As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside of the game itself.
I'm not sure I buy the first part at least. Take this, from a randomly selected review (the top one at the Onion AV Club) right now:
The ground is shaking, and a gigantic metal tower creaks above you. Sparks and fires light the shadows to reveal a mauled corpse in every corner, and debris and more bodies fall from the sky. Throughout the five hours of Half-Life 2: Episode One, you're always aware of your environment, thanks to the poor lighting, the shaky terrain, and the devastation around the war-torn city that you're trying to escape. The whole world feels of a piece, and it's all falling apart on top of you.
That definitely seems like an attempt to capture the feel; and it's not just about the gameplay. And note the concern with exposition.
I have a friend who works on aesthetics some who is very big on the argument that video games are art. I believe him about that, but he hasn't convinced me that any existing video games are great art. Early days, perhaps.
(Not a gamer at all, though I've mucked around with GTA San Andreas a bit and it sure is addictive.)
After spending far too much time last summer playing Halo 2, I can certainly appreciate a very well-designed game. However, that is all that makes a game great: being well-designed. Art should move you, or have a message, or something; we can be impressed by the big T-Rex in Jurrasic Park, but that is not the same as being impressed by the movie. Video games are perhaps more utilitarian--just like the FX dinosaurs could, on their own, potentially be considered art (sculpture perhaps, if they aren't CGI), there are aspects of games that are artistic in nature (like designing the landscape or crafting the story), but this doesn't extend to the game itself. The unique aspect of video games is the gameplay itself, which is more of a technical issue.
Something else on the issue of a game's "plot"--it tends to be advanced mostly through static cut-scenes, which are pretty much just movies. Then there are some technical challenges for the player, and then another cut-scene, on until the game ends. They're basically quirky movies, if you want to view them artistically. This could of course be due to the relatively early stage of game design we're in right now, but I can't really think of what kind of game would be distinctly artistic on its own. I suspect this will change in a few years.
I think probably the closest anyone's coming to what he's talking about is Terra Nova, though it's less criticism and more interdisciplinary analysis by academics in other fields, and it's exclusively focused on the Massively Multiplayer end of things.
Alternately, Penny Arcade comes close, sometimes, in their discussion of why they like a particular game.
My friends and I discuss games this way - I can go on and on and on about how Jill from Resident Evil is the strongest woman in pop culture, stronger than Buffy even (and by "strongest" I don't mean "toughest," I mean most compelling and most multi-faceted and most generally human in her motivations and desires, allowed to display both "feminine" sentiment and "masculine" resolve), but one of the problems of videogames as art is precisely what he describes. I did not experience Resident Evil the same as some of my friends, and it's entirely possible to just run & gun through zombies for a few hours and never stop to consider whether Jill or Leon are the most heroic because of the complex motivations driving them to return to that city in their various sequels.
Another reason, related but not the same, is that videogames are something to be fiddled with, something intended to be hands-on and interactive in a way that "art" generally isn't supposed to be. Even when something is considered both art and functional, it is generally explicitly discussed in those terms. That chair isn't just a chair, it's a work of art, too! That fork isn't just a fork, it's art. That hand-knitted sweater isn't just warm, it's a folk art. Et cetera.
Matt says he's not convinced any of them are great art. I don't think society - ours, or any other - has ever been able to distinguish what art is, much less what distinguishes mere art from great art. Does a videogame have to evoke an emotion to be great art? GTA certainly evokes a few. Does that emotion have to be something other than excitement ? The end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII does that - almost everyone I know who played that game cried tears of genuine sadness at the end of Disc One. Does art, in order to be great, have to be contemplative? The Final Fantasy series in general does its share of navel-gazing; a few other games that genuinely challenge the player to think about and even decide certain philosophical questions in ways that substantively affect the outcome of the games would be Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights in its various iterations - oh, man, that's a list too long to start. Does it have to metaphorically or literally treat real, serious issues outside the game, or from history? World of Warcraft (concentration camps, ethnic profiling, genocide and imperialism) and Deus Ex (terrorism and authoritarianism) both spring immediately to mind. Or is it that art - or great art, anyway - isn't allowed to be fun? To be violent? To be silly?
I mean, seriously. What makes it great art? That it asks a question of the audience? That it prompts discussion? That it has a real-world application? A philosophical question? I'm not challenging you, Matt, to answer these or to defend yourself. I'm just talking out my ass, mostly - but only mostly.
To wrap up an already too-long comment, I guess I'll say that when the "serious" art world is willing to consider videogames as art, it will have genuine criticism, not merely reviewers. In order for that to happen, though, a game is going to have to be both (a) able to demand a stirring, emotional response from the audience by dealing with a serious topic, and (b) sell like fucking hotcakes.
It'll probably help if most games advertising doesn't look like it was designed by people who got laid off from a Mountain Dew campaign for being "too 3XTR3M3!!1!" with everything.
I'm not a serious gamer, but the call for literary-style criticism seems to miss the point: there isn't a message to most video games, or at least not a message that improves gameplay. There may be a story line (here you are, the paladin hero fighting the orcish horde, but then, oops, now you're fighting for the bad guys) or a theme, but there isn't a message. And unlike a film or a book, having a message wouldn't improve a game in the way that being a well-designed game would.
It's rather like asking the what the message of the board games Sorry or Monopoly or Life: the Game. You probably could cobble together a meaning, but it's not a reason you'd recommend a game to a friend.
I don't play the shoot-em-ups, but am still playing an ancient ancient RPG, like a hand of solitaire to relax. RPG's, Simulations, and strategy games (Civilization, RR Tycoon,Simcity, Sims) are like what? A paintbox? A very large Lego set? A symbolic vocabulary? One can follow the scenarios and campaigns, or one can have Godzilla destroy Paris, or use the materials any way you like.
I view at least several categories of PC games, (online RPG's are still in this category) as forms of media. Reviewing them is less like reviewing a novel and more like reviewing television or Typepad.
I'd have to disagree with you, Cala. I think at their core almost every videogame has at least one message worth hearing: that in the face of adversity it is better to do something than to do nothing.
And seriously, I can talk all night about what I think are the subtexts and subtle (or not) sociopolitical messages of a variety of videogames.
Tim Burke (whom eb links in 3) has done some writing about video games that I would consider criticism of the type Klosterman's looking for. The solution to the problem of writing criticism of a genre that mainly consists of action-cut scene-action cut scene etc. could be to focus on the games that aren't like that--mmorpgs, for instance (Burke's main subject), as well as open-ended gameplay types like GTA.
In particular, I would say that the vast majority of RPGs have just as much message as any cheesy novel. And a few have as much message as rather good novels.
13: Yes, but that's not what makes the videogame excel at being a videogame. Even interesting plot tends to be very simple (and often, game play is: Kill enemies. Enemies are things that look different from you.), and a videogame with an outstanding message and subpar game play just isn't a good game.
Red Alert 2 is fun, and it has a cool concept: what would have happened if WWII hadn't occurred, and the Allies had to face a strong (un-Nazi-checked) Soviet bloc? But I'm playing it because Level 3 Prism Tanks are t3h aw3som3. The cut scenes are neat, and fun to talk about, but not really essential.
I was intrigued by the writer's suggestion that architecture criitcism was a possible model. My son downloads and builds alternative environments — I forget his name for them — for his games. So it is the bones, the structure of a game thet determines its character.
But architecture criticism concerns itself with surfaces, with the feel of the thing, the impact on the location, etc.
A building that can be remodeled overnight would pose a real problem for traditional criticism.
Hope 'smasher arrives soon. He knows about this stuff.
16, I'd argue whatever message is there is just packaging, like making Star Wars Monopoly rather than regular Monopoly. W00t, my hotels are now star destroyers. Of course you can analyze it as a theory of commerce; but I think that when I read a great novel, I read it in part for its message. But I don't think I'm playing a game for its message.
Maybe it just means that video games are more like pulp novels than high art. But I don't expect literary critics to waste time on the latest D&D novelization, either.
In part, he's just wrong on his own terms. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as game criticism, and Au has written other pieces that I think count.
But the more important point is that the kind of art that video games are is different from "traditional" art: they're more intellectual and self-referential and, like Matt F says, the technical issues are inseparable from discussions of the art. Check out this Wikipedia article on Spore; it's mainly expository, but it can't help but deal with how the game feels and what it means; it just doesn't sound like traditional art criticism.
17: I'll give you that. (I'll also give you that Prism Tanks pwn. I haven't played RA2, but only because WoW has so thoroughly dominated my brain.) But then, traditional media can suffer - if suffer is the term for it - the same thing. Lots of people went to see Episode III for the light sabers - almost all of them, I would argue - but "this is how democracy dies" saved the movie for me, single-handedly, and was the main thing The Boyf and I talked about afterwards. If the audience chooses to ignore something about a game, that's out of a developer's hands. Likewise, it's out of a director's or a painter's or a composer's hands if their audience chooses to ignore something about their work. Upton Sinclair thought he was going to turn us all into socialists, after all, but instead we got the FDA. I don't think the question of something's status as art or not-art can be answered by the audience's reaction to it, it can only be answered in an assessment of the artist's intent.
Criticism, on the other hand, is all about the reaction and the intent's effectiveness, and on those grounds I would say it's perfectly valid for a critic to say, "This game has some interesting ideas, but they're not integral to the gameplay and easy to ignore or otherwise swept aside, and so they don't really count." That's totally valid. But I think if that's valid then the critic also has to accept that the game is art by virtue of having those interesting ideas as an intention in the first place.
Basically, I think people who bemoan the lack of game criticism are looking at the wrong games--it would be like asking why literary critics aren't analyzing pulp romances (or whatever). In addition to the types of games I mentioned above (mmorpgs and GTA-type open-ended gameplay things) there are also games that have plots but nevertheless raise interesting issues and have more elaborate gameplay than just "kill enemies"; these tend to be Japanese and appeal to more of a niche audience than conventional shoot-'em-ups, but I bet you could do some great criticism on them (and people probably have).
I'm not too hung up on whether the game is art or not. Just mostly that I think it's the wrong model to expect reviewers to criticize an excellent game as they would an excellent book. (Plus, some reviews go apoplectic while drooling over the experience of a game.)
I'm not familiar enough with architecture critcism, but if it includes criticisms of form-as-function, and not just beauty, then I would guess that high level game criticism will look more like philosophy of architecture than it will literary or art criticism.
I haven't played Final Fantasy since the early Nintendo version, but I remember thinking there was real potential there to do something artlike with that kind of setting and concept. By the way, are there any analyses of Choose Your Own Adventure books?
I really haven't played video games since Below the Root on my C64, so I don't know much about modern gaming besides what I've seen over my little brother's shoulder so I'm definitely not as knowledgeable about this as many of you. I do think the issues of how video games should be evaluated and whether they can be considered art are interesting, though.
Another part of the essay that I didn't excerpt made the analogy that video games are to today's society what rock and roll was to the 60s. And, if that's the case, what is the impact on society if we let the dominant form of entertainment be judged solely on consumerism instead of their messages or ability for artistic expression?
And, to go way back to what Cala was saying earlier, are people not treating video games seriously because they are the equivalent of pulp novels or are most video games like pulp novels because people aren't treating them seriously?
A little more than 10 years ago, Bungie wrote a first person shooter called Marathon. You could play it Doom-style just to kill the bad guys; but then you'd miss getting absorbed in the tantalizing, allusive narrative revealed piecemeal in little text terminals along the way. That link is the best example I can think of, of a community of game players trying to answer the question, "What does it mean?" It may not be criticism, but darned if it didn't get people thinking.
Granted, Marathon was also good for blowing things up, and for letting you edit the flame thrower to spew deadly, immolating likenesses of your friends.
In one of the Unreal Tournaments, my friends and I decided to code a flamethrower, but we modelled it badly on the biogel template, so we ended up with flaming biogel that didn't set people on fire but left scorch spots.
Clive Thompson does some of the best meta-critiquing of video games I've seen. I don't know how he stacks up against Pauline Kael, but as someone who doesn't play video games at all, I find his writing about them interesting.
I certainly am not trying to attack you, Cala, or say that I think you're objectively wrong. I just get very impassioned about this because I'm someone who thinks videogames are serious art - or, like books, at least some are - and thus worthy of more serious consideration.
And I do definitely agree that they can't be examined the same way a novel or a film or another work of art that has a direct, controlled narrative can be examined. In that regard, I think Klosterman is 100% correct. But I think there are ways that it can be done that the critical fields are ignoring - and by that, I mainly mean that I wish more game reviewers would start considering the intent of the game developers alongside their consideration of polygon counts.
I think it's highly possible that there are plenty of game developers who have no artistic intention beyond a complex and vivid execution of visual arts, but that, too, might be an opportunity for criticism in some critics' eyes. I guess that yes, I think you're absolutely spot-on by saying that videogames are a lot like pulp novels - but again, that some are, or perhaps even most, but not all. To answer Becks either/or question: yes. I think some games are really cultural non-factors because they are pulp, and some are regarded as pulp because they are videogames. This same debate is probably being had on any number of comic book blogs, or would have been ten years ago. Like any developing medium, working to find its serious side and grow into more mature themes, and much like comic books in this regard, I think videogames will have been "serious," or had "serious" offerings, for a long time before they begin to be regarded as worthy of consideration from outside.
OK, I really need to go work on leveling my rogue in WoW.
I think the main reason there aren't more serious videogames are two:
1. No one knows how to make a video game with a very high quality of storytelling and still make it interactive and fun and challenging and not overly linear. Primarily this is because it's too hard to generate new plot points in an appropriate way based on the player's character's actions, because that would entail having real intelligence built into the game, or at least a huge library of alternative storylines. (A few games do go with the latter approach, but it can never go very far.) And playing a game where part of the time you're just watching and other parts you're controlling just feels kind of weird.
2. The primary audience for videogames is still pretty young. The first generation of very serious gamers is still in their twenties and early thirties, and still predominantly male. (Female gamers are several years behind in numbers.) It takes people even older than that, demographically, to create a demand for truly literarily sophisticated and subtle games. Expect to see them in the next decade or two as gaming continues to be a mainstream pastime in an aging generation.
There is a lot of literary criticism of genre fiction, such as pulps. Usually, it is of the elements that are always common to all the examples of a type. Sometimes a particular example will be analysed in detail, and then other examples described by their substitutions and deviations. So there is a substantial existing model for this kind of evaluation. Journalistic treatments of this are quite old and are a kind of genre of their own. My wife's dissertation was about Victorian examples of genre criticism, and its social assumptions and anxieties. A late, superior example of the type is the famous Orwell essay Boy's Weeklies. But this kind of critical writing is as old as periodicals, as some of our experts will attest if they ever arrive.
(Another reason I get so cranked about this is that I used to do reviews/criticism of Vampire: the Masquerade novels for RPG.net, and some of them - but not many, but some! - dealt with very serious issues, and I really got tweaked when someone's reaction would be 'that clan is so lame! I hate this novel!' and I would be writing reviews about how great it is that a fantasy novel aimed at young people dealt in mature ways with topics like addiction, or abusive relationships, or the mentally ill, or the struggle between Christianity and Islam, and it drove me crazy.)
32: I share a lot of your concerns about videogames and whether they count as serious. Part of this may be that I don't play RPGs, which seem to be more suited to ambitions of art that the sort of strategy games I normally favor. (I've heard they're addicting, and I have enough problems with getting things done.)
I suspect that video games aren't treated 'seriously' because the demographic deciding what sort of things are serious (my parents) aren't the people who grew up playing games. Rather like university courses on film & television which would have been unheard of years ago because television couldn't be worthy of university study.
And I'm not feeling attacked -- this is a fun discussion. And even if I were, the handle 'Robust McManlyPants' induces giggles and therefore is an effective defense against heated ripostes.
the handle 'Robust McManlyPants' induces giggles and therefore is an effective defense against heated ripostes.
Excellent! This was one of its intended effects. I would find it very difficult to get that upset over being flamed by someone with a name as silly as mine, as well. OK, really, WoW.
To interject a side arguement: the "plottiest" games, or at least the the plottiest console games are the Metal Gear Solid games, right? But those are pretty much good because the non-plot parts are fun. So I questtion what the relationship is between plot and artistic quality.
I see that other people have already mentioned Tim Burke and Terra Nova... Esther MacCallum-Stewart also does the sort of thing Klosterman's talking about, although again she's an academic (whose main specialty is WWI history and representations in literature) and all of her writing I'm aware of deals with WoW.
Klosterman gets pretty hung up on the nonlinearity of game narrative ("OMG what if you read a story and it ended all different every time, it'd be so WEEEEIRD") given that hypertext fiction has been around for at least a decade and a half.
given that hypertext fiction has been around for at least a decade and a half.
And before that in choose your own adventure zines.
And before that, two telegraph operators would play and a third, with a script changing on the basis of the number of dots (dashes need not apply), would moderate.
Since video games continue to get better technically, in certain ways it makes the kind of criticism Klosterman wants somewhat unstable.
It is like reviewing silent films. Contemporaniously, the most interesting thing about silent films is how lifelike they were. Now the most interesting thing about silent films is the things that make them less lifelike: the silence and the lack of color.
Klosterman's question is merely a permutation of the common question about criticism: why has it been preempted by service journalism? It's not correct to look to inherent qualities of the medium (loosely or problematically defined though they may be) to make assumptions about why the journalism takes the form that it does. It's not a problem of whether Final Fantasy approaches something "high" with its literary narrative or sweeping score; it ought to be the concern of video game critics why and how Mario Party or Super Monkey Ball succeeds at the level they do. Art has plenty of plots—I think video games are interesting for being dramatic despite their real lack of them.
More to the point, where are, for example, the art critics? Most newspapers have swept away their Arts sections in favor of cloudy Style sections, and the art critics who are there employed write accordingly. For example, Blake Gopnik (art critic for the Washington Post wrote a lengthy essay on Flag Day about the aesthetic merits of the flag. Fun blog post fodder, but entirely worthless for a non-review arts feature that a critic has an opportunity to publish twice, maybe three times a year. Last year one of his said elective pieces was about the gelato they serve in the National Gallery.
Maybe Gopnik's just a bad critic, but nevertheless there are fewer than 30 fully waged art critics working for the papers of the nation, a steep drop since even the 80s (when there were, at least, writers on the payroll to cover the local art fairs and what have you, if only). And many of those do write little more than service journalism: gallery columns that review four or five shows into an 800-word item, no more than the descriptive service writing you find about video games. Alt weeklies are better on this front (in particular the one I write for, naturally) but are also looking at decline in the face of new media.
Point being, I think it looses sight of the real question to venture into whether video games (and their makers) themselves are doing enough to qualify as real art, in order to then receive the real art critical treatment. By the look of criticism, it would be reasonable to ask how much of serious painting counts as "serious art."
But assuming that the question really does hinge on the quality of the work—say, were Klosterman asking why critics haven't emerged among the many bloggers or tech writers who write about video games—I'd venture that it's much like film, in which the collaborative efforts must be dissolved to be analyzed and awarded, and as yet the nature of the collaboration that goes into producing a video game is opaque, and among these writers there still exists the notion that the art must be analyzed in terms of its authorial intention.
