I Can Never Make a Game Because Im Bad at Art

Having once made the statement to a higher place, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend information technology. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my means. Still, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot exist art. Maybe it is foolish of me to say "never," considering never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer at present living will survive long plenty to experience the medium as an fine art grade.

What stirs me to render to the bailiwick? I was urged past a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC past Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is vivid, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken.

I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I take the luxury of responding afterward consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It'due south just fifteen minutes long, and she makes the time laissez passer rapidly.

She begins past maxim video games "already ARE fine art." Withal she concedes that I was right when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparing with the groovy poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my bespeak is articulate.

Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling information technology "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo'southward ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may be closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.

She then says speech began equally a form of warning, and writing as a course of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, oral communication probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long before writing was adult. And cave paintings were a course of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those craven-scratches Werner Herzog is fifty-fifty at present filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern French republic should only be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires congenital behind the artists, which suggests the cavern paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the start of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were peachy artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted creative person volition tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, yet elegant their rules. I agree. Just of course that depends on the definition of fine art. She says the most clear definition of fine art she'southward found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined equally the fake of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from piece of work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Central components of games are goals, rules, claiming, and interaction."

Simply we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as normally the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not fine art? I could think of it as countless individual works of fine art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal trip the light fantastic an artwork, yet the collaboration of a customs? Aye, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at in one case.

I obvious departure between fine art and games is that you tin can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an upshot. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then information technology ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, trip the light fantastic toe, a film. Those are things you cannot win; yous can only experience them.

She quotes Robert McKee's definition of practiced writing as "being motivated by a want to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the aforementioned desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are and then motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would debate that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the footing of my taste (which I would contend is better than the gustation of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago at present phrases this in her terms: "Art is a manner of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Nighttime of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Vocal of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you tin perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, only then y'all are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this betoken lacking a convincing definition of art. Only is Plato's any better? Does art grow ameliorate the more than it imitates nature? My notion is that information technology grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might telephone call the artist'due south soul, or vision. Countless artists have fatigued countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, nearly are very bad indeed. How practice we tell the difference? We know. It is a affair, aye, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (in a higher place), in which the thespian, every bit David Koresh, defends his Co-operative Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like ane more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a great game, but as potential fine art information technology all the same hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, she defends the game not as a record of what happened at Waco, but "as how we feel happened in our culture and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in dissimilarity award the game a Neglect in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing information technology as fine art.

Her adjacent instance is a game named "Braid" (in a higher place). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key deviation...you tin can't dice." Yous can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known equally taking back a move, and negates the whole subject of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my ain by by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

We come to Example iii, "Flower" (higher up). A run-down city apartment has a single blossom on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "most trying to find a residuum betwixt elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative involvement on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Practice you win if yous're the get-go to find the remainder betwixt the urban and the natural? Tin can you control the flower? Does the game know what the platonic balance is?

These three are only a small selection of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into creative expression." IMHO, that purlieus remains resolutely uncrossed. "Complect" has had a "great market touch," she says, and "was the top-downloaded game on XBox Alive Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclaim."

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modernistic video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-up gamers" hope for games that attain higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already beingness fabricated) "are beingness rewarded past audiences by high sales figures." The only mode I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through turn a profit participation.

The three games she chooses as examples practise not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play information technology. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the corking poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Why are gamers then intensely concerned, anyway, that games be divers equally art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Hashemite kingdom of jordan and Dick Butkus never said they idea their games were an art course. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 Globe Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply bask themselves? They take my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to exist able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'k studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if information technology makes them happy.

I permit Sangtiago the terminal discussion. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Didactics, and Executive Management. I residual my case.