[Kalium]

Games are frequently something that most instances of arts culture struggle with - commercial. This means that trying to treat games as artistic artifacts, made of beauty and aesthetics, free of the drudgery of economics, is a misguided thing at best.

Games are not generally produced as solely artistic works. The economic aspect is significant. Attempting to discuss and critique games as solely artistic artifacts means missing one of largest influences on any such artifact. It's like discussing architecture without admitting that materials and physics and humans impose limits.

[the_af]

I don't think this addresses the parent post, though. For one, no-one I know of wants to consider games as solely artistic artifacts. What some in the game development community are asking for is the recognition of games as a valid art form; this is orthogonal to their (admittedly dominant) commercial aspects. In my opinion, more misguided is to consider them as simply mindless entertainment whose content and message is too shallow to be discussed.

Criticism and analysis of games as cultural artifacts is both valuable and needed. Games are like mainstream movies in this regard, where we accept that even mainstream Hollywood movies have a message that can be dissected and analyzed.

[Kalium]

My problem is that games-as-commercial-artifacts and games-as-art both miss the point. Games are both, as well as entertainment and cultural artifacts. Criticism and analysis needs to consider all these things or miss important aspects required for understanding.

For instance, the question is not just what message a movie conveys. The question also includes why. Similarly, there are entire game mechanisms that exist solely for economic reasons (IAPs, gating, etc.) that cannot be understood through artistic lenses.

[the_af]

> My problem is that games-as-commercial-artifacts and games-as-art both miss the point. Games are both, as well as entertainment and cultural artifacts. Criticism and analysis needs to consider all these things or miss important aspects required for understanding.

That's why reviewers can attempt to do both. Just like they do with movies :)

The problem is that videogames are relatively new and people are not yet convinced they can be reviewed as art. It's safer to stick to them being just entertainment whose content is pointless to analyze.

[Chathamization]

Not just the economic aspect, but the game aspect. Board games and role-playing games have been around much longer, and aren't considered art (and there doesn't seem to be any push for them to be considered as such).

[Lawtonfogle]

I could definitely seem board games as art. As for RPGs, the books themselves are art as are the stories produced. A given session of play would also be art; akin to some kind of improv/acting, though not done with any thought given to an outside viewer. As for the system of rules... that one I'm left unsure of but it may be art in a same way some see elegant code as art.

[Vaskivo]

[EDIT] Why is my parent being downvoted? It is a legitimate question, and we should try to answer it.

Yet there are a lot of board and roleplaying games pushing their boundaries regarding theme and mechanics:

You have boardgames exploring difficult themes (Train[0]) and others being defined as they are played (Fluxx[1])

On RPGs, You can have rpgs about simple themes as being a housecat (Cat RPG[2]) or serious one like rape and domestic violence[3]. In terms of mechanics, there is Dread[4], a horror game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice.

There is no push to be considered art, but there are folks doing some really cool stuff with the medium.

What is happenning with videogames is that there are people who thing "videogames should grow up" and "stop playing around". That, in my opinion, is stupid. You don't tell a 15 years kid to "grow up". It will come out naturally. KLEt games mature on their own.

[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/06/24/can-you-make-a-boa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx

[2] http://johnwickpresents.com/product/cat-a-little-game-about-...

[3] sorry, the internet failed me :(

[4]https://dreadthegame.wordpress.com/about-dread-the-game/

[Chathamization]

Actually, Train was the first thing that came to my mind when typing that comment. The fact that we both immediately thought of the same niche game that apparently has only been played twice without it's creator present suggests that these things aren't terribly common (that's not to say that these edge cases aren't interesting). But maybe a die hard board gamer can correct me, since there tends to be a lot of interesting stuff that goes unnoticed (this is definitely true for video games, I'd be surprised if it wasn't true for other games).

The people who seem to be pushing for games to grow up or talking about Citizen Kane moments (and seemingly forgetting about silent films) seem more interested in validation than anything else. There have been interesting games for decades; if they're truly interested in these, all they have to do is play them.

[the_af]

I'll have to think some more about RPGs, but the thing with board games is that the "narrative" aspect is less important than in modern videogames.