I'm reminded of people who go around claiming pop song lyrics are poetry. Sure, they have something to do with one another, but why bother? "Poetry" in these cases implicitly means "something that is good and valued", and the pop enthusiast wants that legitimacy.
So art and video games have points in common. Both are, after all, forms of play. I think the comments above that focus on the (for lack of a better word) utilitarian aspects of video games are on to something. A recent article (bonus! It's about how blogs suck) mentioned Tetris as appealing "to the "lab rat" part of your brain"; that's a big part of pretty much any video game, and it's not something that's going to go away as the technology improves. If they're art--and it would be too tedious to bother trying to argue that they're not--they're bad art.
That said, I'll note that I've argued that Dana Schutz's paintings are not unlike the practice of a bored video game player.
Then I'd point you to a piece of criticism comparing Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 with Donkey Kong.
As I said in your comments, Armsmasher, this makes me think that's got to be deliberate. I want to play the Cremaster/Donkey Kong mashup.
JL, I think the pop song analogy might be a good one, but it doesn't cut the way you think it does. Saying "pop song lyrics are poetry" is by and large a category mistake; pop song lyrics are pop song lyrics. But the fact that they aren't poetry doesn't mean that the pop songs aren't worthy of serious consideration. It's absolutely obvious that they are, I think; I'd invite you to try to convince me otherwise but it just wouldn't be possible.
Similarly, I think it's going to be a bad idea to say "Video games are just like movies! But you can choose what happens!" That's another category error. Ditto considering them as visual art. But that doesn't mean that they're unworthy of serious consideration, and I think that it's unhelpful to withhold the term 'art' from them because 'art' means other forms.
As Cala said in 37, for a long time you couldn't have university courses on movies and tv because they were obviously not serious; this after moviemakers had been making masterpieces for probably half a century. AFAIK you could say something similar about jazz and blues, stuck in the ethnomusicology ghetto. The general arbiters of seriousness (not you, you're already doing one of those blog things) take a while to catch up.
I wrote a hypertext essay on The Left Hand of Darkness when I was a freshman in college. It had two introductory first paragraphs with diametrically opposed theses, then it continued down on both sides to argue opposing subsidiary points based on the same pieces of evidence, but the arguments gradually converged until the last paragraphs were identical. It blew your mind. But the hypertextiness of it was kind of pointless.
btw, why the bourgeois hang-up on "plots"? Sculptures don't have much of a plot, but there are scuplture critics.
I was thinking this. My last serious contact with computer games was with Infocom's text adventures back in the day -- I don't play games these days, but from what people say, I get the impression they're comparable, but with pictures/animation. I wouldn't argue that Infocom was producing significant art, but it seems clear to me that the sort of thing they were producing could have been art -- a complex depiction of an invented world where certain types of things happen, however any particular plot unfolds. It's the creation of a setting in which the player can experience a story in a manner partially but not totally controlled by the game designer, not the writing of a story, but there's no reason that that can't be art.
On the lab rat brain, this is part of what I tend to argue about with my friend I mentioned in 1. That is, the games he describes as great sometimes seem to me to be great games, with great gameplay, and possibly cool visuals as well, rather than great art. For instance, Au's review of Thief makes the case for its suspensefulness, and for the need to pay attention to the visual environment, but does that make the game art, or just a game that plays very well? I'm not sure -- the fact that it generates suspense doesn't make it artful, any video game (or sporting event) can generate suspense but that doesn't make them art. (Aside: As a non-gamer, I'm not finding Au convincing. When he name-dropped Aristotle in the Black and White review I wanted to kick him.)
But I don't think games are disqualified as art just because they exercise the lab rat brain. So do a lot of books, the page turners, and movies, and those can be art too. Like, The Charterhouse of Parma is a page turner. Tetris is of course just about as far from art as you could get, but that doesn't mean other video games should be disqualified as art.
(Other stuff: 49, why three-dimensional? What about painting? But I think the obsession with plot is one of those category error things.)
Similarly, I think it's going to be a bad idea to say "Video games are just like movies! But you can choose what happens!" That's another category error. Ditto considering them as visual art. But that doesn't mean that they're unworthy of serious consideration, and I think that it's unhelpful to withhold the term 'art' from them because 'art' means other forms.
This gets it (almost) exactly right and was where my lab rat brain was attempting to go last night. The call to consider video games like novels or movies is as misguided as wondering why a concerto is art, because art involves painting.
But here's a question: Video games are goal-directed. You can win by meeting certain conditions. Art isn't goal-directed. You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing. And I'm wondering if the goal of a game might disqualify it from the broader category 'art'. Not that it would be worthless, or that artistic elements might not be worth contemplating, but just that art doesn't involve a purpose. (And you're totally right if you suspect my understand of art didn't get out of the 18th century.)
And games are about levelling your rogue or building your civilization or smashing the opposing army.
Art isn't goal-directed. You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing. And I'm wondering if the goal of a game might disqualify it from the broader category 'art'.
Where's Smasher? He was just talking about some art with an auditory component -- you walk down a corridor, turn, see the sculpture and react audibly, at which point it echoes at you. It's not a game, but it's similar -- leading you through a series of actions so as to experience the art fully.
47, I point out 11. The Shadow of the Colossus is perhaps the most beautiful game I've ever played. I think the artistic quality qualifies it for something.
51: Pretty much anything under the sun will be considered by someone to be worthy of serious consideration, and I've no desire to stand in their way. And to repeat myself slightly, to debate the question of whether something is art or not has to be the most boring thing in the world, so I'm not going to bother. But I think that calling video games art perhaps isn't the best way to draw out what about them might be worth considering seriously; that a serious, contemplative mind might not be the best one to engage with video games; and that the end result of such serious consideration will likely be bad video games. Same with song lyrics.
I do agree with sentence two of 54, now that I see it in preview.
Yes, but you can't win at Cone Sculpture in the Long Corridor. I'm racking my brains trying to think of a video game that is intent just on giving you an experience, but I can't think of one. The experience is always secondary to a goal.
SCMTim, I'm not, except for a rough idea that art isn't for anything.
I'm racking my brains trying to think of a video game that is intent just on giving you an experience, but I can't think of one. The experience is always secondary to a goal.
The Shadow of the Colossus. I wouldn't say the goal is actually secondary in this game, insofar as goals can't really be secondary. The game is goal driven, but visual experience is intended to be the focus. The goal is about as secondary as it could possibly be.
Video games are goal-directed. You can win by meeting certain conditions. Art isn't goal-directed.
Weinerfriend1 once said, "Maybe novels are just games that are really easy to win. You win when you finish it." I said, "Easy to win? I've never been able to get past level 2 of The Ambassadors." This is not meant as a serious reflection on anything.
More seriously, it seems like many of the games people are talking about, the Sims-like things, don't have goals. You just play them and see what you can do. Also, lots of art does seem to have a purpose, altarpieces and the like; the idea that art is for art's sake is actually distinctively modern as I understand it.
Thanks, Cala. Weiner's objections to one side, I'm having a hard time distinguishing movies from games. Saying that there are dissimilarities between the mediums is not the same as saying that one is not a close (or the closest available) analogue of the other. I think you need to point out where the analogy fails, and how that failure points to movies as art and games as not art.
Yes, there are. But they seem to be externally imposed, with rules that don't seem to be part of the art. ("The literary prize will go to the book most in touch with our times." "We're rewarding the most graceful dancer.")
But if I'm playing a piece for piano outside of a competitive construction, or listening I'm not thinking 'If I hit that B flat on the beat, I'll be closer to winning.'
66: But the competition in games is really just a McGuffin to motivate you to experience the games, just as the plot in To Catch a Thief is really just a McGuffin to get you to enjoy looking a pretty people in pretty settings. (There are better movie examples, obv.)
About plot. I think plot is very important in video games, because the medium of video games, in its highest form, will be plot driven. This is because the most moving and compelling pieces of art are plot driven. (Sure, some people have cried at a painting or two, but who hasn't cried at a real tear-jerker kind of movie?) As I mentioned above, making a good plot-driven game is extremely hard, and the technology for running games is still much, much better than the technology for making them. It's the software-hardware gap.
The genre is still mostly unexplored. Because of the great expense involved, there's no market for anyone to experiment with different ways to use the video game medium, as opposed to churning out something by the formula. (Which can still lead to a great game, in the right hands.) And because video games aren't perceived as serious, there isn't much funding coming from grants or any such thing.
The Sims did have goals: keep your Sims happy, make them do their dishes and clean their apartments instead of doing your own dishes and cleaning your apartment, make them buy more things, etc.
Weiner, by 'modern' I assume you mean modern, not contemporary. And I'd say that's right.
I think you need to point out where the analogy fails, and how that failure points to movies as art and games as not art.
And as Matt's answer to 56 implies, you're not going to be able to, because nobody will be able to successfully maintain a definition of art that exludes anything offered as art. The question to ask is, what does considering games as art get you? My answer is, on balance, bad things. So find another way to talk about them.
Which is not to say the two have nothing in common--play and art go hand in hand--or that video games can't be well-made, or that you're a big loser for being into them (though you are.) It's more that calling them art, and then thinking about them as such, is dreary.
59 (JL, right?): The "Is it art?" debate probably is boring, because none of us has a definition anyway (I know that the Mona Lisa is art, I'm pretty sure that this blog is not, we could go on with examples but it might be tedious). "Is it worth serious consideration and discussion of the kind Klosterman calls for?" is a good question still, I think.
But it seems like you're endorsing this: "a serious, contemplative mind might not be the best one to engage with [popular music]; and that the end result of such serious consideration will likely be bad [popular music]"; and I think that's just obviously wrong. Which makes me suspicious of the analogous claim about games, and suspicious that it's based partly on a too restrictive view of what games can be like; a lot of them don't seem to involve much reflex action at all.
But in the generic and common sense of the term, creating a good video game (good on its own terms) is definitely an art. And people (or rather, teams of people and their supporting companies) can be better or worse practicioners of this art. So that's at least one, hopefully uncontroversial, sense in which video games are art.
Yes, 59 was me. Sorry about that. Anyway, yes, I did intend what 71 says I did; and if it's obviously wrong, it's not so obvious to me. That, however, may simply be a matter of taste.
I wouldn't claim any great familiarity with current video games, though I do know that they don't necessarily involve reflex action. I remember well the days of text adventure games, after all.
73: Sure, but I think we're arguing about something different. In that sense persuading a jury is an art, or training a dog, but they don't call for serious cultural criticism, I don't think.
66: But the competition in games is really just a McGuffin to motivate you to experience the games, just as the plot in To Catch a Thief is really just a McGuffin to get you to enjoy looking a pretty people in pretty settings.
I think this is the answer to the 'goal directed' question -- the goal is bait to lead you fully through the experience. The experience is what may or may not be art.
Though: You could have a video that was art, which you might watch while knitting. You could also have something where the same video played while you played a game that was about as non-distracting as knitting. Then that thing would be art, but it wouldn't be a game-as-art, I think. If the artistic parts of the game are just in the cut scenes and backgrounds, not in the game play, is the art in the game or the backgrounds and cut scenes?
I suspect that that's not the case in FFVII as Robust describes it in 9 -- it's not that, at the end of the disc, you get a heartbreaking video that would be heartbreaking even if you hadn't played the game -- but it's an interesting way to think of these questions, I think. (IOW, I'm being a nitpicky philosopher.)
Video games are a medium in which you can experience practically any emotion or feeling, or idea, given the right game design. I think this is an existence proof for hypothetical games that are great art.
Maybe a better way of putting 77 is to contrast two games:
1. Race through the Louvre. Everyone runs a certain course through the Louvre, with designated stopping points in front of certain great paintings. The race is a way of getting you to experience the paintings, but the art is in the paintings, not in the race. And that would be true even if the paintings had been painted by the person who designed the race.
2. We were talking about Janet Cardiff here. The one walk of hers I did was one in which you followed instructions on an audio and video screen to take you through the Carnegie Library; it had a plot and everything. It seems to me that (maybe with some new technology) she could make it so the instructions were hard to follow, and that when you failed to follow them you had to start over or something different happened (and you had to start over) or something like that. And then that would be a game, but it would still be art. (And her actual piece was kind of like playing a live-action video adventure game and losing.)
But I'm not sure whether some of the artiness of Cardiff's piece is that it's odd to play in exactly that way; maybe if there was a whole industry of things like I just described, it wouldn't be art but would be a game. I think it would still be art though. Or, since that question is tedious, it would be worth criticism in a way that the Race through the Louvre wouldn't be.
Tetris is of course just about as far from art as you could get
Diametrically disagree with this; I think it's one of the only video games that is definitely art. It takes you into a mental space where you think about spances and orientations in a completely different way. It makes you look at some fairly simple shapes and really try to understand them as shapes. It's definitely art and it's even art in a tradition of shape and form that's not too difficult to extend back into history.
81 - I did something called The Angel Project a couple of years ago that was kind of like your #2. You had to follow clues around to different art installations hidden throughout the city that were related and, together, told a kind of story and there were actors along the way that you interacted with and every person's experience was different. There were some points where it was hard to tell if you had "found" the art or not and it was very confusing to tell what was part of the experience and what was serendipity. (The whole thing was much like the movie The Game, only based on Paradise Lost)
I don't know much, but I know I was impressed with the story arc of one of the later Zelda games, (Ocarina of Time), which is as meticulously structured, and features as many plot points, as an epic novel. Or such was my belief when I was playing it. I remember feeling bummed after I'd beaten the game; I found myself wishing that the story wasn't over.
I've been told that Steven Spielberg spoke to a conference of game designers, expressing hope that video games would be the great new medium of this century. I think he told them, the turning point will be when a video game involves your emotions to such a degree that that it actually moves you to tears.
If the Harry Potter series is worthy of serious criticism (and I think it is), then why not video games?
Agree roughly with Joe D and pdf23. Video games are the only true art medium; we just can't tell, because the use of the medium has only just begun. If Smasher really cared about art, he would spend all of his time on the Xbox.
Art is near the top of the long list of things about which I know almost nothing; except for seeing my kids play them, modern video games are not far behind (I miss Ms. Pac Man). But doesn't the lack of video game criticism have to reflect nothing more than the relative newness of the medium combined with its popular, rather than high art, roots. There is a helicopter hanging in the MoMA, along with furniture. Folk art and crafts get studied. Hell, people now think of I Love Lucy as something worthy of study. If those things are art, the artificial worlds, with story lines and sound and graphics, found in video games have to be art.
If those things are art, the artificial worlds, with story lines and sound and graphics, found in video games have to be art.
This is why the question JD quotes in 87 is, in fact, a useful question. Of course you can analyze video games as if they were art -- since Dada, you can analyze anything, urinals, helicopters, whatever, as if it were art. The question is, what do you get out of it?
I think the answer 'Bad things' is probably wrong -- my guess is that it is or will be a fruitful field for criticism once people get the hang of it.
Also, I think Matt speculated that a movie with the plot of FF7 wouldn't have gotten the reaction at the Big Plot Point. I agree with this. But I think the reason is counterintuitive, and interesting. I think it's not because the plot was very well-designed (it wasn't, it was just OK) or that the game was just that moving. It was that the player has, at that point, spent anywhere between 10 and 25 hours in the game,
**SPOILER WARNING**
and that sort of day-to-day mundane-level interaction creates a real attachment to this character. It's worth noting that minor dialogue associated with various features of geography and various side-quests and such really adds to this effect, and FF7 is really full of that. The character's death is thus emotionally significant for the player,
**END SPOILER**
in a way that it's much harder to achieve in movies, since movies can't be 60 hours long.
I think he told them, the turning point will be when a video game involves your emotions to such a degree that that it actually moves you to tears.
Why is this the turning point? Video games already titillate many emotions. When a video game involves your libido to such a degree that you get an erection, is that the turning point for video games as pr0n? (Cf. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball)
I'm surprised by the fact no one here has addressed in any detail what I've found the most fascinating about video games, which is that they often allow the player to navigate not just physical spaces, but to navigate a moral space as well. Klosterman alludes to this in the last excerpted paragraph, and it's something I'd love to see discussed in more detail.
87: I consider that the question to ask because it gets to what the impact or practical effect of considering video games as art might be. The "bad things" that would result, to my mind, are video games designed to the taste of art, or in this case, video game, critics. Down with art! Engage the lab rat brain!
97: Were The Lord of the Rings books written to the taste of literary critics? I really don't see that being a serious issue. Who reads books written for literary critics? Not many people. Writers (generally) want to write books that will be read by educated people in general, even great writers, and so they write with that general audience in mind.
This is why the question JD quotes in 87 is, in fact, a useful question. Of course you can analyze video games as if they were art -- since Dada, you can analyze anything, urinals, helicopters, whatever, as if it were art. The question is, what do you get out of it?
These comparisons are not apt, though. Video games already contain so many elements present in what we think of as "art" -- plot, character, visual design, etc. Many are also specifically created with the goal of taking the player to a specific mental or emotional place. Virtually all of them are designed to stimulate our imagination.
my guess is that it is or will be a fruitful field for criticism once people get the hang of it.
I agree. I just don't think the criticism will look much like movie or art criticism. That's more or less where I was going with the goal-directed stuff; call it goal-directed art, if you want, since 'what is art?' is a hair-splicing question, but high-level criticism of games just shouldn't be expected to look like other art criticism.
Which is why I think the article's off; many reviews of games aren't criticism, but one that was probably still would talk about gameplay and how it contributes to the experience, etc, and the article seems to think that that couldn't be proper criticism.
97: I dunno, FF7's come up several times as an arty game, and it's certainly one of the most popular titles.
since Dada, you can analyze anything, urinals, helicopters, whatever, as if it were art
I don't think this is accurate. There's some tendency after Barthes to ascribe all the discoveries of Postmodernism to Dada, but to a degree they stand at ends. For Duchamp it wasn't any urinal, but this urinal at this moment given this intervention (the "R. Mutt" inscription), and in any event I don't think the notion was clear or common among Dadaists that their work democratized the means of criticism.
98: I'm describing the issue in a rather simplified manner, of course. But this whole topic began with a plea to take video games as worthy of serious consideration; with seriousness comes different ambitions. And so your nice little pop band, to return to another analogy, decides the 2:30 numbers with the beats you can dance to aren't enough: they want to do a rock opera. That is a very bad thing.
[[When someone reviews Moby Dick or Kramer vs. Kramer, they don't spend most of their time explaining the details of the plot]]
Actually, they do if they're reviewing for The New Yorker -- nonfiction reviews, at least.
And not to blogwhore, but a co-worker/friend does regular game reviews in a podcast called Game Buzz. Examples here, here and here if anyone's interested.
105: I don't care for Sgt. Pepper's. Many people who like The Beatles don't.
While I was being a little light, I don't see how pointing out how the discourse surrounding an art form affects how it is seen and, in turn, what new development it takes, is nothing.
