[Kjorteo]

JJ has written several blog posts recently about video games as art (Flower, Pathologic, etc.) but there has yet to be a forum post for discussion. I've been itching for one since I wanted to contribute, but after not seeing one for long enough, I decided to just make it myself. I do hope no one minds!

If there is to be a discussion on this topic, the main thing I want to contribute to it is my recommendation of Mother 3, the ill-fated (in that Nintendo seems to have something against localizing it anywhere) third game in the Mother series (of which the SNES Earthbound is number two.) Fortunately, it now has a phenomenal fan translation that I quite honestly believe is better than anything they could hope to do with an official translation at this point.

Gameplay-wise, it's definitely a game--it hasn't attempted to sacrifice anything for the sake of being artistic. It's an RPG. If you've played Earthbound then, on a strictly gameplay level, you've pretty much played Mother 3. Stats, spells, that neat thing Earthbound did where your HP scrolls down and you don't actually die (even if you take mortal damage) until it reaches zero, etc. It also has a neat system where you can get extra hits in battle by rhythmically timing button presses to the beat of the music, and then takes advantage of that by later introducing some diabolical "hard versions" of songs with random pauses and other complexities specifically to throw off your combo. (Compare http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqp0ubzjt44 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw_Izr1Ylr8 .) It's a fairly typical but very solid RPG. No compromises on the gameplay, but there generally doesn't have to be that many for an RPG anyway.

At the same time, it has been described by some as the closest video games have yet come to literature, and I am tempted to agree. The story is passable RPG fare on the surface (save the world, some tear-jerker moments) but it's the subtle themes between the lines where it really shines. Mother 3 has a smaller world than most RPGs, with fewer random villages to visit on your quest--in fact, there's really one main village for most of the game--but it makes up for it with more happening within that smaller world. Every time anything happens, talking to every random person all over again reveals a sort of sense of what's happening to the world as the plot progresses. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, there is a lot of subtext exploring the themes of progress and development, tight-knit communities versus self-absorbed strangers, and materialism. The message is occasionally unsubtle yet still very enjoyable (like how WALL-E asked its viewers to kindly hold still so it could beat them over the head with its point, but was still a fantastic movie anyway) and at other times is much more subtle but brilliant when you see it. That, the occasional brilliant stylistic touches (those who have actually played: consider, for example, the use of who is speaking and who is mute along with who the camera is focusing on to essentially pass on the "you're the main character now" torch in that scene between chapters 1 and 2,) and plenty of room for interpretation on one or two parts (there is no shortage of theories of things for which the doorknob is a metaphor, and TV Tropes has a fantastic theory I love enough to personally choose to believe and adopt regarding the identity of the dragon) really make it a thing of beauty.

Just make sure to be extremely plot-phobic if you're playing it looking for the art--that entire side of the game lies within its expression of what's happening to the world around you as time goes on, so talk to everyone at every turn before you further the plot so you don't miss anything.

[JJ]

I played the translated Mother 3 when I was in Japan, and I agree that it is a very beautiful game. It's so genuinely emotional, creative, and profound in its message, for all the reasons you stated. I liked the original Earthbound a lot, but I always thought it was a bit too absurd and incoherent to be a truly great RPG. Mother 3 takes so much of the magic of the first game and repackages it in a much more organized, purposeful way.

It's interesting, because the other game I played through in Japan was Final Fantasy 9. And that game is just one long cliche-fest, a total by-the-numbers Japan RPG that fails to evoke any sort of genuine emotion or attachment from the player. Mother 3 is so much more primitive, technologically speaking, but is so much more powerful due to brilliant writing.

But see, the problem is just that. The artistic appeal of a good RPG is related mostly to its plot. And the stronger the plot, the more linear it has to be, which compromises the gaming. Many final battles in RPGs, for instance, are very structured and controlled in order to ensure the game climaxes in exactly the right way. Intro sequences are very much the same. There's a lot of stuff the gamer cannot be trusted to control on his own.

RPGs basically just keep the player on a short leash throughout the experience. Sometimes you're let off the leash to battle some bad guys or navigate some dungeon, but then you're jerked back on the rails for a bunch of cinema sequences to ensure the plot continues to unfold as it should.

It begs the question as to whether or not the game would work just as well as a book or comic or movie, and whether the "gameness" of the product is in any way a prerequisite of the experience it gives to the player. I'd say no to the latter.

[Kjorteo]

I would say that you're right for a lot of RPGs, but Mother 3 in particular benefits from its "gameness" in a way that wouldn't apply to a movie/comic/etc. due to its pacing. Like I said, the best part about Mother 3 is its ability to talk to all the random people at every turn and use their reactions to get a feel for what's happening around you, the sense of change in the world as time goes on. In a non-interactive story like a movie or comic, there wouldn't be a convenient or effective way to shoehorn in all those miniature conversations with otherwise irrelevant NPCs without destroying the pacing. The fact that Mother 3 lets the player handle it him- or herself allows it to put so much more of that subtext between the plot points, rather than having to worry about making sure the plot keeps moving at a decent speed.