I admit is way less common, but even board games have been created and analyzed as art/philosophy/opinion. Some examples:

- Monopoly (possibly the best known example of a game whose original intent went beyond entertainment).

- Train (a game about Auschwitz: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63933/train)

As for videogames, the language of the creators themselves sometimes seems to acknowledge the relation to narrative and cinema. Some game designers style themselves "directors", and are sometimes more interested in cutscenes and "telling a story" than in actual interactive gameplay. Note I'm not telling whether I think this is a good or a bad thing :)

[Kalium]

This is an excellent point, and one I didn't think of. Do you have any thoughts on why this might be?

[Chathamization]

I think some of it goes back to the art vs. design conversation and games, in so much as they are games, tend to fall on the design side (there tends to be a clarity regarding the rules, rules are designed to create good gameplay rather than an expression of artistic vision, etc.). A lot of the things that can be considered art can work just as well outside of the game (take a cutscene, for example, which has no gameplay and is basically a movie inserted into a game).

Of course, there are some games that tie the narrative and the gameplay together in such a way that it's hard to separate the two, such as The Colonel's Bequest (1989), The Last Express (1997), and a favorite of Roger Ebert's, Cosmology of Kyoto (1994). There are also "ungames" that eschewed gameplay in order to create more of an art experience, such as Puppet Motel (1995) and The Manhole (1988). But mainstream gaming has largely forgotten these games (as well as many others).

[the_af]

Good examples! I regret that mainstream gaming has forgotten these games. Non-mainstream gaming hasn't, fortunately. There is the Interactive Fiction community, which has produced some of the best games I've ever enjoyed; there are some indie designers doing experimental games about personal issues -- I'll avoid mentioning them, because that's a can of worms I don't want to open here -- there is the "agitprop" of Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini, etc.

[comrh]

I think there is a massive shift in this though. The rise of indie games, niche crowdfunded games, easier tools to create means people are making games for art and not the AAA paycheck.

[Kalium]

Indie games and crowdfunded games are still generally done with an eye towards the economics. Even today, with all the tools available, you still don't generally get a team of a dozen people working full-time on a game for three years solely as an art piece.

[the_af]

This isn't it. Mainstream movies are often analyzed and reviewed as art -- whole books written about them! -- even though they are primarily done "with an eye towards the economics".

Modern tools can help make (admittedly small) games even by people who aren't programmers and who don't necessarily want to make money. It's been a while, but I remember the early days of the Adventure Game Studio; there were people trying to make something to sell, but also plenty of people writing pretty decent games solely because they wanted to. Also see the awesome Interactive Fiction community.

[Kalium]

And I think that such analysis has similar flaws for similar reasons. You cannot hope to understand a thing meaningfully if you choose to ignore huge influences on its creation and creative choices.

[nosuchthing]

Art and creative design are not necessarily invalidated due to motivations of economics. Some people might have something to say of their opinions on how financial aspects of creative projects influence the final 'product', but that's all mostly irrelevant to the main experience of the end user. If a single person created Splatoon in their basement and released it for free, it's interesting to think about, but the experience of the creation remains the same as it is that the game was intended to sell for $54.99 a copy.

[Kalium]

No, art and creative designs are not invalidated by economic motivations. However, art and creative design cannot always be fully and properly understood without considering economic motivations.

The experience of the creation might be the same, but how the creation came to be and how it is best understood are very different.

[the_af]

That's a non-standard view of art. I don't know of anyone who uses the term like that; of course an analysis of art must take into consideration its "huge influences".

For example, when people review classic movies, they take into consideration what studios were willing to fund; executive meddling; whether the movie bombed at the box office; the political situation at the time; the moral codes of the time; budget limitations that forced directors to be extremely creative; problems between the lead actors; etc.

[Kalium]

I say this because of the people I know who attempt to treat video games as art. They examine social aspects, political aspects, and so on. There's a tendency to either ignore or gloss over economic aspects.

That said, it's probably easier to do that with classic movies about which there is a sizable body of knowledge. You don't have the same production information about a video game released last month.