Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kranar | Hacker News Reader

It's a perfectly good argument and I will admit that the distinction isn't particularly meaningful, but I don't consider video games to be art anymore than I consider basketball to itself be an art.

Video games make use of many arts, music, visuals, storytelling etc... but a video game is identified by the goal it sets for its player, its win condition, strategy, etc... the use of art is mostly to keep the player engaged and entertained instead of being the defining characteristic.

That said I also agree this may not be a particularly useful distinction and don't have very strong feelings about it.

View on HN

Are movies art? It seems to me that these two things are pretty analogous. Movies make use of many arts: music, visuals, storytelling, etc...

Some movies are junk that people consume passively in the background or to have a laugh and/or escape their troubles for a bit while they eat some popcorn. Some movies are masterpieces that make their audience feel complex feelings or look at the world differently.

Some drawings are vulgar juvenile doodles. Some drawings are masterpieces that make their audience feel complex feelings or see the world differently.

I think the same things could be said about video games.

> Are movies art? It seems to me that these two things are pretty analogous. Movies make use of many arts: music, visuals, storytelling, etc...

Movies also have an art form that makes them unique—cinematography & editing.

Video games have this as well — interactive cinematography and participatory narrative.

As just one of many excellent essays exploring these subjects, may I suggest Noah Caldwell Gervais on Kentucky Route Zero through the lens of participatory theater (spoilers, 1+ hr).

https://youtu.be/pW3qZfF6JfI

The classic counterargument is that game design (or, more broadly, interaction design) is the art medium, not the game. The game is the result.

A basketball player might not be an artist, but the person who created the idea of basketball could be called one, under this premise.

Now, most computer games are way more complicated than basketball due to what their platform allows, but the argument remains that the rules of interaction and the responses of the game to player's actions are designed to provoke some specific response, or even used contemplatively, even if you were to change what actual medium those responses were in (for example, text-based dungeon crawlers versus something more visual like For the King).

Basketball is the same game played over and over. The objective is to make the court and gameplay setting as consistent as possible across different locations so as to set the best players against each other in a competition.

Some video games fit this sport-like criteria and are competitive in nature. Others are storytelling experiences meant to be enjoyed for the sake of enjoyment. It's an interactive art form and some of the talent that goes into some of the most well-designed games is extraordinary and should be recognized as such.

People fall in love with some games based on their characters and storyline. If making people fall in love with a creation isn't art, then I don't know what art is.

Consider that you can fall in love with those same characters and that storyline independently of the video game itself. In other words you can delineate between the video game and the story/music/visuals.

Someone could take that story and present it as a film, or a novel, and you'd likely still fall in love with the characters.

But few people would claim to fall in love with the video game in and of itself, for example what you would get after stripping out the story, the visuals, the music. No one feels an emotional connection to game mechanics, goal setting, a scoring system, strategy etc... at least not the same kind of emotional connection that one associates with other art.

So that's why I say video games use art, just like advertisements use art, but I don't consider advertisements themselves to be art nor do I consider video games to be art.

A lot of things use art without being an art form themselves, and I suspect video games are one such thing.

> Consider that you can fall in love with those same characters and that storyline independently of the video game itself. In other words you can delineate between the video game and the story/music/visuals.

You can pull Mario out and put him in a movie, but it's not quite the same, is it? The character was created for the medium. The original Super Mario Bros, for example: classic work of art. The music is iconic. The character animation and mechanics are a joy and clearly had a sweeping, long-lasting influence on society. You would not have had that emotional connection with a fat plumber from Brooklyn without that experience. It's inseparable from the medium.

You can also pull a character from a novel (or other art form) and put them in a video game. I just played Witcher 3 recently: A beautiful in-depth, expansive game with a gripping storyline that was pulled from a book series. Is the book series no longer art because it jumped mediums? Nonsense. The experience of reading the story and playing the story are completely different. I treaded thousands of miles in an expansive virtual landscape and played the role of Geralt as I did so. I experienced his romances, fought his battles, and shaped the story and outcome based on decisions I made in the game. And I experienced art (voice acting, cinematography, architecture, landscaping, character design, etc) that would otherwise not exist without the game as a package. It doesn't make the book any less of an art form. It's all art.

Anyways I could go on and on with examples. Clearly not all games are created equal, just as not all paintings are created equal. And they do not all fit into neat, sport-like or Pong-like categorizations.

> The character was created for the medium.

This is literally true: Most of the salient features in Mario's visual design (cap, moustache, overalls) were intended either to make his movements readable on the primitive 8-bit character-cell-with-sprites graphical displays of the time, or to compensate for the difficulty in representing features like hair and a mouth on those displays.

He is a very deliberate design within very tight constraints, and thus a marvel of character design.

I buy the distinction you’re making, but not the conclusion. There is some art used in games, separate from the art that is the game itself.

> few people would claim to fall in love with the video game [...] No one feels an emotional connection to game mechanics

I think you’ll have a hard time convincing gamers of this line of thinking. Mario Bros, Doom, Kerbal Space Program, Worms, Secret of Monkey Island, Warcraft, Celeste ... and so many other games have delightful mechanics that people love. It is different than a story, but you’re using the idea that it’s different to invalidate mechanics as art. It doesn’t have to be the same kind of emotional connection. People don’t have the same emotion connection to Leonardo’s ornithopter as they do to DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, yet nobody would even attempt to make the argument that the ornithopter isn’t art.

Art is and always has been in the eye of the beholder, so my disagreeing doesn’t need to change your opinion, but FWIW games absolutely count as art in my book, and many others’. Not all games are good art, but a few games are great art.

> but a video game is identified by the goal it sets for its player, its win condition, strategy, etc...

Lots of games don’t have a win condition—Tetris, for instance—and many don’t even have goals.

Sure, any precise definition I give can be argued against which is why I'm not giving a very precise definition. But usually when people present a video game that lacks a goal so as to give an example of how games can be art, they point to extreme outliers like so called "walking simulators" which may or may not be video games but at any rate are not what most people think of when they consider video games.

When you consider video games outside of the context of arguments about whether they are art, you usually think about Mario, Halo, Minecraft, etc... these are games that are defined by skill, goals, strategies, mechanics. They make use of visuals, music, storylines, characters, a host of various art forms but at their core, after stripping away the art that they make use of, you get something at the core.

What that core is, what I consider to be a game, isn't something I sincerely think most people would associate with art in the same way music or movies are associated with art.

We just have come to mix video games with art together that as a consumer we don't see the differentiation between the two. But I think as a game designer it's worth have a clear distinction between the "game" and the "art". I also think that good games develop those two things independently of one another with the art layered on top of the game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com