103: From what I can tell, our central difference is that you think that what separates current games from "serious" games is something that woud negatively affect the gameplay. I, on the other hand, simply think that the main problems with current games is that the game industry sucks. They waaay overwork their employees, they don't have long enough production schedules, and they don't take enough chances on new-concept games like Katamari Damacy. Part of it may be that the software tools used to make games (i.e. C++) are simply not good enough to allow for more realistic production schedules that still don't crunch the designers. More research into better tools would help a lot. Naughty Dog, for instance, made their own programming language and compiler, and their games push the PS2 platform further than any other games do.
But to continue 111, all the elements of great games are currently present (not that there won't be innovations, of course), scattered throughout the industry. It's just a matter of doing a good job of putting it all together, and it happens, once in a while.
While I was being a little light, I don't see how pointing out how the discourse surrounding an art form affects how it is seen and, in turn, what new development it takes, is nothing.
No one's objecting to this, it's just that not everyone thinks the result is necessarily going to be bad.
106: New Yorker reviewers aren't summarizing the plot so much as using the review as an excuse to write their own essay on the topic. Also, in non-fiction the specific details of what happened (the plot, so to speak) are the entire point of the book; not so much with fiction.
One philosophical puzzle of fiction is known as imaginative resistance. Simply stated, the puzzle arises from our well-documented inability to imagine and accept fictiious moralities as easily as we imagine and accept fictitious stories, laws of nature, beings, etc. One example that's often used is the Kipling poem which exhorts the reader to 'take up the white man's burden', or a fiction about an alien culture which casually says, 'The king ordered the death of the child, but that was fine, because it was a girl.'
We will probably have little trouble imagining the exotic trappings of the cultures Kipling describes, or imagining the alien biology and weird planet, but we will meet with internal resistance if asked to accept that white men must tame the world or that the murder of girl children is unobjectionable.
And it's a puzzle because there seems to be no really compelling reason why this is the case. We can imagine events that are contrary-to-fact. We can imagine different laws of nature. We can imagine that time travel is possible. None of these have happened, but we can imagine them all. But imagining that imperialism is good or infanticide is unproblematic, positions which have been held by actual human beings, somehow leaves us stumped.
Video games, however, due to their drawn-out exposition, may be suited to overcoming imaginative resistance. Consider Warcraft III, a strategy game. When you begin the game, you play as the young hero of a relative peaceful kingdom, which is being threatened by the undead. A clear moral code by most standards: zombies bad! demons bad! And you begin, of course, by killing the undead army.
But as the campaign progresses, your hero changes. The cut scenes tell you they're losing the war. Your hero advocates wiping out a village of his own people in order to stop the horrific onslaught of ghouls. By the end of his 'act' in the campaign, your hero has gone from being the golden child of the kingdom of light to a man who has sold his soul in order to protect it. When you begin the second act, your hero is now commanding an undead army against his own former kingdom.
And you're on his side.
And you've played him, every step of the way. Worse, many of his actions aren't clearly bad until you reach the next level.
A well-written story might be able to get you to identify with this poor hero. But the video-game forces you to; he doesn't win unless you direct him. You don't succeed unless his morality ('protect your people') falters.
they don't take enough chances on new-concept games like Katamari Damacy.
Speaking of games which lead to T-Syndrome.... goodness what a great game. But you do run the risk of hearing infectious Japanese pop music in your head even when the game is off.
111: I don't play video games myself, and am not informed as to the industry. I'm sure everything you say about it is true, and negatively impacts the product.
I also don't think that considering games as an object of criticism as proposed in the post (That, I think, is where video-game criticism should be going: toward the significance of potentiality. Video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequences of free will, a concept that has as much to do with the audience as the art form and so on) will mean good things for gameplay, yes. I see that others here are noting that video game criticism of a sort focused on craft, attentive to game play, could be done and be a good thing; I don't really have an issue with that.
It often strikes me that when someone chooses to call something art (and I don't in the Warhol, Brillo Box kind of manuever), what they are trying to say is that it is good. It's not necessary to be art in order to be good.
I don't mean this as an insult to games or gamers, but on another note: it strikes me that while both art and games can engage the lab rat brain, doing so is perhaps essential to the latter in a way that it isn't to the former.
113: I think saying that "it's snark and nothing more" does, in fact, constitute an objection to my comment. As to whether the consequences might in fact be bad, that's largely a question of taste--and that I have called them bad on balance, not unreservedly.
I'll toot my own horn a little on this subject. Klosterman certainly isn't the first to wonder about this. I think for a while JC Herz *was* the Pauline Kael of video-game writing, but the NY Times didn't see fit to continue the column. But the problem that Klosterman describes is also part of it. Even when we're writing for other people who play games, it can be very difficult to figure out how to write about the experience of game play. This came up some at this year's Social Computing Symposium as well.
105: I don't care for Sgt. Pepper's. Many people who like The Beatles don't.
Bully for you and many people.
Ok, JL, I'll be more thorough.
By the logic expressed in 103, considering something to be "art" has the detrimental effect of provoking mediocre talents to create bad attempts at artistic greatness. Because such bad art will inevitably be produced, we should therefore discourage all attempts to expand this new popular medium into something greater and more meaningful than it currently is.
Do I really need to do a walk-through on how silly this is? First, it ignores the evolution of virtually all forms of artistic expression, going back to their roots as populist/folk pasttimes which gradually became more and more significant and artistically self-aware.
Second, you're basically saying that, on balance, the great achievements of a Kurosawa or a Hitchcock or a Scorsese (or whichever filmmaker you may prefer) are not worth all the bad attempts at profundity that have been churned out ever since the early days of film. I'm sure even you can recognize how silly this is.
I was so dismissive of your comment because you clearly didn't mean it seriously; no one would offer that kind of statement as a serious objection to exploring a new medium of expression. It was just a self-important sneer, intended to win quip points rather than add anything substantive to a debate.
I don't play video games myself, and am not informed as to the industry. I'm sure everything you say about it is true, and negatively impacts the product.
But if you don't play video games, how do you know this stuff "negatively impacts the product"?
run the risk of hearing infectious Japanese pop music in your head even when the game is off
A problem that becomes compounded when you discover "jukebox mode", which lets you listen to the soundtrack on its own. For quite a while, we had it playing near-constantly in my dorm.
The opening sequence of that game (before you get to the starting menu) is also one of the most mesmerizing things I've ever seen. I flip out a little when the panda turns red.
121: Okay, fine, I see I should have reread 111 to understand your comment. Still, if you don't play games, why do you think considering them art will make them worse?
117: JL, I realize you're mostly being snarky, but a) you don't play games b) acknowledge that you don't know anything about games and c) (tongue-in-cheek I'm sure) consider anyone who does to be a loser, so I'm trying to figure out on what basis you're criticizing attempts to make games more artistic.
And so your nice little pop band, to return to another analogy, decides the 2:30 numbers with the beats you can dance to aren't enough: they want to do a rock opera. That is a very bad thing.
Shitloads of great music have been produced by people deciding that short danceable numbers weren't enough. Nevermind that that comment is ridiculously elitist, it's wrong.
So, JL, do you not like the fact that paintings, sculpture, "serious" literature, and all the other things that we currently consider art, are currently considered art?
I actually transliterated (probably terribly) the words to one song from the second Katamari game, "Everlasting love". Then I memorized it, and I can sing along now.
133: Though I know all the songs, I don't recall which one goes with the racecar level, let alone the title. I'd have to unpack my PS2 (because I just moved) to find out. There's a jukebox somewhere in the game, though.
and that sort of day-to-day mundane-level interaction creates a real attachment to this character. It's worth noting that minor dialogue associated with various features of geography and various side-quests and such really adds to this effect, and FF7 is really full of that. [redacted spoiler] is thus emotionally significant for the player
This got me excited because it reminds me of something I'm always trying to convey about the powerful aesthetic potential (and actuality) of soap operas as a medium. I seriously can't think of a another art form that asks you to spend as much time with it, another kind of narrative that inserts its characters so fully into your lives. Further, it lets you experience the growth and change of families and the aging and birth of generations in the closest thing to natural time of any art form I know of. I don't watch All My Children anymore, because five hours a week is a pretty demanding amount of TV, but I did start again for several months about a year ago during the Bianca/Babe babynapping plot, since I happened to catch a bit of it at my mom's house and I realized it was probably the most compelling the show had ever been and I wanted to follow it to the resolution. And let me tell you, when Bianca finally came out of her coma when her daughter Miranda was finally returned to her after she'd believed her dead, and later, when Erica, Bianca's mother, gave her a letter that Mona, Erica's mother had written for her on the occcasion of the birth of her first child, before she died (an event that was written into the show after the actress's death), that made rueful, affectionate reference to a long, long history the audience had with Erica and Mona, it was a really powerful statement about the possibility of the persistence of love past death through your words and through your children, a statement that derived special strength from the nature of the genre.
Perhaps I've expressed myself poorly. I was joking around a bit at times, but I'm not meaning to be entirely snarky, nor do I think I'm being entirely silly. The musical analogy that so annoyed Joe is a clue to why I'm bothering with the topic despite my general uninterest today (I played them all the time years ago) in games. It was not meant as a sneer at anyone (well, ok: at the Who. But they got enough money from me over the years, I feel I can crack a joke at their expense.)
I like complex things. I like art. But I also like simple things and cheap thrills. To step away from games for a moment, what Joe calls "mediocre talents" are not seen as such by me: I like them. My concern, such as it is, is more with what gets lost when a particular activity gets bumped up the status chain. Calling something art that we don't normally speak of in those terms changes it. Obviously this is a rather small worry with video games--as has been pointed out, any one that didn't viscerally grab its audience probably wouldn't get far. But it's partly that concern that motivates what I've been writing.
Joe rightly notes that many art forms travelled from folk roots to being "artistically self-aware". Games--of all kinds, not just video games--are a profoundly absorptive activity; is self-awareness compatible with them? If it is, then they'd probably be something more along the lines of what we find in art more traditionally conceived. But I'm not sure they'd offer the same thrill.
Great artists, or great game designers, will do fine in any event. I just consider, from the view of what effect it might have, calling video games art to be a shove in the wrong aesthetic direction. Sure, some good things might result--that's why I don't claim the effects would be unreservedly bad. I do predict a lot more pretentiousness. I have to say, though, Joe: that "even you"? Nice touch.
Cala, rest assured: I don't consider people who play games to be losers. It just seemed like the obvious joke to make. I'm criticizing the idea of making games more artistic because, in addition to liking art, I like lots of things that are not art. I'm also doing it because, I don't know, it seemed fun. I hope it is for others as well.
I don't agree with the "It's snark and nothing more" assessment of JL's comment (though, call all the gamers nerds and losers and you get what you paid for); I think s/he is making a serious aesthetic judgment. And, as per 126, I think it's dead wrong.
One thing is that I think you're just wrong about the effects of taking yourselves seriously as an artist and paying attention to criticism. I've heard that London Calling was seriously influenced by Greil Marcus's Mystery Train" (though this may be a legend), and though it's not as punk rock as the first album it ain't no rock opera. The Mekons, ditto; influenced by critics, not rock opera. OTOH I doubt that Metallica's move toward longer songs on ...And Justice for All was seriously influenced by critics. (Not a Metallica fan, though, so I may get this wrong.) And you can have serious contemplative engagement with the 2:30 stuff; check Greil Marcus's Mystery Train.
Maybe more on point, when Will Eisner talks about The Spirit he's very explicit that he was thinking about it as art and trying to innovate. And though I don't The Spirit much, it's because it's too comic-booky, not that it's not comic-booky enough. I'll bet George Perriman and Walt Kelly (if not Schultz) thought they were making art, too.
And, you seem to be wanting to enforce a serious high/low distinction: there's Art and then there's pop music which should stick to "Drive My Car" and video games which should stick to Tetris. No ambitions for you, low art practitioners! Bully for you, as 119 says, but this means you're not enjoying and appreciating a lot of things that other people enjoy and appreciate, profoundly. That's why I didn't respond to 74; I figured most people will read it, think of the pop music they engage in seriously and contemplatively, and decide it's wrong. Someone who doesn't, well I don't see how to convince them except by saying "There are a lot of people who are getting serious contemplative stuff out of pop music, do you think they're all fooling themselves?"
126: Has "elitist" been redefined? I would think the term you were looking for would be more along the lines of "ridiculously faux populist" or something. Haven't you seen my top fifteen list?
128: Sometimes I don't. There's a whole lot of anxiety over maintaining the art status of painting, for instance, that gets old very quickly. Might be a relief not to have to deal with it.
You're right, teo. This makes it hard to find his books in the library. (I also meant to close that italics tag.) Which reminds me, one reason I want to define things like comic strips as art is so people will realize that every public library should have the collected works of these guys.
139a: It seems to me like you're being elitist at the level of genre leads to faux-populism within some genres. Anyway, I don't think fun games and pop songs are in any danger of dying out; unless there stops being a demand for them, which will only happen if The People become more interested in the arty stuff. Also, lots of pop songs are worthy of a serious, contemplative approach. Ask me sometime about "Rain Drops" or "The Streets of Laredo."
And, you seem to be wanting to enforce a serious high/low distinction: there's Art and then there's pop music which should stick to "Drive My Car" and video games which should stick to Tetris. No ambitions for you, low art practitioners!
Well, sort of. I'm sure I've expressed something like that. In truth, it's really more of a double game. More like this great quote from an old Michael Bérubé post:
In the formulaic quality of the later Replacements stuff I hear the sound of someone “achin’ to be,” to borrow a phrase. It’s a Groucho kind of irony, and one that reminds me of one of my favorite Mad magazine cartoons that I saw in a Don Martin anthology a million years ago. It’s called “The Rejection Slip” or something like that. It’s about this guy who has the world’s largest collection of rejection slips and is writing to Mad magazine requesting theirs so that he can complete his set and put it on the shelf. He accompanies the request with some little drawing of himself and his set of rejection slips. The editors of Mad reply that they loved his letter and would like to publish his drawings. He writes back to them that he’s not really interested in contributing, and would merely like to have a slip. Again he accompanies the letter with some funny picture of himself with his head sticking through a mailbox, awaiting a reply. This exchange continues back and forth a few more times, with greater and greater accolades from the editors, until the guy finally decides to burn his collection and submits ten drawings for publication, which of course gain him the official, impersonal rejection slip that he had been looking for all along. It’s kind of like that with Westerberg. He’s saying, “I’m a bum, see?” and we’re saying, “You’re an artist.” Until he gives up and says, “Okay, I’m an artist” at which point we tell him he’s a bum. Can’t blame the guy for feeling had.
The point is to seriously engage, without ever seeming to. That's why you don't call it art.
142 -- I always though of "streets of laredo" as a folk song, not pop. Does this make a taxonomic difference? Does it have two separate existences, as a folk song and as a pop song?
55: Art isn't goal-directed. You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing. And I'm wondering if the goal of a game might disqualify it from the broader category 'art'.
My experience of Pale Fire was (not entirely, but in large part) one of trying to figure out a really complicated puzzle. Ditto a lot of Borges or anything structured like a detective story.
See the first two sentences of the last paragraph of of 137. The "pop music is good (even great) of its kind" attitude has as a corollary "and don't get uppity".
It's not just rock/pop music (and someone who invokes the rock opera as the paragon of ambitious popular music is tacitly admitting that he either doesn't know what he's talking about or isn't arguing in good faith), bebop got a lot of criticism in its early days for not being danceable. Too eggheaded! I think Louis Armstrong had some criticism along those lines. But we recognize this attitude as silly when applied to jazz. Why should anything else be disbarred from a little self-consciousness, and attempts on the part of its practitioners to do something "artistic" (word in quotation marks b/c the practitioners may not so regard their doings).
The Smothers Brothers have a subversive reinterpretation of "The Streets of Laredo" commenting on the capitalist cooptation of the culture of the Western:
Tom: I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy
Dick: I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy too
Both: We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys
If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy too!
It's within the category of literature, but I don't think Raymond Chandler's novels suffered from his desire to push his mystery stories up the status chain.
Why should anything else be disbarred from a little self-consciousness, and attempts on the part of its practitioners to do something "artistic" (word in quotation marks b/c the practitioners may not so regard their doings).
Because people like you get involved, which obv. ruins everything.
The point is to seriously engage, without ever seeming to. That's why you don't call it art.
So, someone who seriously engaged, with seeming to, would be, what? Not punk rock?
Do we ever really doubt that even the people who try to come off all unstudied are, in fact, at least a bit studious in what they do, even if it's just cultivating the unstudied affect? How is this significantly different from a much more innocent attempt to conceal how difficult whatever it was that you did was? You've illustrated that there's sort of a game going on, but why should we listen to the natives? What is it about the game that actually matters here?
Too true. I've been misremembering it as "I see by your outfit that you are one too", which does. Despite having just had the lyrics in front of me. This just goes to show that Gombrich was right when he said "___________" (I just returned the book, alas).
I guess it depends on how you define thrash and how you define prog (which is a genre I studiously avoid). For me, Metallica's only real thrash albums were their first (Kill 'Em All) and 4th (an EP called Garage Days Revisited. Their last two albums with Cliff Burton, their original bassist, are already moving into the semi-orchestral style that you see later on Justice, and that the Black album was such a departure from. (Fuck Bob Rock.)
It's not just rock/pop music (and someone who invokes the rock opera as the paragon of ambitious popular music is tacitly admitting that he either doesn't know what he's talking about or isn't arguing in good faith)
Or perhaps he's just showing his age. In any event, I already have said, I think more than once, how that particular comment was not entirely serious, something I thought was obvious but apparently wasn't. So to move on:
So, someone who seriously engaged, with seeming to, would be, what? Not punk rock?
I'm about the most un-punk rock person around, so I don't know. Perhaps they would be earnest. How awful.
Do we ever really doubt that even the people who try to come off all unstudied are, in fact, at least a bit studious in what they do, even if it's just cultivating the unstudied affect? How is this significantly different from a much more innocent attempt to conceal how difficult whatever it was that you did was?
No, I don't think we do, and probably not too different. I'm afraid I'm not really sure what you're getting at with the rest, I'm sorry. As far as I understand it, "what matters here" is in part the usefulness of considering something as art. I'm sceptical. I believe we have very different tastes, however, and nothing I'm likely to say or argue on the question will seem right to you. What I would say against myself, I think, is that determinedly insisting on the non-art status of a thing or practice is probably every bit as distorting, partial, and ideological (not to mention generative) as holding the opposite position.
I couldn't speak to critical influence. I suspect that the critical theory surrounding metal may not have really been up to snuff circa 1988--it really took the Black album to move metal (real metal, anyway) out of the genre ghetto.
Stipulate that Westerberg's audience is allowed to call him an artist, but that he himself is not allowed to say "I am an artist". But he can still regard himself as an artist (and we all know that he does, he just can't say it, and he knows we know, but that we know too he can't say it—ad infinitum). This doesn't mean he's not an artist, it just means there's a game in which he can't say it. If he said it, the game would be over (arguably then, by showing himself to be inept, we'd have cause to call him not an artist).
