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.
I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's argument that all philosophical arguments are linguistic arguments. This debate is, at heart, an argument about what art is, one that has been going on at great and tedious length before video games ever existed.
If I draw a stick figure, is it art? Well, obviously, yes, but is it Art? That is to say, is it essentially the same thing as a painting by a master or are they fundamentally different in some way? Do we embrace a wider definition of art where all human creative endeavor is art or do we single out some forms of expression as distinguishing itself in some way that makes it Art? And if so, are there video games that are distinguished in this way?
I remember there's an argument that Versailles, the Sistine chapel, many works of music etc aren't art because they were made on commission and often to spec and are therefore mere "design" and it wasn't until the 19th century that anything but amateur art existed (I think this is a dumb argument.)
I wonder if this person thinks that art simply does not exist since it's all made for profit.