Games are art. Many may be very bad art, and many gamers may not give one groat about the question. But games are art.
Roger Ebert published an article two days ago following up on the ongoing discussion he kicked off about a year ago on whether games are art. He said “no” a year ago, now he says “not high art.” His main opponent in this debate is Clive Barker, here.
Game bloggers and journalists are continuing to weigh in on the subject (here, for instance, and here).
I figure I’ll just add my own quick opinions.
Games in general and video games in particular are obviously a distinctive kind of art, although arguing about what is and isn’t a game is just as valuable as arguing about what is and isn’t art. (That is, it’s very valuable for trying to understand what a game is, useless if you’re just doing it to make some peripheral point.)
Games may not yet have reached their full potential as art, but they’re an extremely exciting form of it. Like movies, some games experiment with technique and craft more than art. But also like movies, modern video games share something with all other forms of art—visual artistry, music, narrative—while adding the very exciting element of interactivity.
It’s this interactivity which, for some bizarre reason, forms the crux of Ebert’s argument against games as art. The artist’s work is where art begins, but the audience—the players, when the artwork is a game—are where art happens. The Mona Lisa is much more than Da Vinci’s paint spread on poplar wood. It’s the crowds in the Louvre, the great capers and thefts, the doctoral dissertations, the imitations and parodies, the games themselves
, and even things like The Da Vinci Code (which inspired a movie, a promotional game like the Bourne game, and endless debates and discussions).
The Mona Lisa is the emergent cultural phenomenon born of the painting, not the painting itself.
No other art genre has ever been so open to audience participation as games. No other art genre has the potential for emergent phenomena. Do games weaken the role of the artist? No more than Hollywood did. And in fact, all Hollywood and feature films really did was make it possible for collaborative art to come into its own. Great movies are the collaboration of directors, writers (too often undervalued), actors, and even suits who sign the checks.
Games are too, but more than anything else, they not only invite their audience to participate, they are art as audience participation.
So get out the chess board, the dice, or the Xbox, and let’s make some art!
July 23rd, 2007
Here’s a complete spoiler for today’s mission in the Ultimate Search for Bourne. The briefing informed me that I beat the CIA to Bourne’s locker. Here’s a complete spoiler for the mission.
The locker had a video I need Mustapha Nayet, the expert videographer, to descramble, so today’s mission involves contacting Nayet and asking for help. So it’s back to the Instant Messenger. If you need it spoiled: using Nayet’s Dater Notes profile, I find that his handle is probably mouslelion and assume that the underlined phrase Vive le maroc! is his passphrase.
Sure enough, Nayet chats me with two short IMs. They include a link (broken between the two messages but hot in the first) to a YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF8nFpSMUDU.
Watching the video leaves little doubt of what must be transmitted in the communication panel, but here’s a complete spoiler: The video involves looking at a scrap of paper in a garbage can with the word Treadstone on it, a flier on a lamppost with All on it, and a box of paper clips with the camera focusing on the LIES of “office supplies.”
Thus, transmitting Treadstone All Lies in the communication panel (I don’t think capitalization matters) solves the challenge.
You don’t actually need to follow the steps to finish if you’re not interested in going to Dater Note s and Youtube. You can just click Transmit, enter the password, and click Okay, and you’re done.
Incidentally, “Treadstone” is the top-secret CIA program that featured prominently in the first two Bourne movies. (No point in spoiling the plot details of those movies here. If you want to learn more, you can watch them yourself: The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy at Amazon, or at Netflix here and here. Or read the Wik article.) I’m not sure how it can turn out to be “All Lies.” Perhaps that’s just a cloak-and-dagger password, but I think the more the events of the game tie in with the film, the more fun it is. (Of course, we don’t want the game actually revealing major plot details!)
My last camera placement (random, although a commenter thinks the videos may hold a clue) did catch a short of Bourne. Today, with two cameras to place, I chose (more or less at random; I realy didn’t see any connections to any of the possible locations in Nayet’s videos or profile) Marshan Stadium and Rue de Fez. So far, my random placements have done reasonably well; we’ll see if that applies today.
July 23rd, 2007