Airlines know that it's no big deal if you arrive less than two hours before the departure time, and so do we. We can say so to our hearts' content, but the airlines can't come out and say "yeah, it doesn't really matter that much when you arrive; in fact, we're counting on a significant proportion arriving less than two hours before departure time". But we know that the airlines know it, and the airlines know that we know it, etc. They can't say it, but that doesn't mean that we actually all have to arrive ltthbtdt. It's a game.
As far as I understand it, "what matters here" is in part the usefulness of considering something as art. I'm sceptical. I believe we have very different tastes, however, and nothing I'm likely to say or argue on the question will seem right to you. What I would say against myself, I think, is that determinedly insisting on the non-art status of a thing or practice is probably every bit as distorting, partial, and ideological (not to mention generative) as holding the opposite position.
Does anyone here hold the opposite position? Why not seek … a happy middle!
The "what matters here" bit in response to your use of that illustration from Berube of a certain sort of game, following which you said "that's why you don't call it art". I meant only: what are the relevant factors in that illustration? What about that game is why you don't call it art?
So in that same comment you said this: "Well, sort of. I'm sure I've expressed something like that. In truth, it's really more of a double game." Where "something like that" is something like sentiment expressed in the comment that was not entirely serious. I don't know where I'm going with this.
I'm about the most un-punk rock person around, so I don't know. Perhaps they would be earnest. How awful.
Can't follow all the layers of possible indirection here.
(arguably then, by showing himself to be inept, we'd have cause to call him not an artist)
In the second Katamari game you can set the levels to whatever song you want. There's no need to play the cowbear level just to hear "Everlasting Love", like there would be in the original game.
The sumo level with "DISCO PRINCE" is something I've done over and over again with no real goal in mind. Art?
I'm so glad that 93 got posted, because I really didn't want to try to summarize the end of Disc One of FF7. Woot! But yes, many people I know wept at the end of that disc, and 93 gets it exactly right: it's not the cut-scene, it's the emotional attachment you've got to the character by that point. (Also, it's that you just lost your healer. Damnation.)
Cala, fun fact about World of Warcraft: the Alliance's 'specialty' class is the Paladin. So, you get to go play a plate-wearing holy warrior of Light, just like Arthas, and in the middle-range of leveling you're very likely to come across the last of the detention camps used to corral and 'tame' the orc race, and the paladins still guarding it. Yay! You're a concentration camp guard! That's basically my favorite thing about WoW, that it just leaves that gem of real-world politics and social issues and history right there, out on the map, waiting to be discovered.
So, OK, I say toss the question of whether they're 'art,' altogether. Can they still receive serious criticism? What is 'serious criticism,' anyway? A discussion of a thing and the audience's experience of it, and their relevance to society? To a theme? To culture? To shared experience? I guess what I'm asking is, what is an example of 'serious criticism' that demonstrates what Klosterman means? Can those of us who are familiar with a game apply the same model - or a similar one, or at least some core critical principles from it and other criticism - to that game?
Klosterman says that 'the meaning of most art is usually found within abstractions,' and that 'video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequences of free will.' I'm still not entirely clear on what he means, what he thinks serious criticism of a videogame would look like. Is it a discussion of how the end of Disc One, FF7, turns on the common experience of losing loved ones and accepting mortality? Is it a discussion of how W3 demonstrates vert viscerally the slippery slope of paranoia + self-preservation + self-righteous morality, and ways in which that might inform the players' opinions of the political Right in America today? Is it one side of a conversation about the freedom to do what one wants in GTA leaves the player free to test their own potential moralities, time and again, and learn something about themselves from the experience?
Because if that's what he means, I think there's a bunch of us already doing it, right here in this thread. We just don't get paid to say it. If that's what he wants, then great. I would take that job any day. But as Idealist (comity!) and others have said, it's going to be a matter of letting time pass for videogames to get that treatment, for various cultural and economic and ultimately demographic reasons.
170: I see. That seems right. So what it is about the game that actually matters (for the artist, not the airlines), is that it imposes certain restrictions, upholds certain values, at the expense of others. I'm arguing in favor of those that produce the work I like. Those who want to break the fetters and release the shackles are arguing in favor of work I don't like. So it's easy to pick sides.
(Please note: this is a little more baldly stated than anything I actually believe strongly, though I do think it contains an element of truth in that criticism, calling things art, etc., helps shape practice through selective distortion.)
Just saw 173 in preview. Quickly:
"determinedly insisting on the non-art status of a thing or practice is probably every bit as distorting, partial, and ideological (not to mention generative) as holding the opposite position."
Does anyone here hold the opposite position?
In light of all of the people getting upset by my urging that video games not be considered as art, yes, I think some people do.
"I'm about the most un-punk rock person around, so I don't know. Perhaps they would be earnest. How awful."
Can't follow all the layers of possible indirection here.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be that unclear. When it comes to music, I've been insisting on a non-art trash aesthetic of sorts, to which I thought you were referring with "not punk rock?". And of course, it's silly to think of me as determining what's punk rock. I was acknowledging that. Then I remembered some old post here about earnestness, and how awful it was. It struck me that someone seriously engaged with their work as art and unselfconscious about it might be earnest, which I also often find icky, so I included that reference.
Anyway, I'm out of here in a few minutes. I've got to get back to RI so I can make an appointment to decide whether or not to make an offer on a Cape with white vinyl siding in Pawtucket. Très punk rock.
At the end of the semester, the number of students in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the beginning. The students said, "You taught us how to do it," Buono recalled.
This actually parallels the advice I gave to someone I knew who was heading to business school.
Sounds like PROG PROG PROG GROUP PROGGY PROG to me.
Yeah, except the albums aren't annoyingly twee.
Actually I suppose you could make a connection from King Crimson to Hawkwind to all sorts of British Seventies Metal acts to Metallica and others. I suppose you could define a subgenre of Metal as "Prog Metal," but it seems like fairly pointless thing to do, since at a certain point it all becomes an amorphous soup of influences.
it's going to be a matter of letting time pass for videogames to get that treatment, for various cultural and economic and ultimately demographic reasons
What are those reasons, and how much time has to pass? Pong came out before Run DMC, and hip-hop has arrived as a genre.
Someone above mentioned JC Herz, and I think her writing on video games comes as close to criticism as you're likely to find. I think the reason you don't find something that reads much more like literary or artistic criticism has little to do with the genre not being sufficiently developed in some technical sense or popular yet among the right demographics. Instead, there are structural elements of games that don't exactly prohibit criticism—although, as people have illustrated with the emphasis on plots and the like, the urge is irresistable to dissolve out the elements of the game that can be analyzed in terms of other genres that are more familiar (criticizable); instead, the structural elements encourage other more appropriate responses, typically service journalism. (Put another way, why aren't there walkthroughs for symphonies?)
I suppose you could define a subgenre of Metal as "Prog Metal," but it seems like fairly pointless thing to do, since at a certain point it all becomes an amorphous soup of influences.
There actually is a subgenre called "prog metal", but it's the wankiest aspects of prog combined with the wankiest aspects of metal: Dream Theater are the leading exponents. Persons such as myself, who think that "post rock" was just the prog rock that dare not speak its name, are inclined to consider that post-metal acts, and really lots of other metal genres, are basically already prog with more heavy.
I had in mind Robust McManlyPants's criteria for an emerging genre ("for various cultural and economic and ultimately demographic reasons"), and it struck me that hip-hop has in the recent past succeeded this test (become commercially viable?). Anyway, it depends on whether you allow video games to fall under the heading of games, doesn't it? Since it makes me not wrong, I do.
(Put another way, why aren't there walkthroughs for symphonies?)
There are. Sometimes in the program; sometimes the conductor will talk about the symphony and have the orchestra play sections to illustrate what's going to go on, etc.
This looks like an interesting "game", and apparently it influenced the completely great game Earthbound a lot. There was a different post on metafilter about a supposedly amazing early console game but! I can't locate it.
196: I think Pants is right, so I fall the other way. I suspect there was criticism of hip-hop relatively soon after its arrival on the larger scene, in no small part because there was an already developed vocabulary with which to discuss music, and even closely related music.
Can we all agree that "Pants" as a foreshortened "Robust McManlyPants" is better than "RMP"?
It's especially funny to our British friends, who think it means something different from what we think it means. And Tim definitely wins the nickname sweepstakes.
True, Armsmasher, Pong did come out before Run DMC. But popular music had been around for a long time when Run DMC came out. I don't consider it an apt comparison. Perhaps now we're to the Run DMC period of videogame history: there have been many games before, and a generation with sufficient memory of gameplay to be able to tie current games and their cultural significance and their cultural merit - the questions they ask, the emotions they evoke - to predecessors, creating a cultural genealogy in the same way by the time Run DMC were around there were critics who could draw from first-hand experience of hip-hop and other genres a musical genealogy that could trace hip-hop to specific figures and to specific musical styles and movements before itself. Had Run DMC manifested spontaneously in 1960, with nothing before it, it would have been much more difficult to work into an understanding of popular music culture.
In that sense, though, I agree with Cala in that videogames are their own thing and specific models of other objects of criticism won't necessarily work, but I think to some degree I disagree in that I think it's quite possible for someone who's better versed, culturally and critically, than I am to draw the genealogy from novels to text-based adventure to Knights of the Old Republic (as a random example), and for them to talk about the competing philosophies of the characters that surround you in that game and their significance when viewed in terms of real-world scenarios.
It's especially funny to our British friends, who think it means something different from what we think it means.
Does this mean that it was not a good idea to call a section of a paper that will be delivered in Australia (concerning an obviously unsatisfactory semantics for "My pants are on fire!") "Pantsed"? Yes, Australia ≠ Britain.
205: Fair enough. I made the comparison because the argument seemed to have changed between one of where are the vg critics? to one of whether there ought to be any at all, and the hip-hop analogy seemed apt since rockist critics resisted it from the start.
And I imagine any writer versed in all those things could do what you ask for KotR, but I don't think that would be vg criticism in some categorical sense. What you're describing strikes me as similar to the subject of Mark Greif's great essay on the philosophy of pop as espoused by Radiohead. (He in fact begins with the thought, "I’ve wondered why there’s no philosophy of popular music.")
AFAIK, "pants" in UK-English refers to underpants, not trousers. I gather it is also used to refer to something that's just no good, i.e., "x is totally pants!"
And if I understand Google, this applies in Australia, too.
I side with JL here, so now everyone can hate on me. How much of this "video games are art" business is driven by the desire to legitimate one's preferred passtime? Why bother? People will take it seriously or not, and getting the "it's art" label isn't going to do much for that.
w/d - depends on the style of game you prefer. Their libraries largely overlap, but the Xbox has a stronger FPS selection and the PS/2 has a stronger RPG selection. Otherwise, there are few exclusives. The PS/2 library is larger overall, as well, with many more imports available (Microsoft has totally dropped the ball on the Japanese market), but many of them might not be to your tastes. I would recommend heading down to a videogame store (not Best Buy or its ilk, but something like Gamestop or EBgames or the like) and perusing the shelves to compare them side by side.
224 -- so what about "Pantsed" which in American English is the past tents or passive voice of the verb "to pants", i.e. to pull down somebody's trousers -- would this meaning come through to a British audience? This is what I interpret 221 to be asking.
How much of this "video games are art" business is driven by the desire to legitimate one's preferred passtime
I neither paint, play video games nor sing (if that's the term) hip hop music, but I can see them all as being art. That said, "People will take it seriously or not, and getting the "it's art" label isn't going to do much for that. certainly seems true.
228: But 'games' has some negative connotations. Don't play games with me. Children play games. Part of 'why do we want to call videogames 'art'?' might be because 30-year-olds don't like having things they play trivialized. (compare 'graphic novel' and 'comic book'.)
And I would argue that labelling something can determine whether someone will take it seriously. But like Joe Drymala, I will leave my argument floating around in counterfactual land.
But it might also be that the consumers of video games aren't 14 any more, and they also read literature and appreciate art, and see parallels between those pasttimes and more complex games.
I say PS2, but I haven't played much XboX. I just don't like their controllers. Which is not a reason.
I had written out a list of the last five or six games that I'd played and really enjoyed, so that people could examine it and tell me what to do. But what I learned from that list is that I've mostly played games that were very popular at the time I was playing them and that other people had bought for systems they had. Basically the only exception to that pattern is Soul Calibur for Dreamcast.
On preview: I hope you have a smashing good time with that.
236 -- Do you consider the playing of video games to be an artistic pursuit? I haven't followed the thread that close but I thought people were talking about the creation of video games. But I could totally get into your idea -- if indeed your idea is what I am thinking it is. Also: what if we think of video games as sport?
As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside of the game itself.
I'm not sure I buy the first part at least. Take this, from a randomly selected review (the top one at the Onion AV Club) right now:
That definitely seems like an attempt to capture the feel; and it's not just about the gameplay. And note the concern with exposition.
I have a friend who works on aesthetics some who is very big on the argument that video games are art. I believe him about that, but he hasn't convinced me that any existing video games are great art. Early days, perhaps.
(Not a gamer at all, though I've mucked around with GTA San Andreas a bit and it sure is addictive.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:01 PM
Klosterman is an abomination. That is all.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:14 PM
The Shape of the Gordian Knot.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:19 PM
These guys often do something close to video game criticism.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:24 PM
After spending far too much time last summer playing Halo 2, I can certainly appreciate a very well-designed game. However, that is all that makes a game great: being well-designed. Art should move you, or have a message, or something; we can be impressed by the big T-Rex in Jurrasic Park, but that is not the same as being impressed by the movie. Video games are perhaps more utilitarian--just like the FX dinosaurs could, on their own, potentially be considered art (sculpture perhaps, if they aren't CGI), there are aspects of games that are artistic in nature (like designing the landscape or crafting the story), but this doesn't extend to the game itself. The unique aspect of video games is the gameplay itself, which is more of a technical issue.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:25 PM
Do most numbers of Esquire have serious video game criticism?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:26 PM
Does Esquire have a coat of arms?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:27 PM
Something else on the issue of a game's "plot"--it tends to be advanced mostly through static cut-scenes, which are pretty much just movies. Then there are some technical challenges for the player, and then another cut-scene, on until the game ends. They're basically quirky movies, if you want to view them artistically. This could of course be due to the relatively early stage of game design we're in right now, but I can't really think of what kind of game would be distinctly artistic on its own. I suspect this will change in a few years.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:30 PM
I think probably the closest anyone's coming to what he's talking about is Terra Nova, though it's less criticism and more interdisciplinary analysis by academics in other fields, and it's exclusively focused on the Massively Multiplayer end of things.
Alternately, Penny Arcade comes close, sometimes, in their discussion of why they like a particular game.
My friends and I discuss games this way - I can go on and on and on about how Jill from Resident Evil is the strongest woman in pop culture, stronger than Buffy even (and by "strongest" I don't mean "toughest," I mean most compelling and most multi-faceted and most generally human in her motivations and desires, allowed to display both "feminine" sentiment and "masculine" resolve), but one of the problems of videogames as art is precisely what he describes. I did not experience Resident Evil the same as some of my friends, and it's entirely possible to just run & gun through zombies for a few hours and never stop to consider whether Jill or Leon are the most heroic because of the complex motivations driving them to return to that city in their various sequels.
Another reason, related but not the same, is that videogames are something to be fiddled with, something intended to be hands-on and interactive in a way that "art" generally isn't supposed to be. Even when something is considered both art and functional, it is generally explicitly discussed in those terms. That chair isn't just a chair, it's a work of art, too! That fork isn't just a fork, it's art. That hand-knitted sweater isn't just warm, it's a folk art. Et cetera.
Matt says he's not convinced any of them are great art. I don't think society - ours, or any other - has ever been able to distinguish what art is, much less what distinguishes mere art from great art. Does a videogame have to evoke an emotion to be great art? GTA certainly evokes a few. Does that emotion have to be something other than excitement ? The end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII does that - almost everyone I know who played that game cried tears of genuine sadness at the end of Disc One. Does art, in order to be great, have to be contemplative? The Final Fantasy series in general does its share of navel-gazing; a few other games that genuinely challenge the player to think about and even decide certain philosophical questions in ways that substantively affect the outcome of the games would be Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights in its various iterations - oh, man, that's a list too long to start. Does it have to metaphorically or literally treat real, serious issues outside the game, or from history? World of Warcraft (concentration camps, ethnic profiling, genocide and imperialism) and Deus Ex (terrorism and authoritarianism) both spring immediately to mind. Or is it that art - or great art, anyway - isn't allowed to be fun? To be violent? To be silly?
I mean, seriously. What makes it great art? That it asks a question of the audience? That it prompts discussion? That it has a real-world application? A philosophical question? I'm not challenging you, Matt, to answer these or to defend yourself. I'm just talking out my ass, mostly - but only mostly.
To wrap up an already too-long comment, I guess I'll say that when the "serious" art world is willing to consider videogames as art, it will have genuine criticism, not merely reviewers. In order for that to happen, though, a game is going to have to be both (a) able to demand a stirring, emotional response from the audience by dealing with a serious topic, and (b) sell like fucking hotcakes.
It'll probably help if most games advertising doesn't look like it was designed by people who got laid off from a Mountain Dew campaign for being "too 3XTR3M3!!1!" with everything.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:32 PM
I'm not a serious gamer, but the call for literary-style criticism seems to miss the point: there isn't a message to most video games, or at least not a message that improves gameplay. There may be a story line (here you are, the paladin hero fighting the orcish horde, but then, oops, now you're fighting for the bad guys) or a theme, but there isn't a message. And unlike a film or a book, having a message wouldn't improve a game in the way that being a well-designed game would.
It's rather like asking the what the message of the board games Sorry or Monopoly or Life: the Game. You probably could cobble together a meaning, but it's not a reason you'd recommend a game to a friend.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:35 PM
Has anyone played Shadow of the Colossus? Or Ico, for that matter?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:35 PM
I don't play the shoot-em-ups, but am still playing an ancient ancient RPG, like a hand of solitaire to relax. RPG's, Simulations, and strategy games (Civilization, RR Tycoon,Simcity, Sims) are like what? A paintbox? A very large Lego set? A symbolic vocabulary? One can follow the scenarios and campaigns, or one can have Godzilla destroy Paris, or use the materials any way you like.
I view at least several categories of PC games, (online RPG's are still in this category) as forms of media. Reviewing them is less like reviewing a novel and more like reviewing television or Typepad.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:36 PM
I'd have to disagree with you, Cala. I think at their core almost every videogame has at least one message worth hearing: that in the face of adversity it is better to do something than to do nothing.
And seriously, I can talk all night about what I think are the subtexts and subtle (or not) sociopolitical messages of a variety of videogames.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:39 PM
Tim Burke (whom eb links in 3) has done some writing about video games that I would consider criticism of the type Klosterman's looking for. The solution to the problem of writing criticism of a genre that mainly consists of action-cut scene-action cut scene etc. could be to focus on the games that aren't like that--mmorpgs, for instance (Burke's main subject), as well as open-ended gameplay types like GTA.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:40 PM
10, I think 9 addresses your assertion that "there isn't a message to most video games".
