like it seems fucking obvious, right? any medium that can contain degrees of symbolism, has the potential to provoke viewer interpretation, has the potential to contain specific or vague messaging from the creator, and just generally can be used for self-expression has the potential to be an art form.
Why the fuck is/was this a point of discussion? to the point of heated discourse, even! Was it just the most geriatric people they could find on the street? Weird snobs?
like, the second games started having narratives this should have been a moot topic. why the fuck did Kojima parrot it?
reading his statement, i feel there's two different discourses happening, the already solved (:lt-dbyf-dubois:) point of "can video games be art" and the more interesting question of "does the video game industry currently have a culture that promotes artistic endeavor over mass appeal"
to which my personal answer is 'no, but we're slowly getting there with the rise of auteurism (despite some of the problems inherent to it) in acclaimed development teams (:praise-it:) and the indie scene's entirety, and we'll see if it starts to push against the corporate board schlock in the future.'
but still, god damn, half of this debate comes from the same place as the video games cause violence bit and the other half is just people being annoyed with call of duty schlock, which, fair. but why is the former even a debate that happened/is happening. i'm genuinely curious.
part of the concern is that people consider being 'game-like' to be of less value then art when that makes very little sense. they are both forms of cultural expression.
People do this dance with every new media form that comes out. Novels went through this, movies went through this, many music genres were derided as unworthy of hte term "art".
Yes all forms of art must initially struggle to be recognized as art, but they don’t become art until they are socially accepted as such. Novels, films and music were not art previous to their broad acceptance as art. It was this very struggle for acceptance that eventually led to them being accepted. We shall see if the same happens with video games.
I think the disconnect is you all seem to have a platonic idea of what art is, some unchanging perfect ideal. It seems weird to you that something could be not art one day, and then art the next. But that’s how it is, art is subjective and descriptive - not a perfect platonic idea floating in the ether
People don’t just consider it, it seems to be universally understood that the more puzzle/task/competitive a game becomes the less it fits into “art” and the more it fits into game, which seem to be mutually distinct categories that oppose each other