[Psudo]

Movies set the pace of action for you. Books give you a little control by letting you read as fast or slow as you'd like and, since it's all in your head anyway, decide to tweak your interpretation of things to match your individual style. Except, that is, for choose your own adventure books, the best of which are pretty much on par with average-quality video games for plot control and which also face the problem of frequently crappy writing. Games like Grand Theft Auto (so-called "sandbox games") give you an illusion of plot control by scattering the plot points around and letting you collect them (or not) in whatever order you'd like, but you still collect them until you have enough to move on to the next area and the next until you win. If a regular game is just counting to 10, a sandbox game is collecting all the numbers from 1 to 10. It's exactly the same except the order (and, as JJ said, the level of writing control).

What alternative is there, really, to a linear plot? A setting simulation, perhaps, where you can interact and alter the setting and see the consequences through until catastrophic failure or perfected success. But can that actually contain writing or properly be called a game? The Sim- series of games did that, and Microsoft Flight Simulator, both of which you just play until you're bored. Can that possibly be art?

[Kjorteo]

I think the problem here is what we're all counting as "art." If something with a linear non-changeable story can't be art, then literature can't be art. If we're pretty much sticking to art as paintings and sculptures and such, then no, video games can't do that, but then again, nothing but the paintings and sculptures and such can, really.

The other thing to consider is medium awareness. Whatever form a work takes--video game, literature, movie, comic, etc.--comes with advantages and disadvantages. Each medium has things you can only really do in that particular medium. This is true even counting the subtypes of written works. For example, I have a story I'm working on, the first chapter of which I have completed and released. (http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3153093 , I would be honored if anyone here were to read it.) I went with prose/novel form. This allows me to do a lot of inner monologue and thoughts and reflections from the narrator, and have scenes where very little happens externally (a character is by himself and just walks across the room while thinking about stuff) while being able to carry them with the inner thoughts and actions. The ability to do that would be completely lost if I had gone for, say, a screenplay. On the other hand, a more visual medium such as a film or comic would allow me to convey information about the scene immediately, something I definitely can't do in prose without completely killing the pacing by stopping to describe everything. (This is something I always found to be a drawback in J.R.R. Tolkien's writing style, for example, the excellence of that actual story if you can get through the dry presentation and its cultural impact and influence and such notwithstanding.)

So basically, pretentious and unanswerable "what is art?" question aside, I'm willing to acknowledge anything that A) has emotional impact/is beautiful/is...artistic like that (I'm going to file this under "really hard to explain but you guys know what I mean") and B) obviously takes advantage of its own medium. To go back to Mother 3, I would argue that it has at least as much artistic merit as a good book, and it has to be a video game due to the previously-mentioned between-the-plot-points subtext if the player goes looking for it, which would be next to impossible to translate to a non-interactive medium--it would wreck the pacing if included but destroy the beauty of the work entirely if not.

[Psudo]

I was casting doubt on whether something WITHOUT a linear, unchanging story could be "art." If it can't, a given video game must either be linear at some level or lose all chance of being art. I'm not certain of the answer myself.

I recognize video games as a medium have access to a self-paced world exploration capability that is utterly impossible with the written word. My point was that it might not be possible to create art out of only that self-paced exploration capability alone, without an underlying linear plot in there somewhere. I'm not totally sure, it's just an assertion I wanted to test. A setting exploration game could be compared to a painting, in which the viewer analyzes it at whatever pace, focusing on or ignoring parts at their whim. Perhaps it could be art in that sense.

If art is "anything that conveys a message brilliantly" than certainly many games are art. But there could be a whole new argument between whether a video game can be fine art or not. My ignorance of fine art is extreme enough to prevent me from speculating on that question at all.

The challenge facing video games is that the primary purpose is not to brilliantly convey a message (emotion, image, concept, argument, etc) but offer the player physical and strategic challenges and an easy, recreational reward. In that way, games are more like sports than art; the goal is to have fun or win, not to convey a message.

Or I could be an annoying and say "Art is anything artificial." =]

By the way, definitely read Kjorteo's story. It's pretty good, and maybe your readership will motivate him to work on it more.

[Psudo]

Roger Ebert (famed movie critic) has written an article defending his claim that "Video games can never be art." It then received a response from Kellee Santiago, the same games-as-art advocate that motivated Ebert's article. The whole exchange is quite relevant to this thread.