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:42 PM
In particular, I would say that the vast majority of RPGs have just as much message as any cheesy novel. And a few have as much message as rather good novels.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:44 PM
13: Yes, but that's not what makes the videogame excel at being a videogame. Even interesting plot tends to be very simple (and often, game play is: Kill enemies. Enemies are things that look different from you.), and a videogame with an outstanding message and subpar game play just isn't a good game.
Red Alert 2 is fun, and it has a cool concept: what would have happened if WWII hadn't occurred, and the Allies had to face a strong (un-Nazi-checked) Soviet bloc? But I'm playing it because Level 3 Prism Tanks are t3h aw3som3. The cut scenes are neat, and fun to talk about, but not really essential.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:45 PM
I was intrigued by the writer's suggestion that architecture criitcism was a possible model. My son downloads and builds alternative environments — I forget his name for them — for his games. So it is the bones, the structure of a game thet determines its character.
But architecture criticism concerns itself with surfaces, with the feel of the thing, the impact on the location, etc.
A building that can be remodeled overnight would pose a real problem for traditional criticism.
Hope 'smasher arrives soon. He knows about this stuff.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:46 PM
16, I'd argue whatever message is there is just packaging, like making Star Wars Monopoly rather than regular Monopoly. W00t, my hotels are now star destroyers. Of course you can analyze it as a theory of commerce; but I think that when I read a great novel, I read it in part for its message. But I don't think I'm playing a game for its message.
Maybe it just means that video games are more like pulp novels than high art. But I don't expect literary critics to waste time on the latest D&D novelization, either.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:48 PM
In part, he's just wrong on his own terms. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as game criticism, and Au has written other pieces that I think count.
But the more important point is that the kind of art that video games are is different from "traditional" art: they're more intellectual and self-referential and, like Matt F says, the technical issues are inseparable from discussions of the art. Check out this Wikipedia article on Spore; it's mainly expository, but it can't help but deal with how the game feels and what it means; it just doesn't sound like traditional art criticism.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:49 PM
Super Mario Bros was an attempt to reclaim an Italian identity from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:53 PM
17: I'll give you that. (I'll also give you that Prism Tanks pwn. I haven't played RA2, but only because WoW has so thoroughly dominated my brain.) But then, traditional media can suffer - if suffer is the term for it - the same thing. Lots of people went to see Episode III for the light sabers - almost all of them, I would argue - but "this is how democracy dies" saved the movie for me, single-handedly, and was the main thing The Boyf and I talked about afterwards. If the audience chooses to ignore something about a game, that's out of a developer's hands. Likewise, it's out of a director's or a painter's or a composer's hands if their audience chooses to ignore something about their work. Upton Sinclair thought he was going to turn us all into socialists, after all, but instead we got the FDA. I don't think the question of something's status as art or not-art can be answered by the audience's reaction to it, it can only be answered in an assessment of the artist's intent.
Criticism, on the other hand, is all about the reaction and the intent's effectiveness, and on those grounds I would say it's perfectly valid for a critic to say, "This game has some interesting ideas, but they're not integral to the gameplay and easy to ignore or otherwise swept aside, and so they don't really count." That's totally valid. But I think if that's valid then the critic also has to accept that the game is art by virtue of having those interesting ideas as an intention in the first place.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:55 PM
Basically, I think people who bemoan the lack of game criticism are looking at the wrong games--it would be like asking why literary critics aren't analyzing pulp romances (or whatever). In addition to the types of games I mentioned above (mmorpgs and GTA-type open-ended gameplay things) there are also games that have plots but nevertheless raise interesting issues and have more elaborate gameplay than just "kill enemies"; these tend to be Japanese and appeal to more of a niche audience than conventional shoot-'em-ups, but I bet you could do some great criticism on them (and people probably have).
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 8:56 PM
I'm not too hung up on whether the game is art or not. Just mostly that I think it's the wrong model to expect reviewers to criticize an excellent game as they would an excellent book. (Plus, some reviews go apoplectic while drooling over the experience of a game.)
I'm not familiar enough with architecture critcism, but if it includes criticisms of form-as-function, and not just beauty, then I would guess that high level game criticism will look more like philosophy of architecture than it will literary or art criticism.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:01 PM
I haven't played Final Fantasy since the early Nintendo version, but I remember thinking there was real potential there to do something artlike with that kind of setting and concept. By the way, are there any analyses of Choose Your Own Adventure books?
I feel very old all of a sudden.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:02 PM
I really haven't played video games since Below the Root on my C64, so I don't know much about modern gaming besides what I've seen over my little brother's shoulder so I'm definitely not as knowledgeable about this as many of you. I do think the issues of how video games should be evaluated and whether they can be considered art are interesting, though.
Another part of the essay that I didn't excerpt made the analogy that video games are to today's society what rock and roll was to the 60s. And, if that's the case, what is the impact on society if we let the dominant form of entertainment be judged solely on consumerism instead of their messages or ability for artistic expression?
And, to go way back to what Cala was saying earlier, are people not treating video games seriously because they are the equivalent of pulp novels or are most video games like pulp novels because people aren't treating them seriously?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:11 PM
A little more than 10 years ago, Bungie wrote a first person shooter called Marathon. You could play it Doom-style just to kill the bad guys; but then you'd miss getting absorbed in the tantalizing, allusive narrative revealed piecemeal in little text terminals along the way. That link is the best example I can think of, of a community of game players trying to answer the question, "What does it mean?" It may not be criticism, but darned if it didn't get people thinking.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:19 PM
Granted, Marathon was also good for blowing things up, and for letting you edit the flame thrower to spew deadly, immolating likenesses of your friends.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:25 PM
Eternal verities, all.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:27 PM
In one of the Unreal Tournaments, my friends and I decided to code a flamethrower, but we modelled it badly on the biogel template, so we ended up with flaming biogel that didn't set people on fire but left scorch spots.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:27 PM
Clive Thompson does some of the best meta-critiquing of video games I've seen. I don't know how he stacks up against Pauline Kael, but as someone who doesn't play video games at all, I find his writing about them interesting.
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:29 PM
I certainly am not trying to attack you, Cala, or say that I think you're objectively wrong. I just get very impassioned about this because I'm someone who thinks videogames are serious art - or, like books, at least some are - and thus worthy of more serious consideration.
And I do definitely agree that they can't be examined the same way a novel or a film or another work of art that has a direct, controlled narrative can be examined. In that regard, I think Klosterman is 100% correct. But I think there are ways that it can be done that the critical fields are ignoring - and by that, I mainly mean that I wish more game reviewers would start considering the intent of the game developers alongside their consideration of polygon counts.
I think it's highly possible that there are plenty of game developers who have no artistic intention beyond a complex and vivid execution of visual arts, but that, too, might be an opportunity for criticism in some critics' eyes. I guess that yes, I think you're absolutely spot-on by saying that videogames are a lot like pulp novels - but again, that some are, or perhaps even most, but not all. To answer Becks either/or question: yes. I think some games are really cultural non-factors because they are pulp, and some are regarded as pulp because they are videogames. This same debate is probably being had on any number of comic book blogs, or would have been ten years ago. Like any developing medium, working to find its serious side and grow into more mature themes, and much like comic books in this regard, I think videogames will have been "serious," or had "serious" offerings, for a long time before they begin to be regarded as worthy of consideration from outside.
OK, I really need to go work on leveling my rogue in WoW.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:34 PM
I think the main reason there aren't more serious videogames are two:
1. No one knows how to make a video game with a very high quality of storytelling and still make it interactive and fun and challenging and not overly linear. Primarily this is because it's too hard to generate new plot points in an appropriate way based on the player's character's actions, because that would entail having real intelligence built into the game, or at least a huge library of alternative storylines. (A few games do go with the latter approach, but it can never go very far.) And playing a game where part of the time you're just watching and other parts you're controlling just feels kind of weird.
2. The primary audience for videogames is still pretty young. The first generation of very serious gamers is still in their twenties and early thirties, and still predominantly male. (Female gamers are several years behind in numbers.) It takes people even older than that, demographically, to create a demand for truly literarily sophisticated and subtle games. Expect to see them in the next decade or two as gaming continues to be a mainstream pastime in an aging generation.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:34 PM
There is a lot of literary criticism of genre fiction, such as pulps. Usually, it is of the elements that are always common to all the examples of a type. Sometimes a particular example will be analysed in detail, and then other examples described by their substitutions and deviations. So there is a substantial existing model for this kind of evaluation. Journalistic treatments of this are quite old and are a kind of genre of their own. My wife's dissertation was about Victorian examples of genre criticism, and its social assumptions and anxieties. A late, superior example of the type is the famous Orwell essay Boy's Weeklies. But this kind of critical writing is as old as periodicals, as some of our experts will attest if they ever arrive.
Good night.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:35 PM
"reason" should be "reasons"
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:36 PM
Also, that is one just damned cute kitten.
(Another reason I get so cranked about this is that I used to do reviews/criticism of Vampire: the Masquerade novels for RPG.net, and some of them - but not many, but some! - dealt with very serious issues, and I really got tweaked when someone's reaction would be 'that clan is so lame! I hate this novel!' and I would be writing reviews about how great it is that a fantasy novel aimed at young people dealt in mature ways with topics like addiction, or abusive relationships, or the mentally ill, or the struggle between Christianity and Islam, and it drove me crazy.)
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:45 PM
32: I share a lot of your concerns about videogames and whether they count as serious. Part of this may be that I don't play RPGs, which seem to be more suited to ambitions of art that the sort of strategy games I normally favor. (I've heard they're addicting, and I have enough problems with getting things done.)
I suspect that video games aren't treated 'seriously' because the demographic deciding what sort of things are serious (my parents) aren't the people who grew up playing games. Rather like university courses on film & television which would have been unheard of years ago because television couldn't be worthy of university study.
And I'm not feeling attacked -- this is a fun discussion. And even if I were, the handle 'Robust McManlyPants' induces giggles and therefore is an effective defense against heated ripostes.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:46 PM
"My wife's dissertation was about Victorian examples of genre criticism, and its social assumptions and anxieties."
So, a genre criticism of a period of genre criticism? How pleasantly metacircular.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:49 PM
the handle 'Robust McManlyPants' induces giggles and therefore is an effective defense against heated ripostes.
Excellent! This was one of its intended effects. I would find it very difficult to get that upset over being flamed by someone with a name as silly as mine, as well. OK, really, WoW.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 9:57 PM
To interject a side arguement: the "plottiest" games, or at least the the plottiest console games are the Metal Gear Solid games, right? But those are pretty much good because the non-plot parts are fun. So I questtion what the relationship is between plot and artistic quality.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 10:12 PM
I see that other people have already mentioned Tim Burke and Terra Nova... Esther MacCallum-Stewart also does the sort of thing Klosterman's talking about, although again she's an academic (whose main specialty is WWI history and representations in literature) and all of her writing I'm aware of deals with WoW.
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 10:32 PM
Klosterman gets pretty hung up on the nonlinearity of game narrative ("OMG what if you read a story and it ended all different every time, it'd be so WEEEEIRD") given that hypertext fiction has been around for at least a decade and a half.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 10:47 PM
given that hypertext fiction has been around for at least a decade and a half.
And before that in choose your own adventure zines.
And before that, two telegraph operators would play and a third, with a script changing on the basis of the number of dots (dashes need not apply), would moderate.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 11:27 PM
Since video games continue to get better technically, in certain ways it makes the kind of criticism Klosterman wants somewhat unstable.
It is like reviewing silent films. Contemporaniously, the most interesting thing about silent films is how lifelike they were. Now the most interesting thing about silent films is the things that make them less lifelike: the silence and the lack of color.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 11:28 PM
Klosterman's question is merely a permutation of the common question about criticism: why has it been preempted by service journalism? It's not correct to look to inherent qualities of the medium (loosely or problematically defined though they may be) to make assumptions about why the journalism takes the form that it does. It's not a problem of whether Final Fantasy approaches something "high" with its literary narrative or sweeping score; it ought to be the concern of video game critics why and how Mario Party or Super Monkey Ball succeeds at the level they do. Art has plenty of plots—I think video games are interesting for being dramatic despite their real lack of them.
More to the point, where are, for example, the art critics? Most newspapers have swept away their Arts sections in favor of cloudy Style sections, and the art critics who are there employed write accordingly. For example, Blake Gopnik (art critic for the Washington Post wrote a lengthy essay on Flag Day about the aesthetic merits of the flag. Fun blog post fodder, but entirely worthless for a non-review arts feature that a critic has an opportunity to publish twice, maybe three times a year. Last year one of his said elective pieces was about the gelato they serve in the National Gallery.
Maybe Gopnik's just a bad critic, but nevertheless there are fewer than 30 fully waged art critics working for the papers of the nation, a steep drop since even the 80s (when there were, at least, writers on the payroll to cover the local art fairs and what have you, if only). And many of those do write little more than service journalism: gallery columns that review four or five shows into an 800-word item, no more than the descriptive service writing you find about video games. Alt weeklies are better on this front (in particular the one I write for, naturally) but are also looking at decline in the face of new media.
Point being, I think it looses sight of the real question to venture into whether video games (and their makers) themselves are doing enough to qualify as real art, in order to then receive the real art critical treatment. By the look of criticism, it would be reasonable to ask how much of serious painting counts as "serious art."
But assuming that the question really does hinge on the quality of the work—say, were Klosterman asking why critics haven't emerged among the many bloggers or tech writers who write about video games—I'd venture that it's much like film, in which the collaborative efforts must be dissolved to be analyzed and awarded, and as yet the nature of the collaboration that goes into producing a video game is opaque, and among these writers there still exists the notion that the art must be analyzed in terms of its authorial intention.
Then I'd point you to a piece of criticism comparing Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 with Donkey Kong.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 11:31 PM
Um, apologies for all sorts of usage errors above; Dallas lost and I'm drunk. Not fun Becks drunk but sad WTF-with-the-Mavs'-shooting drunk.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-15-06 11:35 PM
"Trigger Happy" by Steven Poole is the book he's looking for.
btw, why the bourgeois hang-up on "plots"? Sculptures don't have much of a plot, but there are scuplture critics.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:49 AM
And porn! Sometimes no plot at all. But who even notices?
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 3:05 AM
Thesis: art forms which are three-dimensional do not require plot to achieve beauty.
Discuss.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 4:23 AM
(Snicker) Nerds.
I'm reminded of people who go around claiming pop song lyrics are poetry. Sure, they have something to do with one another, but why bother? "Poetry" in these cases implicitly means "something that is good and valued", and the pop enthusiast wants that legitimacy.
So art and video games have points in common. Both are, after all, forms of play. I think the comments above that focus on the (for lack of a better word) utilitarian aspects of video games are on to something. A recent article (bonus! It's about how blogs suck) mentioned Tetris as appealing "to the "lab rat" part of your brain"; that's a big part of pretty much any video game, and it's not something that's going to go away as the technology improves. If they're art--and it would be too tedious to bother trying to argue that they're not--they're bad art.
That said, I'll note that I've argued that Dana Schutz's paintings are not unlike the practice of a bored video game player.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 4:27 AM
Then I'd point you to a piece of criticism comparing Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 with Donkey Kong.
As I said in your comments, Armsmasher, this makes me think that's got to be deliberate. I want to play the Cremaster/Donkey Kong mashup.
JL, I think the pop song analogy might be a good one, but it doesn't cut the way you think it does. Saying "pop song lyrics are poetry" is by and large a category mistake; pop song lyrics are pop song lyrics. But the fact that they aren't poetry doesn't mean that the pop songs aren't worthy of serious consideration. It's absolutely obvious that they are, I think; I'd invite you to try to convince me otherwise but it just wouldn't be possible.
Similarly, I think it's going to be a bad idea to say "Video games are just like movies! But you can choose what happens!" That's another category error. Ditto considering them as visual art. But that doesn't mean that they're unworthy of serious consideration, and I think that it's unhelpful to withhold the term 'art' from them because 'art' means other forms.
As Cala said in 37, for a long time you couldn't have university courses on movies and tv because they were obviously not serious; this after moviemakers had been making masterpieces for probably half a century. AFAIK you could say something similar about jazz and blues, stuck in the ethnomusicology ghetto. The general arbiters of seriousness (not you, you're already doing one of those blog things) take a while to catch up.
(More on lab rat brain later....)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 6:46 AM
I wrote a hypertext essay on The Left Hand of Darkness when I was a freshman in college. It had two introductory first paragraphs with diametrically opposed theses, then it continued down on both sides to argue opposing subsidiary points based on the same pieces of evidence, but the arguments gradually converged until the last paragraphs were identical. It blew your mind. But the hypertextiness of it was kind of pointless.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:20 AM
btw, why the bourgeois hang-up on "plots"? Sculptures don't have much of a plot, but there are scuplture critics.
I was thinking this. My last serious contact with computer games was with Infocom's text adventures back in the day -- I don't play games these days, but from what people say, I get the impression they're comparable, but with pictures/animation. I wouldn't argue that Infocom was producing significant art, but it seems clear to me that the sort of thing they were producing could have been art -- a complex depiction of an invented world where certain types of things happen, however any particular plot unfolds. It's the creation of a setting in which the player can experience a story in a manner partially but not totally controlled by the game designer, not the writing of a story, but there's no reason that that can't be art.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:38 AM
On the lab rat brain, this is part of what I tend to argue about with my friend I mentioned in 1. That is, the games he describes as great sometimes seem to me to be great games, with great gameplay, and possibly cool visuals as well, rather than great art. For instance, Au's review of Thief makes the case for its suspensefulness, and for the need to pay attention to the visual environment, but does that make the game art, or just a game that plays very well? I'm not sure -- the fact that it generates suspense doesn't make it artful, any video game (or sporting event) can generate suspense but that doesn't make them art. (Aside: As a non-gamer, I'm not finding Au convincing. When he name-dropped Aristotle in the Black and White review I wanted to kick him.)
But I don't think games are disqualified as art just because they exercise the lab rat brain. So do a lot of books, the page turners, and movies, and those can be art too. Like, The Charterhouse of Parma is a page turner. Tetris is of course just about as far from art as you could get, but that doesn't mean other video games should be disqualified as art.
(Other stuff: 49, why three-dimensional? What about painting? But I think the obsession with plot is one of those category error things.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:40 AM
Similarly, I think it's going to be a bad idea to say "Video games are just like movies! But you can choose what happens!" That's another category error. Ditto considering them as visual art. But that doesn't mean that they're unworthy of serious consideration, and I think that it's unhelpful to withhold the term 'art' from them because 'art' means other forms.
This gets it (almost) exactly right and was where my lab rat brain was attempting to go last night. The call to consider video games like novels or movies is as misguided as wondering why a concerto is art, because art involves painting.
