Ballet uses sound, visual design and movement to convey a story to its audience, and their skill in completing that story can be measured in applause.
Videogames use sound, visual design and movement to convey a story to its players, and those players’ skill in completing that story can be measured in points, and/or receiving a specific ending at the end of the game.
Videogames are a storytelling art, just as much as ballet is. Winning and points aren’t as much of a deciding factor in the question of “art vs. sport” as they might appear. Is a ballet competition to score a prized place in a troupe any less artistic than a recital or a public performance?
Yes…and I would say Bandersnatch is not good art, at least from a game perspective. It’s almost as if it was created by someone that considers film/TV art but doesn’t understand games post 1963
How is neither a valid representation of an artistic creation? A Call of Duty game started with an idea, had writers create a story, a world had to be designed, characters created, actors hired, and so on. It qualifies even if it’s cynically produced low art designed to appeal to an unsophisticated but reliable demographic. It’s no less valid than something like What Remains of Edith Finch.
The same can be said for Police Academy 7 or whatever American Pie movie that last got made despite the series having nothing new to say after the first film.
Art doesn’t have to be good, interesting, sophisticated, or even thought provoking to be art.
Plenty of games have purely incidental or just not very interesting connections between the act of play and the story(and in some cases this is a deliberate virtue carefully cultivated, when an interface is designed to let you perform as well as possible in the mechanics of the game and otherwise stay out of your way); but it isn’t universally the case.
Something like Papers Please is a fairly visible example: if it were actually a game about winning at border control its cluttered, claustrophobic, shabbily skeuomorphic interface would be a complete design atrocity that could have been massively improved with a better information layout and some sensible hotkeys and other quality of life features.
Efficient passport processing isn’t actually the point, though, and the gameplay is all about putting you in the position of a petty functionary who is going to make mistakes under time pressure and a welter of shifting requirements in his shabby little border box; a task to which the limitations of the interface are perfectly suited; and presumably intended.
I’d also, personally, give credit in this area to Spec Ops: The Line, though I cannot put my finger on exactly what it did to succeed(though the apocalyptic Dubai setting is arguably underrated, at its high points, compared to ones like Bioshock’s Rapture): mechanically it’s a not terribly distinguished shooter; but it sticks out in my mind because it’s the only game I’ve ever quit because it managed to make me feel too compromised by the actions of the player character to continue. I’ve played a lot of games where the player character is a bad person, or at least a morally ambiguous antihero who does bad things and is kept from being a plain bad person mostly by sympathetic writers; but that’s the only one that successfully bridges the gap between me and the character and made me feel bad for even playing as them.
So, when I reached the point where the only way forward was particularly unpleasant, I just decided that, while the white phosphorus section might be mandatory for finishing the game, finishing the game was not mandatory. Mechanically the gameplay certainly had skill elements and victory conditions and similar game stuff; but it was also integral to a level of engagement with the story that made me feel like I was no longer an observer, which seems artistically relevant.
I don’t think that disproves my argument. Videogames tell a story, and storytelling is an art. The mechanics of the medium may vary, but the different components combine to create a narrative. A novel follows one path from beginning to middle to end; a videogame is less linear, but you still progress through actions and choices through a tale. Simple games are win or lose. Complex games will end in different ways, depending on the player’s input, and those endings may vary quite a bit depending on the player’s successes and failures. It’s still a story, and stories are art.
Well, now we’re debating the semantic nuance between art and craft, and that’s where I bow out of the conversation. It always boils down to this, and people start talking in circles. Speaking of which…
I like SMBC, but I think this is a really weak take. Sure, no two people agree on the precise definition of “art”. That doesn’t mean the word has no meaning. No two people agree on the dividing line between red and pink, but that doesn’t mean colours don’t exist or even that red and pink are indistinguishable or meaningless.
If you collate everyones’ definitions of “art” there is substantial overlap. It would land somewhere around “creative product of minimal pragmatic value, intended to communicate an emotional message”.
Now everyone is gonna argue with what I just wrote and we start talking in circles again, which is why I’ve spent the past 25 years having this conversation, yet swear every time this is the last time.
A lot of the time, when people talk about what is and is not “art,” they are really talking about what is and is not “good” “art.” A child’s scribbles and the works of Rembrandt are both art, but only one hangs in museums.
I think it is more useful to discuss “is it any good” as opposed to “is it art.”
Good by what metric? Technical competence? There’s plenty of art out there that few would consider “good”, but for some folks it makes that deep, cathartic emotional connection. (Black velvet Elvis, I’m looking at you). That kid’s drawing probably means more to the person displaying it on their fridge than a Rembrandt does.
Societies have spent ages trying to come up with an answer for that. It’s the discussion that matters, and this part is a lot more significant than “what is art.”
ETA: I say that this discussion is more important because “art or not” does not allow for degrees, while “good or bad” practically demands degrees.
I guess I don’t see any semantic nuance here. Art is a form creative expression. Whether it’s any good or not, or whether it has any sort of intrinsic value either culturally or otherwise is completely subjective.
It’s a great game. Very underrated and one of those titles that really sticks with you long after you play it. Part of the reason it works is because it’s essentially Heart of Darkness.
It is completely subjective, but whether there is intrinsic cultural value or not, cultures still do make decisions about the works of art that form a cultural canon, that children study in school. For better or worse, we still study the works of Shakespeare and Dickens hundreds of years later, while not studying other contemporary works. Why?
The processes by which works of art are admitted into the canon, by which we choose what to pass on to our children, those processes are very important.
We have to have one of these conversations scheduled every few months. Right now it’s ‘what is Art?’ It’ll be knife sharpening then Mac Vs Windows time again soon enough
That sounds highly localized to a specific art school subculture - I’ve never encountered it. I mean, the art world likes paintings for commercial reasons (they’re easy to transport, store, sell, steal and use for money laundering…), but even if we’re talking about institutional/cultural biases based on traditional art media (there’s still corners of art institutions that look down their noses at photography as “new media,” much less anything invented after the 18th century), sculpture and painting are very much treated as being on par with each other. Then there’s the other set of prejudices against “the crafts” that dismisses or diminishes work based on cloth or weaving, etc., but that sounds like a different thing.
