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.
Yeah saying an entire medium has no artistic value because some of it is bad makes no sense. Does the mcu remove art status from film? Does Chuck Tingle's book "pounded in the butt by my own butt" mean books aren't art? Does someone's sonic oc fanart mean drawing isn't art? Some games are definitely not of artistic value, but some definitely are. Games that are designed for story as the main goal very much have artistic merit. Even some that are designed around gameplay first can be evaluated artistically, like the many, many dark souls video essays on youtube. Only pure gameplay games like fifa or counter strike are not really art at all.
Actually, that's the book that definitively proves that books are art.
unironically agreed
I think competitive games and sports are actually ripe constructs for critical analysis in similar ways to literature or art. Differentiating 'art' from 'ritual' is such a weird thing we do with contemporary cultures. The cordoning off of these significant cultural practices from this type of critique is quite unfortunate.
Yeah fair point. Look at gymnastics vs ballet for example. Both are things consisting of highly coordinated movement and requiring much practice, but one is considered significantly more "art" despite being not that different. I'm sure there's more examples, but the is where I can think of a distinction being most arbitrary. My initial comment was not really concerned with why that perception exists, only that it does exist.