But here's a question: Video games are goal-directed. You can win by meeting certain conditions. Art isn't goal-directed. You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing. And I'm wondering if the goal of a game might disqualify it from the broader category 'art'. Not that it would be worthless, or that artistic elements might not be worth contemplating, but just that art doesn't involve a purpose. (And you're totally right if you suspect my understand of art didn't get out of the 18th century.)
And games are about levelling your rogue or building your civilization or smashing the opposing army.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:45 AM
Is there a working definition of "art" in the thicket above that everyone is using?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:46 AM
Art isn't goal-directed. You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing. And I'm wondering if the goal of a game might disqualify it from the broader category 'art'.
Where's Smasher? He was just talking about some art with an auditory component -- you walk down a corridor, turn, see the sculpture and react audibly, at which point it echoes at you. It's not a game, but it's similar -- leading you through a series of actions so as to experience the art fully.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:49 AM
47, I point out 11. The Shadow of the Colossus is perhaps the most beautiful game I've ever played. I think the artistic quality qualifies it for something.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:49 AM
51: Pretty much anything under the sun will be considered by someone to be worthy of serious consideration, and I've no desire to stand in their way. And to repeat myself slightly, to debate the question of whether something is art or not has to be the most boring thing in the world, so I'm not going to bother. But I think that calling video games art perhaps isn't the best way to draw out what about them might be worth considering seriously; that a serious, contemplative mind might not be the best one to engage with video games; and that the end result of such serious consideration will likely be bad video games. Same with song lyrics.
I do agree with sentence two of 54, now that I see it in preview.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:49 AM
Yes, but you can't win at Cone Sculpture in the Long Corridor. I'm racking my brains trying to think of a video game that is intent just on giving you an experience, but I can't think of one. The experience is always secondary to a goal.
SCMTim, I'm not, except for a rough idea that art isn't for anything.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:52 AM
You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing.
There are certainly competitions in painting and writing and dancing and music. No?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:57 AM
I'm racking my brains trying to think of a video game that is intent just on giving you an experience, but I can't think of one. The experience is always secondary to a goal.
The Shadow of the Colossus. I wouldn't say the goal is actually secondary in this game, insofar as goals can't really be secondary. The game is goal driven, but visual experience is intended to be the focus. The goal is about as secondary as it could possibly be.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 7:59 AM
Video games are goal-directed. You can win by meeting certain conditions. Art isn't goal-directed.
Weinerfriend1 once said, "Maybe novels are just games that are really easy to win. You win when you finish it." I said, "Easy to win? I've never been able to get past level 2 of The Ambassadors." This is not meant as a serious reflection on anything.
More seriously, it seems like many of the games people are talking about, the Sims-like things, don't have goals. You just play them and see what you can do. Also, lots of art does seem to have a purpose, altarpieces and the like; the idea that art is for art's sake is actually distinctively modern as I understand it.
56: No.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:01 AM
Thanks, Cala. Weiner's objections to one side, I'm having a hard time distinguishing movies from games. Saying that there are dissimilarities between the mediums is not the same as saying that one is not a close (or the closest available) analogue of the other. I think you need to point out where the analogy fails, and how that failure points to movies as art and games as not art.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:01 AM
Yes, there are. But they seem to be externally imposed, with rules that don't seem to be part of the art. ("The literary prize will go to the book most in touch with our times." "We're rewarding the most graceful dancer.")
But if I'm playing a piece for piano outside of a competitive construction, or listening I'm not thinking 'If I hit that B flat on the beat, I'll be closer to winning.'
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:03 AM
61: But it's the artists that are competing, not the consumers of the art.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:03 AM
66: But the competition in games is really just a McGuffin to motivate you to experience the games, just as the plot in To Catch a Thief is really just a McGuffin to get you to enjoy looking a pretty people in pretty settings. (There are better movie examples, obv.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:06 AM
About plot. I think plot is very important in video games, because the medium of video games, in its highest form, will be plot driven. This is because the most moving and compelling pieces of art are plot driven. (Sure, some people have cried at a painting or two, but who hasn't cried at a real tear-jerker kind of movie?) As I mentioned above, making a good plot-driven game is extremely hard, and the technology for running games is still much, much better than the technology for making them. It's the software-hardware gap.
The genre is still mostly unexplored. Because of the great expense involved, there's no market for anyone to experiment with different ways to use the video game medium, as opposed to churning out something by the formula. (Which can still lead to a great game, in the right hands.) And because video games aren't perceived as serious, there isn't much funding coming from grants or any such thing.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:07 AM
65 to 61.
The Sims did have goals: keep your Sims happy, make them do their dishes and clean their apartments instead of doing your own dishes and cleaning your apartment, make them buy more things, etc.
Weiner, by 'modern' I assume you mean modern, not contemporary. And I'd say that's right.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:08 AM
I think you need to point out where the analogy fails, and how that failure points to movies as art and games as not art.
And as Matt's answer to 56 implies, you're not going to be able to, because nobody will be able to successfully maintain a definition of art that exludes anything offered as art. The question to ask is, what does considering games as art get you? My answer is, on balance, bad things. So find another way to talk about them.
Which is not to say the two have nothing in common--play and art go hand in hand--or that video games can't be well-made, or that you're a big loser for being into them (though you are.) It's more that calling them art, and then thinking about them as such, is dreary.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:08 AM
59 (JL, right?): The "Is it art?" debate probably is boring, because none of us has a definition anyway (I know that the Mona Lisa is art, I'm pretty sure that this blog is not, we could go on with examples but it might be tedious). "Is it worth serious consideration and discussion of the kind Klosterman calls for?" is a good question still, I think.
But it seems like you're endorsing this: "a serious, contemplative mind might not be the best one to engage with [popular music]; and that the end result of such serious consideration will likely be bad [popular music]"; and I think that's just obviously wrong. Which makes me suspicious of the analogous claim about games, and suspicious that it's based partly on a too restrictive view of what games can be like; a lot of them don't seem to involve much reflex action at all.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:09 AM
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:10 AM
But in the generic and common sense of the term, creating a good video game (good on its own terms) is definitely an art. And people (or rather, teams of people and their supporting companies) can be better or worse practicioners of this art. So that's at least one, hopefully uncontroversial, sense in which video games are art.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:11 AM
Yes, 59 was me. Sorry about that. Anyway, yes, I did intend what 71 says I did; and if it's obviously wrong, it's not so obvious to me. That, however, may simply be a matter of taste.
I wouldn't claim any great familiarity with current video games, though I do know that they don't necessarily involve reflex action. I remember well the days of text adventure games, after all.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:15 AM
73: Sure, but I think we're arguing about something different. In that sense persuading a jury is an art, or training a dog, but they don't call for serious cultural criticism, I don't think.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:15 AM
66: But the competition in games is really just a McGuffin to motivate you to experience the games, just as the plot in To Catch a Thief is really just a McGuffin to get you to enjoy looking a pretty people in pretty settings.
I think this is the answer to the 'goal directed' question -- the goal is bait to lead you fully through the experience. The experience is what may or may not be art.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:39 AM
Though: You could have a video that was art, which you might watch while knitting. You could also have something where the same video played while you played a game that was about as non-distracting as knitting. Then that thing would be art, but it wouldn't be a game-as-art, I think. If the artistic parts of the game are just in the cut scenes and backgrounds, not in the game play, is the art in the game or the backgrounds and cut scenes?
I suspect that that's not the case in FFVII as Robust describes it in 9 -- it's not that, at the end of the disc, you get a heartbreaking video that would be heartbreaking even if you hadn't played the game -- but it's an interesting way to think of these questions, I think. (IOW, I'm being a nitpicky philosopher.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:44 AM
You know what really gets my goat? NASCAR as a sport. That's not a fucking sport!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:46 AM
Because it...?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:47 AM
Video games are a medium in which you can experience practically any emotion or feeling, or idea, given the right game design. I think this is an existence proof for hypothetical games that are great art.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:54 AM
Maybe a better way of putting 77 is to contrast two games:
1. Race through the Louvre. Everyone runs a certain course through the Louvre, with designated stopping points in front of certain great paintings. The race is a way of getting you to experience the paintings, but the art is in the paintings, not in the race. And that would be true even if the paintings had been painted by the person who designed the race.
2. We were talking about Janet Cardiff here. The one walk of hers I did was one in which you followed instructions on an audio and video screen to take you through the Carnegie Library; it had a plot and everything. It seems to me that (maybe with some new technology) she could make it so the instructions were hard to follow, and that when you failed to follow them you had to start over or something different happened (and you had to start over) or something like that. And then that would be a game, but it would still be art. (And her actual piece was kind of like playing a live-action video adventure game and losing.)
But I'm not sure whether some of the artiness of Cardiff's piece is that it's odd to play in exactly that way; maybe if there was a whole industry of things like I just described, it wouldn't be art but would be a game. I think it would still be art though. Or, since that question is tedious, it would be worth criticism in a way that the Race through the Louvre wouldn't be.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 8:59 AM
79: consists of rednecks turning left.
I thought everyone knew that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:01 AM
Tetris is of course just about as far from art as you could get
Diametrically disagree with this; I think it's one of the only video games that is definitely art. It takes you into a mental space where you think about spances and orientations in a completely different way. It makes you look at some fairly simple shapes and really try to understand them as shapes. It's definitely art and it's even art in a tradition of shape and form that's not too difficult to extend back into history.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:01 AM
81 - I did something called The Angel Project a couple of years ago that was kind of like your #2. You had to follow clues around to different art installations hidden throughout the city that were related and, together, told a kind of story and there were actors along the way that you interacted with and every person's experience was different. There were some points where it was hard to tell if you had "found" the art or not and it was very confusing to tell what was part of the experience and what was serendipity. (The whole thing was much like the movie The Game, only based on Paradise Lost)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:15 AM
I don't know much, but I know I was impressed with the story arc of one of the later Zelda games, (Ocarina of Time), which is as meticulously structured, and features as many plot points, as an epic novel. Or such was my belief when I was playing it. I remember feeling bummed after I'd beaten the game; I found myself wishing that the story wasn't over.
I've been told that Steven Spielberg spoke to a conference of game designers, expressing hope that video games would be the great new medium of this century. I think he told them, the turning point will be when a video game involves your emotions to such a degree that that it actually moves you to tears.
If the Harry Potter series is worthy of serious criticism (and I think it is), then why not video games?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:17 AM
Agree roughly with Joe D and pdf23. Video games are the only true art medium; we just can't tell, because the use of the medium has only just begun. If Smasher really cared about art, he would spend all of his time on the Xbox.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:25 AM
Also:
The question to ask is, what does considering games as art get you? My answer is, on balance, bad things. So find another way to talk about them.
Huh?
What bad things?
And why is this the question to ask?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:31 AM
"I think he told them, the turning point will be when a video game involves your emotions to such a degree that that it actually moves you to tears."
Did he have anything to say about FF7?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:32 AM
Art is near the top of the long list of things about which I know almost nothing; except for seeing my kids play them, modern video games are not far behind (I miss Ms. Pac Man). But doesn't the lack of video game criticism have to reflect nothing more than the relative newness of the medium combined with its popular, rather than high art, roots. There is a helicopter hanging in the MoMA, along with furniture. Folk art and crafts get studied. Hell, people now think of I Love Lucy as something worthy of study. If those things are art, the artificial worlds, with story lines and sound and graphics, found in video games have to be art.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:33 AM
If Smasher really cared about art, he would spend all of his time on the Xbox.
[Throwing controller down in frustration] "Bah! This is not art!"
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:33 AM
pdf -- I only heard this secondhand, so I have no ideer.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:35 AM
If those things are art, the artificial worlds, with story lines and sound and graphics, found in video games have to be art.
This is why the question JD quotes in 87 is, in fact, a useful question. Of course you can analyze video games as if they were art -- since Dada, you can analyze anything, urinals, helicopters, whatever, as if it were art. The question is, what do you get out of it?
I think the answer 'Bad things' is probably wrong -- my guess is that it is or will be a fruitful field for criticism once people get the hang of it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:39 AM
Also, I think Matt speculated that a movie with the plot of FF7 wouldn't have gotten the reaction at the Big Plot Point. I agree with this. But I think the reason is counterintuitive, and interesting. I think it's not because the plot was very well-designed (it wasn't, it was just OK) or that the game was just that moving. It was that the player has, at that point, spent anywhere between 10 and 25 hours in the game,
**SPOILER WARNING**
and that sort of day-to-day mundane-level interaction creates a real attachment to this character. It's worth noting that minor dialogue associated with various features of geography and various side-quests and such really adds to this effect, and FF7 is really full of that. The character's death is thus emotionally significant for the player,
**END SPOILER**
in a way that it's much harder to achieve in movies, since movies can't be 60 hours long.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:39 AM
I think he told them, the turning point will be when a video game involves your emotions to such a degree that that it actually moves you to tears.
Why is this the turning point? Video games already titillate many emotions. When a video game involves your libido to such a degree that you get an erection, is that the turning point for video games as pr0n? (Cf. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:41 AM
I'm surprised by the fact no one here has addressed in any detail what I've found the most fascinating about video games, which is that they often allow the player to navigate not just physical spaces, but to navigate a moral space as well. Klosterman alludes to this in the last excerpted paragraph, and it's something I'd love to see discussed in more detail.
Posted by nolo | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:42 AM
I'm just passing on the information, grammar boy.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:42 AM
87: I consider that the question to ask because it gets to what the impact or practical effect of considering video games as art might be. The "bad things" that would result, to my mind, are video games designed to the taste of art, or in this case, video game, critics. Down with art! Engage the lab rat brain!
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:44 AM
97: Were The Lord of the Rings books written to the taste of literary critics? I really don't see that being a serious issue. Who reads books written for literary critics? Not many people. Writers (generally) want to write books that will be read by educated people in general, even great writers, and so they write with that general audience in mind.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:48 AM
When a video game involves your libido to such a degree that you get an erection
Sue's been gone a while, eh?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:48 AM
This is why the question JD quotes in 87 is, in fact, a useful question. Of course you can analyze video games as if they were art -- since Dada, you can analyze anything, urinals, helicopters, whatever, as if it were art. The question is, what do you get out of it?
These comparisons are not apt, though. Video games already contain so many elements present in what we think of as "art" -- plot, character, visual design, etc. Many are also specifically created with the goal of taking the player to a specific mental or emotional place. Virtually all of them are designed to stimulate our imagination.
Maybe a more useful analogy would be comic books?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:49 AM
my guess is that it is or will be a fruitful field for criticism once people get the hang of it.
I agree. I just don't think the criticism will look much like movie or art criticism. That's more or less where I was going with the goal-directed stuff; call it goal-directed art, if you want, since 'what is art?' is a hair-splicing question, but high-level criticism of games just shouldn't be expected to look like other art criticism.
Which is why I think the article's off; many reviews of games aren't criticism, but one that was probably still would talk about gameplay and how it contributes to the experience, etc, and the article seems to think that that couldn't be proper criticism.
97: I dunno, FF7's come up several times as an arty game, and it's certainly one of the most popular titles.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:53 AM
since Dada, you can analyze anything, urinals, helicopters, whatever, as if it were art
I don't think this is accurate. There's some tendency after Barthes to ascribe all the discoveries of Postmodernism to Dada, but to a degree they stand at ends. For Duchamp it wasn't any urinal, but this urinal at this moment given this intervention (the "R. Mutt" inscription), and in any event I don't think the notion was clear or common among Dadaists that their work democratized the means of criticism.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:57 AM
98: I'm describing the issue in a rather simplified manner, of course. But this whole topic began with a plea to take video games as worthy of serious consideration; with seriousness comes different ambitions. And so your nice little pop band, to return to another analogy, decides the 2:30 numbers with the beats you can dance to aren't enough: they want to do a rock opera. That is a very bad thing.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 9:58 AM
103: So you're not looking forward to plopping down $65 for a game that can only be truly experienced by never opening the box?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:02 AM
103 is just silly. It's snark, and nothing more.
Besides, one of the first "concept" albums was Sgt. Pepper's. Hardly a very bad thing.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:02 AM
[[When someone reviews Moby Dick or Kramer vs. Kramer, they don't spend most of their time explaining the details of the plot]]
Actually, they do if they're reviewing for The New Yorker -- nonfiction reviews, at least.
And not to blogwhore, but a co-worker/friend does regular game reviews in a podcast called Game Buzz. Examples here, here and here if anyone's interested.
Posted by Lex | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:08 AM
I am absolutely certain that people have wept over Tetris.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:08 AM
I have played Tetris so long that afterward, when I closed my eyes, I continued to see falling blocks. In college we called it T syndrome.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:09 AM
I
am absolutely certain that peoplehave wept over Tetris.Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:11 AM
105: I don't care for Sgt. Pepper's. Many people who like The Beatles don't.
While I was being a little light, I don't see how pointing out how the discourse surrounding an art form affects how it is seen and, in turn, what new development it takes, is nothing.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:12 AM
103: From what I can tell, our central difference is that you think that what separates current games from "serious" games is something that woud negatively affect the gameplay. I, on the other hand, simply think that the main problems with current games is that the game industry sucks. They waaay overwork their employees, they don't have long enough production schedules, and they don't take enough chances on new-concept games like Katamari Damacy. Part of it may be that the software tools used to make games (i.e. C++) are simply not good enough to allow for more realistic production schedules that still don't crunch the designers. More research into better tools would help a lot. Naughty Dog, for instance, made their own programming language and compiler, and their games push the PS2 platform further than any other games do.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:13 AM
But to continue 111, all the elements of great games are currently present (not that there won't be innovations, of course), scattered throughout the industry. It's just a matter of doing a good job of putting it all together, and it happens, once in a while.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:15 AM
While I was being a little light, I don't see how pointing out how the discourse surrounding an art form affects how it is seen and, in turn, what new development it takes, is nothing.
No one's objecting to this, it's just that not everyone thinks the result is necessarily going to be bad.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:16 AM
106: New Yorker reviewers aren't summarizing the plot so much as using the review as an excuse to write their own essay on the topic. Also, in non-fiction the specific details of what happened (the plot, so to speak) are the entire point of the book; not so much with fiction.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:19 AM
95: Asked and obliged.
One philosophical puzzle of fiction is known as imaginative resistance. Simply stated, the puzzle arises from our well-documented inability to imagine and accept fictiious moralities as easily as we imagine and accept fictitious stories, laws of nature, beings, etc. One example that's often used is the Kipling poem which exhorts the reader to 'take up the white man's burden', or a fiction about an alien culture which casually says, 'The king ordered the death of the child, but that was fine, because it was a girl.'
We will probably have little trouble imagining the exotic trappings of the cultures Kipling describes, or imagining the alien biology and weird planet, but we will meet with internal resistance if asked to accept that white men must tame the world or that the murder of girl children is unobjectionable.
And it's a puzzle because there seems to be no really compelling reason why this is the case. We can imagine events that are contrary-to-fact. We can imagine different laws of nature. We can imagine that time travel is possible. None of these have happened, but we can imagine them all. But imagining that imperialism is good or infanticide is unproblematic, positions which have been held by actual human beings, somehow leaves us stumped.
