Tuesday, May 04, 2010

I can't get the site to load properly, but here's why...

...I think Ebert is wrong that Video Games can never be an artform.

My basic belief is that Art is Communication. That's its reason to exist. There is nothing in the annals of artistic history to suggest designed or mass produced objects cannot have aesthetic aspects to them, or artistic value. A car's design, and thus the car itself can be a work of art. A building can be a work of art. After all, that's why Architecture is considered an artform, even though there are engineering aspects to it, practical concerns.

Participation is no barrier to something being an art. Theatre can be participatory, and so can ritual. There can be art to interactions, as in a debate, where words are chosen carefully. Rhetoric is an artform, to be certain.

Interaction does not take something away from being art. I could cite the avante-garde artists out there who have people push buttons or do something else, but let's try this from a more theoretical perspective.

If I were to design a panorama in a computer, in video, or as a wraparound mural, aesthetics and art certainly would come into play. Is the scene bright, dark, lovely, tragic, nasty, gory, or whatever? You couldn't escape from questions both of artistic skill, and artistic merit.

Would it change if I made this panorama into a 3-D computer generated landscape? Certainly not. Issues of perspective, of occlusion, of general ambience would come into play.

Okay, so what if we set a game in here? The game could be story based or non-story based. If you took it down the non-story route, you could make a maze, or make it like one of those games you see online, where moving a certain number of elements together would clear them. Even so, questions of appearance, kinetics, animation, and other matters would require the judgment of those developing the game.

There is no scientific way to create this product, everything depends, like most artistic endeavors do, on the judgment of the artist synchronizing in some way with the experience of the audience.

In other words, you need artists to make a game work. Since game-making mainly serves a recreational purpose in our society, it's not even really a question of whether the audience member's experience of the work is relevant, it's practically the whole point. If the game's experience doesn't move the audience in some way, it's not doing its job, and people are going to lose money on it.

I have no doubt every new artform prompts questions from the practitioners and appreciators of the old as to whether it was really art, but I think video game design has been an art from the start. The question is whether video games themselves have been art, and I think the answer is yes. It's been a developing art, though, and is admittedly a young art.

An art, nonetheless, it is.