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Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment ar

Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure. Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking. There are no video game equivalents (yet, one would hope) of, say, Bach, Rembrandt, or Bernini. Maybe someday there will be, but not today. edit: To the downvoters, I'm saying all this as a pretty avid gamer. video games are a very young medium and a hopefully in a few centuries I will be wrong.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it. Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
- voldacar 6y ago
  No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft. My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature. I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful. And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Awesome, I apologise for judging your ignorance then. I have studied Art. I have an "O"-level in Art History. I have been to famous museums, and looked at world-class paintings, sculptures, etc. I mean, I've stood in front of the Night Watch in the Reiksmuseum, and it was great. I get that. I sketch (badly), and I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into that. It's a great piece of art, and it moved me. But to say that that, awesome as it is, is more "Art" than any video game... is bollocks. It's just not true.
- dang 6y ago
  Please stop calling names in HN comments. It's against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Nasty swipes like 'Have you ever heard of "classical" music?' aren't ok either (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636). We're trying to have curious conversation here, not sharp elbows.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    True. My apologies. My only excuse is that I'm passionate about this.
    - dang 6y ago
      Understood, and appreciated!
navait 6y ago
You were downvoted, but I think you're right. I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can. Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it. Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it. I think this is more of a money issue. in a highly linear game, every dollar is spent on content that every player will experience. if you have even three choices in the game that depend on each other meaningfully, you suddenly have eight possible endings and several additional plot paths on the way there. so you have to do several times as much development work to achieve the same level of polish, but each player will probably only experience one or two of the paths. they'll still only pay ~$60 for it.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  I have given up on getting a good story out of emergent gameplay and sandbox-y games. Bioshock 1 & 2 is about as good as it's going to get with regards to producing a good story that can go multiple ways. Those games moved me like very few songs or books ever did.
  - voldacar 6y ago
    Dwarf fortress is a pretty good stochastic story generator, it's head and shoulders above anything else in that vein. But yeah, those kinds of stories will never really be quite as focused or meaningful as human-crafted narrative
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
Video games developers employ a huge number of artists, musicians, sculptors, cinematographers and architects. All of whom produce what would on a daily basis be called "art". It is a strange kind of alchemy to put all that art in a box at which point it becomes Not Art. (also ignoring the whole 20th century modernist questioning of "what is art, anyway" involving all kinds of installations, found art, outsider art, signed soup cans, prints, International Klein Blue, and so on)
manifestsilence 6y ago
Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A: The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall) Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb) Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies) Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane) A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall. This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one. This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.
- voldacar 6y ago
  Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.
Alekhine 6y ago
You should take a look at Pathologic. If you're looking for high art in games, that's what I'd recommend. Watch Hbomberguy's video on YouTube if you're curious.
- voldacar 6y ago
  Thanks, I will definitely check that out.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it. Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.

voldacar 6y ago
No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft. My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature. I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful. And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Awesome, I apologise for judging your ignorance then. I have studied Art. I have an "O"-level in Art History. I have been to famous museums, and looked at world-class paintings, sculptures, etc. I mean, I've stood in front of the Night Watch in the Reiksmuseum, and it was great. I get that. I sketch (badly), and I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into that. It's a great piece of art, and it moved me. But to say that that, awesome as it is, is more "Art" than any video game... is bollocks. It's just not true.
dang 6y ago
Please stop calling names in HN comments. It's against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Nasty swipes like 'Have you ever heard of "classical" music?' aren't ok either (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636). We're trying to have curious conversation here, not sharp elbows.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  True. My apologies. My only excuse is that I'm passionate about this.
  - dang 6y ago
    Understood, and appreciated!

navait 6y ago

You were downvoted, but I think you're right. I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can. Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it. Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.

leetcrew 6y ago
> Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it. I think this is more of a money issue. in a highly linear game, every dollar is spent on content that every player will experience. if you have even three choices in the game that depend on each other meaningfully, you suddenly have eight possible endings and several additional plot paths on the way there. so you have to do several times as much development work to achieve the same level of polish, but each player will probably only experience one or two of the paths. they'll still only pay ~$60 for it.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
I have given up on getting a good story out of emergent gameplay and sandbox-y games. Bioshock 1 & 2 is about as good as it's going to get with regards to producing a good story that can go multiple ways. Those games moved me like very few songs or books ever did.
- voldacar 6y ago
  Dwarf fortress is a pretty good stochastic story generator, it's head and shoulders above anything else in that vein. But yeah, those kinds of stories will never really be quite as focused or meaningful as human-crafted narrative
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

Video games developers employ a huge number of artists, musicians, sculptors, cinematographers and architects. All of whom produce what would on a daily basis be called "art". It is a strange kind of alchemy to put all that art in a box at which point it becomes Not Art. (also ignoring the whole 20th century modernist questioning of "what is art, anyway" involving all kinds of installations, found art, outsider art, signed soup cans, prints, International Klein Blue, and so on)

manifestsilence 6y ago

Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A: The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall) Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb) Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies) Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane) A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall. This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one. This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.

voldacar 6y ago
Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.

Alekhine 6y ago

You should take a look at Pathologic. If you're looking for high art in games, that's what I'd recommend. Watch Hbomberguy's video on YouTube if you're curious.

voldacar 6y ago
Thanks, I will definitely check that out.