Video games, however, due to their drawn-out exposition, may be suited to overcoming imaginative resistance. Consider Warcraft III, a strategy game. When you begin the game, you play as the young hero of a relative peaceful kingdom, which is being threatened by the undead. A clear moral code by most standards: zombies bad! demons bad! And you begin, of course, by killing the undead army.
But as the campaign progresses, your hero changes. The cut scenes tell you they're losing the war. Your hero advocates wiping out a village of his own people in order to stop the horrific onslaught of ghouls. By the end of his 'act' in the campaign, your hero has gone from being the golden child of the kingdom of light to a man who has sold his soul in order to protect it. When you begin the second act, your hero is now commanding an undead army against his own former kingdom.
And you're on his side.
And you've played him, every step of the way. Worse, many of his actions aren't clearly bad until you reach the next level.
A well-written story might be able to get you to identify with this poor hero. But the video-game forces you to; he doesn't win unless you direct him. You don't succeed unless his morality ('protect your people') falters.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:30 AM
they don't take enough chances on new-concept games like Katamari Damacy.
Speaking of games which lead to T-Syndrome.... goodness what a great game. But you do run the risk of hearing infectious Japanese pop music in your head even when the game is off.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:33 AM
111: I don't play video games myself, and am not informed as to the industry. I'm sure everything you say about it is true, and negatively impacts the product.
I also don't think that considering games as an object of criticism as proposed in the post (That, I think, is where video-game criticism should be going: toward the significance of potentiality. Video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequences of free will, a concept that has as much to do with the audience as the art form and so on) will mean good things for gameplay, yes. I see that others here are noting that video game criticism of a sort focused on craft, attentive to game play, could be done and be a good thing; I don't really have an issue with that.
It often strikes me that when someone chooses to call something art (and I don't in the Warhol, Brillo Box kind of manuever), what they are trying to say is that it is good. It's not necessary to be art in order to be good.
I don't mean this as an insult to games or gamers, but on another note: it strikes me that while both art and games can engage the lab rat brain, doing so is perhaps essential to the latter in a way that it isn't to the former.
113: I think saying that "it's snark and nothing more" does, in fact, constitute an objection to my comment. As to whether the consequences might in fact be bad, that's largely a question of taste--and that I have called them bad on balance, not unreservedly.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:34 AM
I'll toot my own horn a little on this subject. Klosterman certainly isn't the first to wonder about this. I think for a while JC Herz *was* the Pauline Kael of video-game writing, but the NY Times didn't see fit to continue the column. But the problem that Klosterman describes is also part of it. Even when we're writing for other people who play games, it can be very difficult to figure out how to write about the experience of game play. This came up some at this year's Social Computing Symposium as well.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:35 AM
105: I don't care for Sgt. Pepper's. Many people who like The Beatles don't.
Bully for you and many people.
Ok, JL, I'll be more thorough.
By the logic expressed in 103, considering something to be "art" has the detrimental effect of provoking mediocre talents to create bad attempts at artistic greatness. Because such bad art will inevitably be produced, we should therefore discourage all attempts to expand this new popular medium into something greater and more meaningful than it currently is.
Do I really need to do a walk-through on how silly this is? First, it ignores the evolution of virtually all forms of artistic expression, going back to their roots as populist/folk pasttimes which gradually became more and more significant and artistically self-aware.
Second, you're basically saying that, on balance, the great achievements of a Kurosawa or a Hitchcock or a Scorsese (or whichever filmmaker you may prefer) are not worth all the bad attempts at profundity that have been churned out ever since the early days of film. I'm sure even you can recognize how silly this is.
I was so dismissive of your comment because you clearly didn't mean it seriously; no one would offer that kind of statement as a serious objection to exploring a new medium of expression. It was just a self-important sneer, intended to win quip points rather than add anything substantive to a debate.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:40 AM
I don't play video games myself, and am not informed as to the industry. I'm sure everything you say about it is true, and negatively impacts the product.
But if you don't play video games, how do you know this stuff "negatively impacts the product"?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:43 AM
I'm happy to take pdf23ds's word for it.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:45 AM
run the risk of hearing infectious Japanese pop music in your head even when the game is off
A problem that becomes compounded when you discover "jukebox mode", which lets you listen to the soundtrack on its own. For quite a while, we had it playing near-constantly in my dorm.
The opening sequence of that game (before you get to the starting menu) is also one of the most mesmerizing things I've ever seen. I flip out a little when the panda turns red.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:47 AM
121: Okay, fine, I see I should have reread 111 to understand your comment. Still, if you don't play games, why do you think considering them art will make them worse?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:49 AM
117: JL, I realize you're mostly being snarky, but a) you don't play games b) acknowledge that you don't know anything about games and c) (tongue-in-cheek I'm sure) consider anyone who does to be a loser, so I'm trying to figure out on what basis you're criticizing attempts to make games more artistic.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:50 AM
Na na na na na na na na na na Katamari on the Swii-ing!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:52 AM
And so your nice little pop band, to return to another analogy, decides the 2:30 numbers with the beats you can dance to aren't enough: they want to do a rock opera. That is a very bad thing.
Shitloads of great music have been produced by people deciding that short danceable numbers weren't enough. Nevermind that that comment is ridiculously elitist, it's wrong.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:53 AM
Word.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:54 AM
So, JL, do you not like the fact that paintings, sculpture, "serious" literature, and all the other things that we currently consider art, are currently considered art?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 10:58 AM
I actually transliterated (probably terribly) the words to one song from the second Katamari game, "Everlasting love". Then I memorized it, and I can sing along now.
Ao eso lao kapo komo shidu ku...
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:00 AM
That's the racecar level, right?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:03 AM
I've clearly got to get a PS2. This Gamecube nonsense isn't cutting it.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:03 AM
It's the racecar landscape, but the one where you find the cowbear, not when you're actually doing the race.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:04 AM
I hate the fucking cowbear. What's the racecar soundtrack called? (Boyfriend's got the PS2 and the game.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:10 AM
133: Though I know all the songs, I don't recall which one goes with the racecar level, let alone the title. I'd have to unpack my PS2 (because I just moved) to find out. There's a jukebox somewhere in the game, though.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:16 AM
and that sort of day-to-day mundane-level interaction creates a real attachment to this character. It's worth noting that minor dialogue associated with various features of geography and various side-quests and such really adds to this effect, and FF7 is really full of that. [redacted spoiler] is thus emotionally significant for the player
This got me excited because it reminds me of something I'm always trying to convey about the powerful aesthetic potential (and actuality) of soap operas as a medium. I seriously can't think of a another art form that asks you to spend as much time with it, another kind of narrative that inserts its characters so fully into your lives. Further, it lets you experience the growth and change of families and the aging and birth of generations in the closest thing to natural time of any art form I know of. I don't watch All My Children anymore, because five hours a week is a pretty demanding amount of TV, but I did start again for several months about a year ago during the Bianca/Babe babynapping plot, since I happened to catch a bit of it at my mom's house and I realized it was probably the most compelling the show had ever been and I wanted to follow it to the resolution. And let me tell you, when Bianca finally came out of her coma when her daughter Miranda was finally returned to her after she'd believed her dead, and later, when Erica, Bianca's mother, gave her a letter that Mona, Erica's mother had written for her on the occcasion of the birth of her first child, before she died (an event that was written into the show after the actress's death), that made rueful, affectionate reference to a long, long history the audience had with Erica and Mona, it was a really powerful statement about the possibility of the persistence of love past death through your words and through your children, a statement that derived special strength from the nature of the genre.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:19 AM
To answer, in varying degrees, 119, 123, and 124:
Perhaps I've expressed myself poorly. I was joking around a bit at times, but I'm not meaning to be entirely snarky, nor do I think I'm being entirely silly. The musical analogy that so annoyed Joe is a clue to why I'm bothering with the topic despite my general uninterest today (I played them all the time years ago) in games. It was not meant as a sneer at anyone (well, ok: at the Who. But they got enough money from me over the years, I feel I can crack a joke at their expense.)
I like complex things. I like art. But I also like simple things and cheap thrills. To step away from games for a moment, what Joe calls "mediocre talents" are not seen as such by me: I like them. My concern, such as it is, is more with what gets lost when a particular activity gets bumped up the status chain. Calling something art that we don't normally speak of in those terms changes it. Obviously this is a rather small worry with video games--as has been pointed out, any one that didn't viscerally grab its audience probably wouldn't get far. But it's partly that concern that motivates what I've been writing.
Joe rightly notes that many art forms travelled from folk roots to being "artistically self-aware". Games--of all kinds, not just video games--are a profoundly absorptive activity; is self-awareness compatible with them? If it is, then they'd probably be something more along the lines of what we find in art more traditionally conceived. But I'm not sure they'd offer the same thrill.
Great artists, or great game designers, will do fine in any event. I just consider, from the view of what effect it might have, calling video games art to be a shove in the wrong aesthetic direction. Sure, some good things might result--that's why I don't claim the effects would be unreservedly bad. I do predict a lot more pretentiousness. I have to say, though, Joe: that "even you"? Nice touch.
Cala, rest assured: I don't consider people who play games to be losers. It just seemed like the obvious joke to make. I'm criticizing the idea of making games more artistic because, in addition to liking art, I like lots of things that are not art. I'm also doing it because, I don't know, it seemed fun. I hope it is for others as well.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 11:57 AM
I don't agree with the "It's snark and nothing more" assessment of JL's comment (though, call all the gamers nerds and losers and you get what you paid for); I think s/he is making a serious aesthetic judgment. And, as per 126, I think it's dead wrong.
One thing is that I think you're just wrong about the effects of taking yourselves seriously as an artist and paying attention to criticism. I've heard that London Calling was seriously influenced by Greil Marcus's Mystery Train" (though this may be a legend), and though it's not as punk rock as the first album it ain't no rock opera. The Mekons, ditto; influenced by critics, not rock opera. OTOH I doubt that Metallica's move toward longer songs on ...And Justice for All was seriously influenced by critics. (Not a Metallica fan, though, so I may get this wrong.) And you can have serious contemplative engagement with the 2:30 stuff; check Greil Marcus's Mystery Train.
Maybe more on point, when Will Eisner talks about The Spirit he's very explicit that he was thinking about it as art and trying to innovate. And though I don't The Spirit much, it's because it's too comic-booky, not that it's not comic-booky enough. I'll bet George Perriman and Walt Kelly (if not Schultz) thought they were making art, too.
And, you seem to be wanting to enforce a serious high/low distinction: there's Art and then there's pop music which should stick to "Drive My Car" and video games which should stick to Tetris. No ambitions for you, low art practitioners! Bully for you, as 119 says, but this means you're not enjoying and appreciating a lot of things that other people enjoy and appreciate, profoundly. That's why I didn't respond to 74; I figured most people will read it, think of the pop music they engage in seriously and contemplatively, and decide it's wrong. Someone who doesn't, well I don't see how to convince them except by saying "There are a lot of people who are getting serious contemplative stuff out of pop music, do you think they're all fooling themselves?"
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:01 PM
Games--of all kinds, not just video games--are a profoundly absorptive activity
I so thought you were going to follow this up with a line about their theatricality.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:03 PM
126: Has "elitist" been redefined? I would think the term you were looking for would be more along the lines of "ridiculously faux populist" or something. Haven't you seen my top fifteen list?
128: Sometimes I don't. There's a whole lot of anxiety over maintaining the art status of painting, for instance, that gets old very quickly. Might be a relief not to have to deal with it.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:04 PM
So far it seems an iron law that whenever I comment, JL will have commented while I was typing. 137 not to 136.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:04 PM
I think you mean George Herriman, Matt.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:06 PM
You're right, teo. This makes it hard to find his books in the library. (I also meant to close that italics tag.) Which reminds me, one reason I want to define things like comic strips as art is so people will realize that every public library should have the collected works of these guys.
139a: It seems to me like you're being elitist at the level of genre leads to faux-populism within some genres. Anyway, I don't think fun games and pop songs are in any danger of dying out; unless there stops being a demand for them, which will only happen if The People become more interested in the arty stuff. Also, lots of pop songs are worthy of a serious, contemplative approach. Ask me sometime about "Rain Drops" or "The Streets of Laredo."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:12 PM
Hey, why isn't there a JL comment before 142? "leads" s/b ", leading"
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:13 PM
First: thanks, Matt.
And, you seem to be wanting to enforce a serious high/low distinction: there's Art and then there's pop music which should stick to "Drive My Car" and video games which should stick to Tetris. No ambitions for you, low art practitioners!
Well, sort of. I'm sure I've expressed something like that. In truth, it's really more of a double game. More like this great quote from an old Michael Bérubé post:
In the formulaic quality of the later Replacements stuff I hear the sound of someone “achin’ to be,” to borrow a phrase. It’s a Groucho kind of irony, and one that reminds me of one of my favorite Mad magazine cartoons that I saw in a Don Martin anthology a million years ago. It’s called “The Rejection Slip” or something like that. It’s about this guy who has the world’s largest collection of rejection slips and is writing to Mad magazine requesting theirs so that he can complete his set and put it on the shelf. He accompanies the request with some little drawing of himself and his set of rejection slips. The editors of Mad reply that they loved his letter and would like to publish his drawings. He writes back to them that he’s not really interested in contributing, and would merely like to have a slip. Again he accompanies the letter with some funny picture of himself with his head sticking through a mailbox, awaiting a reply. This exchange continues back and forth a few more times, with greater and greater accolades from the editors, until the guy finally decides to burn his collection and submits ten drawings for publication, which of course gain him the official, impersonal rejection slip that he had been looking for all along. It’s kind of like that with Westerberg. He’s saying, “I’m a bum, see?” and we’re saying, “You’re an artist.” Until he gives up and says, “Okay, I’m an artist” at which point we tell him he’s a bum. Can’t blame the guy for feeling had.
The point is to seriously engage, without ever seeming to. That's why you don't call it art.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:15 PM
142 -- I always though of "streets of laredo" as a folk song, not pop. Does this make a taxonomic difference? Does it have two separate existences, as a folk song and as a pop song?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:16 PM
I so thought you were going to follow this up with a line about their theatricality.
You know how tempted I was.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:16 PM
This makes it hard to find his books in the library.
The fact that they've only begun publishing them in the last couple of years doesn't help either.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:18 PM
55: Art isn't goal-directed. You can't win at a symphony performance or at painting or at writing or reading or dancing. And I'm wondering if the goal of a game might disqualify it from the broader category 'art'.
My experience of Pale Fire was (not entirely, but in large part) one of trying to figure out a really complicated puzzle. Ditto a lot of Borges or anything structured like a detective story.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:18 PM
Felix S___? Just wondering how broad the Unfogged/arty blogger overlap truly is.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:20 PM
126: Has "elitist" been redefined?
See the first two sentences of the last paragraph of of 137. The "pop music is good (even great) of its kind" attitude has as a corollary "and don't get uppity".
It's not just rock/pop music (and someone who invokes the rock opera as the paragon of ambitious popular music is tacitly admitting that he either doesn't know what he's talking about or isn't arguing in good faith), bebop got a lot of criticism in its early days for not being danceable. Too eggheaded! I think Louis Armstrong had some criticism along those lines. But we recognize this attitude as silly when applied to jazz. Why should anything else be disbarred from a little self-consciousness, and attempts on the part of its practitioners to do something "artistic" (word in quotation marks b/c the practitioners may not so regard their doings).
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:23 PM
The Smothers Brothers have a subversive reinterpretation of "The Streets of Laredo" commenting on the capitalist cooptation of the culture of the Western:
Tom: I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy
Dick: I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy too
Both: We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys
If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy too!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:25 PM
It's within the category of literature, but I don't think Raymond Chandler's novels suffered from his desire to push his mystery stories up the status chain.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:28 PM
151 -- Thanks! That lyric has been kicking around in my head for ages without a source to pin it to.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:28 PM
Why should anything else be disbarred from a little self-consciousness, and attempts on the part of its practitioners to do something "artistic" (word in quotation marks b/c the practitioners may not so regard their doings).
Because people like you get involved, which obv. ruins everything.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:28 PM
The point is to seriously engage, without ever seeming to. That's why you don't call it art.
So, someone who seriously engaged, with seeming to, would be, what? Not punk rock?
Do we ever really doubt that even the people who try to come off all unstudied are, in fact, at least a bit studious in what they do, even if it's just cultivating the unstudied affect? How is this significantly different from a much more innocent attempt to conceal how difficult whatever it was that you did was? You've illustrated that there's sort of a game going on, but why should we listen to the natives? What is it about the game that actually matters here?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:30 PM
151 -- Thanks! That lyric has been kicking around in my head for ages without a source to pin it to.
I've never actually heard it and really want to know how they sing the last line, 'cause it doesn't fit into the melody of the song itself.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:32 PM
155: Wolfson, is this a worry about "authenticity" again? (Serious question.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:33 PM
Because people like you get involved, which obv. ruins everything.
Who're the art blogger/art-knowledgeable types in this conversation? Not I, I assure you. (Assure you!)
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:33 PM
Neither does the second.
Jackhammer nearby. Incapable of putting together complete sentences.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:33 PM
159 to 156.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:34 PM
156 -- my memory is of the last line being spoken, not sung. But it has been many years since I heard it.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:35 PM
I've heard it sung, and it just doesn't work. You kind of cram the syllables in.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:36 PM
Neither does the second.
Too true. I've been misremembering it as "I see by your outfit that you are one too", which does. Despite having just had the lyrics in front of me. This just goes to show that Gombrich was right when he said "___________" (I just returned the book, alas).
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:36 PM
It is on the Smothers Brothers album my parents own, which I'm pretty sure is "Curb Your Tongue, Knave!"
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:38 PM
Metallica began moving to long songs well before Justice, Matt. Geez.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:38 PM
My source says Justice was when they went from thrash to prog. (IOW, sorry.) But was it because of critics?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:40 PM
I guess it depends on how you define thrash and how you define prog (which is a genre I studiously avoid). For me, Metallica's only real thrash albums were their first (Kill 'Em All) and 4th (an EP called Garage Days Revisited. Their last two albums with Cliff Burton, their original bassist, are already moving into the semi-orchestral style that you see later on Justice, and that the Black album was such a departure from. (Fuck Bob Rock.)
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:48 PM
It's not just rock/pop music (and someone who invokes the rock opera as the paragon of ambitious popular music is tacitly admitting that he either doesn't know what he's talking about or isn't arguing in good faith)
Or perhaps he's just showing his age. In any event, I already have said, I think more than once, how that particular comment was not entirely serious, something I thought was obvious but apparently wasn't. So to move on:
So, someone who seriously engaged, with seeming to, would be, what? Not punk rock?
I'm about the most un-punk rock person around, so I don't know. Perhaps they would be earnest. How awful.
Do we ever really doubt that even the people who try to come off all unstudied are, in fact, at least a bit studious in what they do, even if it's just cultivating the unstudied affect? How is this significantly different from a much more innocent attempt to conceal how difficult whatever it was that you did was?
