoshim.

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19 Nov 2018 07:00 #286447 by Erik Twice
Art is a meaningless word with no single definition so it's kind of a dumb debate. For all practical uses, yeah as much as any other medium. I really don't see any meaningful difference and think the whole discussion is rooted on elitism and a touch of politics.

"Oh, it's not real art, because it's interactive"
"Oh, it's not real art, because money was paid for it"
"Oh, it's not real art, because you used a machine to record it"
"Oh, it's not real art, it's just illustration"

Etc, etc. It's a stupid term. You can pretty much flip the names and argue that cinema isn't art and you'll get the same conversation.

Politics get into it because the whole thing is not about definitions or games or anything, it's about being "accepted" as something good and valuable and people being afraid their own little turf may see some competition.

Black Barney wrote: Roger Ebert was super against games ever being regarded as art and was an internet warrior against them when he wasn’t trying to figure out how to eat a Twinkie.

The guy really had a hate-boner for games. Lots of his reviews have dumb attacks against videogames for no logical reason. Like, he's talking about a movie and suddenly he dropped some game-hate at the end. Hate towards games he hadn't played, of course, common sense couldn't get to the guy when it came to this.

What bothered me the most is that people took him seriously. The moment he said that idiotic "Would burn all video games to save Hukelberry Finn" line he should have been laughed out of the room. Instead, you had game personalities and critics talking about how he "might be right" and listing recommendations about how the medium can "improve" so we can actually see art. And to rub salt on the wound, most of these recommendations were "let's copy movies" nonsense.
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19 Nov 2018 09:16 #286477 by Legomancer
Sure, games can be art. (Of course, I have a wide definition of art.)

I will say, though, that in my experience, the people who yell the loudest for games (especially video games) to be treated as art, mean something really odd by "art". So many gamers see "art" as a ward against criticism. As soon as something is declared as "art" then for some reason it can't be judged in any way. I think a lot of folks see the term "art" as a sort of canonization of opinion.

When we're kid's we're told that something like the Mona Lisa or Symphony 5 is "art" and if you say you don't like it or whatever, you're declared a philistine or you "don't get it". Growing up, you're presented with literature, and are constantly told there of symbolism and such, and we often rebel, demanding to read the work literally and refusing to accept these interpretations, seeing them as "just an opinion" being forced on you, even if there's supporting material within the text.

So I think for many people, "art" comes to represent creative works which are just great in and of themselves, which have been elevated, and about which any opinion or interpretation is valid and unassailable (especially if the creator said something somewhere about it). "This is art" is intended to stifle discussion, not encourage it. "Art" takes something off the board.

But again, most people aren't taught anything about art except blind appreciation and canonical interpretation.
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19 Nov 2018 09:43 #286481 by DarthJoJo

Legomancer wrote: But again, most people aren't taught anything about art except blind appreciation and canonical interpretation.


I plan to make a longer post in response to the rest of this post and Erik’s, but I just wanted to say that I have believed for years now that we should be teaching Danielle Steele alongside Romeo and Juliet or Tom Clancy next to Kurt Vonnegut in high school. It’s kind of hard to appreciate the good stuff, if you don’t know mediocrity.
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19 Nov 2018 09:47 - 19 Nov 2018 09:59 #286482 by GorillaGrody
Adorno, writing in Hollywood, in 1942: "All films have become similar in their basic form. They are shaped to reflect facts of reality as closely as possible. Even fantasy films, which claim to not reflect such reality, don't really live up to what they claim to be. No matter how unusual they strive to be, the endings are usually easy to predict because of the existence of prior films which followed the same schemas. Also, for example, erotic depictions become so strong and so pronounced that a transformation to other forms is no longer possible." His point was that bad art is any art in which the ending is preordained in an unacknowledged relationship with unreality between the artist and consumer. The end will always be the same. Games complicate this, of course, but there are very few ambiguous endings in games. Clement Greenberg's Avante Garde and Kitsch is worth reading in this regard, too. sites.uci.edu/form/files/2015/01/Greenbe...-and-Kitsch-copy.pdf

They had similar attitudes, expressed differently. Their first point was, to reductively reiterate Plato's idea, that most art isn't "real" and therefore not worthy of attention. Sounds dumb, but it's what a lot of what people say about art, that it doesn't "ring true." Their other point is that much art, in its unreality, is sentimental. Not only does it shield people from truth, it wraps lies in soft, bleary forms about how great the past was, how heroic all soldiers, and how loving all mothers. This has very real consequences for politics, and these artists rightly identified fascism not so much as a political movement so much as an extremely bad form of popular art.

Many years have passed, and a lot of arguments have been made contra Adorno and Greenberg, the most convincing of which was the way in which Greenberg and Adorno fetishized angular, clean modernism as if it, too, wasn't sentimental about crotchety, privileged white males and their perspective. I agree with the pro-kitsch critics, mostly. Both authors absolutely hated things I love; popular music, movies, etc etc. I haven't read deeply into the pro-kitsch argument, but Johannes Goransson writes about it a lot, and expresses what I instinctively feel about it: "Like Pop Art, Kitsch art makes the inside the outside and the outside the inside. Like Sontag notes about “camp,” kitschy art tends to be the baroque, the art that emphasizes “style” over content or “meaning.”" montevidayo.com/2011/06/contamination-66...nd-excessive-beauty/

In other words, surface may be all an artwork has to say, and its meaning may be totally secondary, in which case, no amount of sentimentality can reduce what is powerful about art, as long as you don't get caught up on its "reality" in terms of what its supposed to mean. Games collect really nicely into this definition. However, the mirror of this is the worst--I mean, the fucking worst-- trend in the interpretation of art ever produced, which is "art is whatever I can pay for." I call it IMHO art. "IMHO it's art." It indicates a sort of reduction to privacy that is like a cancer. "Me and my friends love to collect swastikas, that's art to me IMHO." Because games have a vast body of commercial review, but almost no serious criticism, this terrible trend in games interpretation is the only one available with which to talk about games.

And we can't count sentimentality out. Right now, we live in a world of extreme sentimentality about the promise of technology. We are already in a phase of culture in which really good video gamers are recruited by the military to fly drones to kill people who probably couldn't afford a video game system if they saved for it for a year. The remove a killer drone pilot uses when playing a video game is the same they use when killing an actual person. It's weaponized sentimentality, and it's about to become the way in which rich nations fight wars.

EDIT: To put my feelings about it succinctly, if you don't care whether or not art is important, AND you are willing to accept a sentimental interpretaion of reality as truth, it doesn't matter whether art is good or bad. You're bad--on a broad spectrum,albiet, which includes both the harmless and the harmful--and you make the art around you bad. Ouch. Discuss.
Last edit: 19 Nov 2018 09:59 by GorillaGrody.
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19 Nov 2018 10:14 #286484 by Black Barney

DarthJoJo wrote:

Legomancer wrote: But again, most people aren't taught anything about art except blind appreciation and canonical interpretation.


I plan to make a longer post in response to the rest of this post and Erik’s, but I just wanted to say that I have believed for years now that we should be teaching Danielle Steele alongside Romeo and Juliet or Tom Clancy next to Kurt Vonnegut in high school. It’s kind of hard to appreciate the good stuff, if you don’t know mediocrity.


I took North American Literature in high school and our teacher would read Stephen King short stories to us sometimes just so we could have a control group for when we start reading Huck Finn or whatever. It was great to get the pulp fiction alongside the masterpieces.
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