Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I personally feel this may be taking the "games as art" discussion a bit too far. Yes, some games are art, and almost all games have artistic value. But when I'm playing Quake, I don't care about any of that. All I care about is that it's fun and it's challenging and I'm playing with my friends. Just like when I'm watching the latest summer blockbuster, I don't care that it won't win an Oscar, or that the girl in the plot is really just there to stand around and look pretty, or that the hero is somehow surviving things that no human could withstand. It's fun.

I could go through Ico with this post and glean a lot from it. Taking the same thing to Battlefield 3 might yield substantially different results. I personally don't care. Not all the music I listen to is art, either.

I think the "art vs. not art" discussion isn't the big thing, though. It's really more about awareness of the mechanism of a game and understanding WHY it's fun/intriguing to humans. That brings up interesting discussions regardless of any "artistic message" - the "funness" itself is a type of artistic expression.

You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman)

I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing art, too.

Couldn't have said it better! ^_^

You're not required to care. The average movie-goer is not required to be Roger Ebert, but Roger Ebert nevertheless tried to educate those who were interested in how to ask for better movies.

You are making the (quite appalling I think) assumption that "more artistic" means "better". Video games are not movies. There is far greater variety in video games, and far more reasons to enjoy them. I think people doing research on why human beings have "fun", what fun means and how we can provide more fun experiences are doing far more for the future of video games than people trying to pretend they are movies, and should aspire to be "art" movies.

And some movies go into the category "pornographic" and are not supposed to do anything but turn you on.

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