No, I don't think we do, and probably not too different. I'm afraid I'm not really sure what you're getting at with the rest, I'm sorry. As far as I understand it, "what matters here" is in part the usefulness of considering something as art. I'm sceptical. I believe we have very different tastes, however, and nothing I'm likely to say or argue on the question will seem right to you. What I would say against myself, I think, is that determinedly insisting on the non-art status of a thing or practice is probably every bit as distorting, partial, and ideological (not to mention generative) as holding the opposite position.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:49 PM
I couldn't speak to critical influence. I suspect that the critical theory surrounding metal may not have really been up to snuff circa 1988--it really took the Black album to move metal (real metal, anyway) out of the genre ghetto.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:50 PM
Stipulate that Westerberg's audience is allowed to call him an artist, but that he himself is not allowed to say "I am an artist". But he can still regard himself as an artist (and we all know that he does, he just can't say it, and he knows we know, but that we know too he can't say it—ad infinitum). This doesn't mean he's not an artist, it just means there's a game in which he can't say it. If he said it, the game would be over (arguably then, by showing himself to be inept, we'd have cause to call him not an artist).
Airlines know that it's no big deal if you arrive less than two hours before the departure time, and so do we. We can say so to our hearts' content, but the airlines can't come out and say "yeah, it doesn't really matter that much when you arrive; in fact, we're counting on a significant proportion arriving less than two hours before departure time". But we know that the airlines know it, and the airlines know that we know it, etc. They can't say it, but that doesn't mean that we actually all have to arrive ltthbtdt. It's a game.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:51 PM
I have to say, 158 gets it exactly right. When people like me get involved, it ruins everything.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:51 PM
ltthbtdt
pfffhttppt
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:57 PM
As far as I understand it, "what matters here" is in part the usefulness of considering something as art. I'm sceptical. I believe we have very different tastes, however, and nothing I'm likely to say or argue on the question will seem right to you. What I would say against myself, I think, is that determinedly insisting on the non-art status of a thing or practice is probably every bit as distorting, partial, and ideological (not to mention generative) as holding the opposite position.
Does anyone here hold the opposite position? Why not seek … a happy middle!
The "what matters here" bit in response to your use of that illustration from Berube of a certain sort of game, following which you said "that's why you don't call it art". I meant only: what are the relevant factors in that illustration? What about that game is why you don't call it art?
So in that same comment you said this: "Well, sort of. I'm sure I've expressed something like that. In truth, it's really more of a double game." Where "something like that" is something like sentiment expressed in the comment that was not entirely serious. I don't know where I'm going with this.
I'm about the most un-punk rock person around, so I don't know. Perhaps they would be earnest. How awful.
Can't follow all the layers of possible indirection here.
(arguably then, by showing himself to be inept, we'd have cause to call him not an artist)
Confound you, misplaced modifier!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:58 PM
semi-orchestral style
Sounds like PROG PROG PROG GROUP PROGGY PROG to me.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 12:59 PM
Sounds like PROG PROG PROG GROUP PROGGY PROG to me.
Yeah, after Metallica started bringing in the Mellotrons, it all went straight to Yesville.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:00 PM
In the second Katamari game you can set the levels to whatever song you want. There's no need to play the cowbear level just to hear "Everlasting Love", like there would be in the original game.
The sumo level with "DISCO PRINCE" is something I've done over and over again with no real goal in mind. Art?
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:01 PM
I'm so glad that 93 got posted, because I really didn't want to try to summarize the end of Disc One of FF7. Woot! But yes, many people I know wept at the end of that disc, and 93 gets it exactly right: it's not the cut-scene, it's the emotional attachment you've got to the character by that point. (Also, it's that you just lost your healer. Damnation.)
Cala, fun fact about World of Warcraft: the Alliance's 'specialty' class is the Paladin. So, you get to go play a plate-wearing holy warrior of Light, just like Arthas, and in the middle-range of leveling you're very likely to come across the last of the detention camps used to corral and 'tame' the orc race, and the paladins still guarding it. Yay! You're a concentration camp guard! That's basically my favorite thing about WoW, that it just leaves that gem of real-world politics and social issues and history right there, out on the map, waiting to be discovered.
So, OK, I say toss the question of whether they're 'art,' altogether. Can they still receive serious criticism? What is 'serious criticism,' anyway? A discussion of a thing and the audience's experience of it, and their relevance to society? To a theme? To culture? To shared experience? I guess what I'm asking is, what is an example of 'serious criticism' that demonstrates what Klosterman means? Can those of us who are familiar with a game apply the same model - or a similar one, or at least some core critical principles from it and other criticism - to that game?
Klosterman says that 'the meaning of most art is usually found within abstractions,' and that 'video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequences of free will.' I'm still not entirely clear on what he means, what he thinks serious criticism of a videogame would look like. Is it a discussion of how the end of Disc One, FF7, turns on the common experience of losing loved ones and accepting mortality? Is it a discussion of how W3 demonstrates vert viscerally the slippery slope of paranoia + self-preservation + self-righteous morality, and ways in which that might inform the players' opinions of the political Right in America today? Is it one side of a conversation about the freedom to do what one wants in GTA leaves the player free to test their own potential moralities, time and again, and learn something about themselves from the experience?
Because if that's what he means, I think there's a bunch of us already doing it, right here in this thread. We just don't get paid to say it. If that's what he wants, then great. I would take that job any day. But as Idealist (comity!) and others have said, it's going to be a matter of letting time pass for videogames to get that treatment, for various cultural and economic and ultimately demographic reasons.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:08 PM
I would argue that all conventional narratives are goal-oriented, even for the audience.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:09 PM
I would argue that all conventional narratives are goal-oriented, even for the audience.
You know who would agree with you? J. David Velleman!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:11 PM
177 gets it right.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:11 PM
I'm not familiar with Velleman.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:13 PM
170: I see. That seems right. So what it is about the game that actually matters (for the artist, not the airlines), is that it imposes certain restrictions, upholds certain values, at the expense of others. I'm arguing in favor of those that produce the work I like. Those who want to break the fetters and release the shackles are arguing in favor of work I don't like. So it's easy to pick sides.
(Please note: this is a little more baldly stated than anything I actually believe strongly, though I do think it contains an element of truth in that criticism, calling things art, etc., helps shape practice through selective distortion.)
Just saw 173 in preview. Quickly:
"determinedly insisting on the non-art status of a thing or practice is probably every bit as distorting, partial, and ideological (not to mention generative) as holding the opposite position."
Does anyone here hold the opposite position?
In light of all of the people getting upset by my urging that video games not be considered as art, yes, I think some people do.
"I'm about the most un-punk rock person around, so I don't know. Perhaps they would be earnest. How awful."
Can't follow all the layers of possible indirection here.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be that unclear. When it comes to music, I've been insisting on a non-art trash aesthetic of sorts, to which I thought you were referring with "not punk rock?". And of course, it's silly to think of me as determining what's punk rock. I was acknowledging that. Then I remembered some old post here about earnestness, and how awful it was. It struck me that someone seriously engaged with their work as art and unselfconscious about it might be earnest, which I also often find icky, so I included that reference.
Anyway, I'm out of here in a few minutes. I've got to get back to RI so I can make an appointment to decide whether or not to make an offer on a Cape with white vinyl siding in Pawtucket. Très punk rock.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:15 PM
I would argue that all conventional narratives are goal-oriented
You're making this argument here?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:16 PM
I just said that I would, I didn't say where or when.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:16 PM
I have more I want to say (as ever), but I too must be off. Ah well.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:18 PM
I have more I want to say (as ever), but I too must be off. Ah well.
Practicing for your defense so early, Wolfson?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:22 PM
OT: Weiner, I just saw this: Business Profs Rethinking Ethics Classes. Didn't know if it was something you'd come across.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:24 PM
Do you have to do a defense?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:27 PM
SCMT, I hadn't, thanks.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:28 PM
187 - "and even the philosophy department"
Heh.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:28 PM
This actually parallels the advice I gave to someone I knew who was heading to business school.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:30 PM
Sounds like PROG PROG PROG GROUP PROGGY PROG to me.
Yeah, except the albums aren't annoyingly twee.
Actually I suppose you could make a connection from King Crimson to Hawkwind to all sorts of British Seventies Metal acts to Metallica and others. I suppose you could define a subgenre of Metal as "Prog Metal," but it seems like fairly pointless thing to do, since at a certain point it all becomes an amorphous soup of influences.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:32 PM
it's going to be a matter of letting time pass for videogames to get that treatment, for various cultural and economic and ultimately demographic reasons
What are those reasons, and how much time has to pass? Pong came out before Run DMC, and hip-hop has arrived as a genre.
Someone above mentioned JC Herz, and I think her writing on video games comes as close to criticism as you're likely to find. I think the reason you don't find something that reads much more like literary or artistic criticism has little to do with the genre not being sufficiently developed in some technical sense or popular yet among the right demographics. Instead, there are structural elements of games that don't exactly prohibit criticism—although, as people have illustrated with the emphasis on plots and the like, the urge is irresistable to dissolve out the elements of the game that can be analyzed in terms of other genres that are more familiar (criticizable); instead, the structural elements encourage other more appropriate responses, typically service journalism. (Put another way, why aren't there walkthroughs for symphonies?)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:33 PM
Pong came out before Run DMC, and hip-hop has arrived as a genre.
The relevant comparison of Pong would be music, not hip-hop, no?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:35 PM
Hey, I'm still here!
I suppose you could define a subgenre of Metal as "Prog Metal," but it seems like fairly pointless thing to do, since at a certain point it all becomes an amorphous soup of influences.
There actually is a subgenre called "prog metal", but it's the wankiest aspects of prog combined with the wankiest aspects of metal: Dream Theater are the leading exponents. Persons such as myself, who think that "post rock" was just the prog rock that dare not speak its name, are inclined to consider that post-metal acts, and really lots of other metal genres, are basically already prog with more heavy.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:35 PM
I had in mind Robust McManlyPants's criteria for an emerging genre ("for various cultural and economic and ultimately demographic reasons"), and it struck me that hip-hop has in the recent past succeeded this test (become commercially viable?). Anyway, it depends on whether you allow video games to fall under the heading of games, doesn't it? Since it makes me not wrong, I do.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:40 PM
195: I knew that. I forgot. Dream Theater = teh wank.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:40 PM
(Put another way, why aren't there walkthroughs for symphonies?)
There are. Sometimes in the program; sometimes the conductor will talk about the symphony and have the orchestra play sections to illustrate what's going to go on, etc.
This looks like an interesting "game", and apparently it influenced the completely great game Earthbound a lot. There was a different post on metafilter about a supposedly amazing early console game but! I can't locate it.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:42 PM
I'm really leaving for real now. Bye!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:44 PM
Earthbound! Aw. That was my little brother's favorite game of all time.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:46 PM
193, I think 33 addresses your demographic question to some extent.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:48 PM
196: I think Pants is right, so I fall the other way. I suspect there was criticism of hip-hop relatively soon after its arrival on the larger scene, in no small part because there was an already developed vocabulary with which to discuss music, and even closely related music.
Can we all agree that "Pants" as a foreshortened "Robust McManlyPants" is better than "RMP"?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:48 PM
"Pants" is one of the funniest words in the language.
Pants!
Shout it out, it's fun.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:50 PM
It's especially funny to our British friends, who think it means something different from what we think it means. And Tim definitely wins the nickname sweepstakes.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:51 PM
True, Armsmasher, Pong did come out before Run DMC. But popular music had been around for a long time when Run DMC came out. I don't consider it an apt comparison. Perhaps now we're to the Run DMC period of videogame history: there have been many games before, and a generation with sufficient memory of gameplay to be able to tie current games and their cultural significance and their cultural merit - the questions they ask, the emotions they evoke - to predecessors, creating a cultural genealogy in the same way by the time Run DMC were around there were critics who could draw from first-hand experience of hip-hop and other genres a musical genealogy that could trace hip-hop to specific figures and to specific musical styles and movements before itself. Had Run DMC manifested spontaneously in 1960, with nothing before it, it would have been much more difficult to work into an understanding of popular music culture.
In that sense, though, I agree with Cala in that videogames are their own thing and specific models of other objects of criticism won't necessarily work, but I think to some degree I disagree in that I think it's quite possible for someone who's better versed, culturally and critically, than I am to draw the genealogy from novels to text-based adventure to Knights of the Old Republic (as a random example), and for them to talk about the competing philosophies of the characters that surround you in that game and their significance when viewed in terms of real-world scenarios.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:51 PM
RMP has the advantage of suggesting manly Canadian policemanship.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:51 PM
RMP sounds like a cross between RMS and EMP.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:54 PM
Look at me! Look at me! I'm dancing on the head of a pin! Woo Hoo!
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:54 PM
Also, calling me "Pants" is totally A-OK.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:54 PM
RMP also refers to this abomination.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:55 PM
It's especially funny to our British friends, who think it means something different from what we think it means.
Does this mean that it was not a good idea to call a section of a paper that will be delivered in Australia (concerning an obviously unsatisfactory semantics for "My pants are on fire!") "Pantsed"? Yes, Australia ≠ Britain.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:56 PM
Look at me! Look at me!
Gabriel? Is that you?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:57 PM
Atta boy, Clarence!
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:58 PM
Joey D wins.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 1:59 PM
Was that actually a question of some kind, Weiner, or were you thinking with your keyboard?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:00 PM
It's a yes/no question.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:06 PM
205: Fair enough. I made the comparison because the argument seemed to have changed between one of where are the vg critics? to one of whether there ought to be any at all, and the hip-hop analogy seemed apt since rockist critics resisted it from the start.
And I imagine any writer versed in all those things could do what you ask for KotR, but I don't think that would be vg criticism in some categorical sense. What you're describing strikes me as similar to the subject of Mark Greif's great essay on the philosophy of pop as espoused by Radiohead. (He in fact begins with the thought, "I’ve wondered why there’s no philosophy of popular music.")
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:07 PM
Ah, I see, "yes" was not an answer to my own question but an acknowledgment that what followed was true and possibly relevant.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:08 PM
So, should I buy a used xbox or a used PS2? I've played both, think I like xbox better, but that might just be because I've used it more.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:10 PM
Argh! I was totally getting into that essay, when several paragraphs into it, I got this:
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:11 PM
210 - Come on, slol. I bet you have mad chili peppers.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:11 PM
I bet you have mad chili peppers.
Yeah, that's what squicks me out.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:15 PM
Katamari Damacy is Art. All else is artifice.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:17 PM
It's a yes/no question.
AFAIK, "pants" in UK-English refers to underpants, not trousers. I gather it is also used to refer to something that's just no good, i.e., "x is totally pants!"
And if I understand Google, this applies in Australia, too.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:20 PM
I side with JL here, so now everyone can hate on me. How much of this "video games are art" business is driven by the desire to legitimate one's preferred passtime? Why bother? People will take it seriously or not, and getting the "it's art" label isn't going to do much for that.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:22 PM
Sorry, Joe D. I have it at my house somewhere, I think. I'll look for it. In the meantime: IKEA walkthrough.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:23 PM
getting the "it's art" label isn't going to do much for that
Isn't this essentially identical to the "x is / not a sport" argument?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:23 PM
"Games" seems like a perfectly legitimate label. Who'd rather be an "artist" than a "gamemaster"?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:24 PM
w/d - depends on the style of game you prefer. Their libraries largely overlap, but the Xbox has a stronger FPS selection and the PS/2 has a stronger RPG selection. Otherwise, there are few exclusives. The PS/2 library is larger overall, as well, with many more imports available (Microsoft has totally dropped the ball on the Japanese market), but many of them might not be to your tastes. I would recommend heading down to a videogame store (not Best Buy or its ilk, but something like Gamestop or EBgames or the like) and perusing the shelves to compare them side by side.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:24 PM
224 -- so what about "Pantsed" which in American English is the past tents or passive voice of the verb "to pants", i.e. to pull down somebody's trousers -- would this meaning come through to a British audience? This is what I interpret 221 to be asking.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:25 PM
yes. Shouting "Risk is a sport" does not get one's head out of the toilet.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:25 PM
Er, uh, I mean 211.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:26 PM
Shouting "Risk is a sport" does not get one's head out of the toilet.
Let us heed the voice of experience.
Posted by Sam K | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:27 PM
would this meaning come through to a British audience
Kind of. "Pants/ed" means so many more things to the UK-English speaker, though.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:27 PM
I first read the last sentence of 228 as, "Who'd rather be an 'artist' than an 'armsmasher'?"
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:27 PM
How much of this "video games are art" business is driven by the desire to legitimate one's preferred passtime
I neither paint, play video games nor sing (if that's the term) hip hop music, but I can see them all as being art. That said, "People will take it seriously or not, and getting the "it's art" label isn't going to do much for that. certainly seems true.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:28 PM
Rap! You rap in hip-hop!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:30 PM
I've actually never played Risk. I meant it as a warning, should I ever encounter any of you gamers IRL. But I do sing a good hip-hop.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:31 PM
Rap! You rap in hip-hop! I guess I should have been able to figure that our [hangs head in shame].
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:31 PM
228: But 'games' has some negative connotations. Don't play games with me. Children play games. Part of 'why do we want to call videogames 'art'?' might be because 30-year-olds don't like having things they play trivialized. (compare 'graphic novel' and 'comic book'.)
And I would argue that labelling something can determine whether someone will take it seriously. But like Joe Drymala, I will leave my argument floating around in counterfactual land.
But it might also be that the consumers of video games aren't 14 any more, and they also read literature and appreciate art, and see parallels between those pasttimes and more complex games.
I say PS2, but I haven't played much XboX. I just don't like their controllers. Which is not a reason.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:32 PM
I sing the hip-hop electric.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:32 PM
'Smasher, that IKEA walkthrough is brilliance.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:36 PM
I don't know if I already brought this up several dozen times, but I'm half an hour shy of quitting my job to write freelance—my dream, y'all!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:37 PM
(243 not in response to anything at all, except that I only have one half-hour of real work left to do, and I'm not even doing that much.)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:38 PM
It's got a good beat and you can hop to it.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:38 PM
my dream, y'all!
Hook 'em, bro.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:38 PM
Woo! Smash on, baby!
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:38 PM
Follow the dream.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:42 PM
I had written out a list of the last five or six games that I'd played and really enjoyed, so that people could examine it and tell me what to do. But what I learned from that list is that I've mostly played games that were very popular at the time I was playing them and that other people had bought for systems they had. Basically the only exception to that pattern is Soul Calibur for Dreamcast.
On preview: I hope you have a smashing good time with that.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:42 PM
Woo! Yay for 'Smasher!
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:43 PM
congrats Smasher.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:46 PM
236 -- Do you consider the playing of video games to be an artistic pursuit? I haven't followed the thread that close but I thought people were talking about the creation of video games. But I could totally get into your idea -- if indeed your idea is what I am thinking it is. Also: what if we think of video games as sport?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06-16-06 2:47 PM
To put this discussion to bed, I humbly submit that