It suffers from the same primary limitation as our own discussion; art remains only vaguely and nebulously defined. Ebert's definition seems to be "an artificial, brilliantly moving experience", while Santiago's is once stated thus: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging."

Ebert's and my views run somewhat parallel. He delineates the difference between games and art along the same lines that I did, where I said "In that way, games are more like sports than art; the goal is to have fun or win, not to convey a message." whereas he says "One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome."

I think the similarity of our two arguments demonstrates the awkwardness of the conversation as a whole; there is so little basis for debate that a professional art critic and an ignorant layman use the same arguments. The question cannot reasonably be discussed while there is no mutual definition or ideological common ground from which to build.

In short, the question is meaningless.

[Scape]

Sessler's Soapbox: can games be art?

[JJ]

I actually had a long argument about this last night with my friend Graham. And it ultimately went nowhere, for all the reasons Psudo mentioned.

I honestly don't believe the games-as-art people have a very persuasive material case in their favor, in terms of being able to cite specific evidence. Reading their works, it seems so many of their arguments take the form of some appeal to technicality, as in "emerging art forms always sucks in their early stages," or some definition of art that is so broad ("it anything that makes you experience something") as to be useless.

I think it's the meta-argument surrounding this debate that is the real issue, and Ebert mentions it near the end. This is really just one subculture of people trying to claim legitimacy for a pastime they feel is unfairly maligned.

[Kjorteo]

Since we all seem to agree that this is a subject for which debate really isn't possible anyway, I'll just add a huge thank-you to Psudo for plugging my story like that.

[xerxes]

I don't think the argument can be as easily dismessed as an attempt to legitimize a commonly derided pastime. They amy not be artin in the traditional even modern sense, but there are a handful of games ,like the ones mentioned, that are very artistic in their design and that can't be denied.

Some have been mentioned before, but I would add Bioshock, Braid, and Ico to the list. Each of those games (and braid especially) are visually creative and spectacular not to mention the creativity of their respective stories. Braid in particilar, has some of the best writing I've ever read in a video game and the graphics are beautiful as well.

[Dayseed]

BioShock had an interesting story, but I wouldn't call it mind-blowing. When it comes to video games as art, I'd say they're more akin to a book. I can imagine in my mind what God's Gardeners really look like; there's some freedom there. Movies are set in stone leaving no creative interpretation for me.

Video games can do the same thing. I'd suggest anybody out there giving Heavy Rain a try. It blurs the line between art and video game.

That said, there are other notable entries: Arkham Asylum was like playing a comic book (screw you Genesis Comix Zone and your stupid second level I could never beat). Among others too...time for Lost!

[BartSimpson]

Video games ARE art! My goodness, any one old enough remembers thinking how breathtaking it was the first time they got to look at Myst.

[SparcVark]

I'd agree that the ever-shifty definition of "art" is a key player in making the debate so inconclusive. My own definition of art is a creative work that evokes strong emotion in its audience. I'd probably qualify it that the emotion be what the creator or creators intended, and that it accomplish the emotional effect through skill, rather than shock or cheap button-pushing.

The definition puts a lot of the decision as to what constitutes "art" in the mind of the audience, but I think there's always a subjective element to this. Is a given movie "art"? Is a given piece of music "art"? People will disagree.

For me, the bigger question is "should video games be *trying* to be art?" I can think of a few games that moved me enough to be considered art to me - ICO, and the first Silent Hill game are the first that come to mind, with Shadow of the Colossus a close second. Besides being well-done, the thing that stands out about these games is that they are short. Silent Hill runs about seven hours, ICO about the same, and Shadow of the Colossus maybe nine.

Compare these to games that never get brought up when people are looking for games to call art, but I have enjoyed playing for long periods of time - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Total War series of games, the Civilization games, Morrowind, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games on the console. I've probably sunk hundreds of hours into these, and they continue to hold my interest. I've actually learned quite a bit from the games, Alpha Centauri in particular. Some of the games I've had the most fun with are either sims with no discernible plot (Silent Hunter 4) or shooters with cardboard plots (Rainbow Six Vegas). What's wrong with these titles? Should every game strive to convince doubters that it is "art", even if this results in a large number of games that fail to entertain?

I think that the problem is that video games labor under an intense sense of inferiority. A lot of their fans want, almost *need* to be seen as co-equal with other forms of art. Particularly movies, where the games industry at times seems to have an intense, unrequited schoolgirl crush on Hollywood. Look at today's Penny Arcade, where the authors devote their news page to harshing on Roger Ebert's blog post. A confident culture would agree to disagree and move on. Can you imagine Roger Ebert devoting his print column to bitching about Penny Arcade's review of "God of War 3"?

[BartSimpson]

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Given Ebert's questionable taste in movies Ebert, of all people, should appreciate this.