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I May Be a Sellout, True, But Observe Also That I Am Carrying an Assault Rifle
2007-01-24 08:00
by Mark T.R. Donohue

I don't remember whether I brought it up anywhere on this page before I left on my big rock sabbatical, but I have joined the Gamefly service, which is basically Netflix for video games. Because I have been away for three weeks, I still have out the first two games I ordered. I'm sure Gamefly doesn't care how long I keep them -- it's a flat monthly rate thing, and besides, they have my credit card number -- but I feel guilty about this. I'm the sort of person who breaks into terror sweats when I discover an overdue library book. So I very much wish to utilize the elegant self-addressed postage-paid return envelopes Gamefly sent me so many weeks ago. But I want to get my money's worth, too. I want to finish these games!

While console games have grown considerably easier over the years, they've also gotten longer at a much greater pace. First games went from cartridges (which were basically floppy disks in proprietary shapes) to CDs. Then they went from CDs to DVDs. Soon, they will be on yet still another format, although the final decision on which format that is to be won't come for some time. Just be sure that while the games will cost more and more, you'll at least be getting 50 to 60 or even more hours of play time for your money. Pretty much every game has full voice acting now, which can certainly stretch things out. Unless you get impatient and just turn the subtitles on and zip through them. I don't do that as much as I used to because mercifully as voice acting has become ubiquitous in games its standard of quality has risen, with a slight lag at first. Nowadays it's quite common for companies to re-release games from the hardware cycle before last (the PS1 era) with dramatically expanded and improved voice acting. As a curious side effect of the industry's rather slipshod transition to 3D graphics and theater-quality surround sound, there are now a great deal of games from the mid-1990's that are completely unplayable and obsolete...while there are hundreds of much older Atari and NES games that are as fun now as they were when parachute pants were the hip thing. Isn't that funny? It's kind of like how much of the commercial rock music from the 60's still sounds great while the one-hit wonders of the 70's by and large don't. "Those disco synthesizers/Those daily tranquilizers" indeed.

Yes, well, on to my point. I'm playing a game called Saint's Row. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and since a major part of the gameplay involves assembling small teams of your allies to go and kill somewhat larger teams of your enemies, I've really started to get into the goofy, exploitative potboiler storyline despite myself. An example of the across-the-board improvement in video game voice acting I mentioned in the last paragraph, this isn't. This is one way the experiential component of video games throws a spanner into the works of objective criticism. Look, I've watched enough of Ice Cube's movies to know that the dialogue spouted by the Saint's Row character Troy is neither well-written nor particularly deftly performed. But last night I was in this warehouse, right, totally out of ammo for my sniper rifle, surrounded by Los Carnales, and hearing the ominous low-health-meter beep loudly in my ears. You could have knocked me over with a feather, but I swear my man Troy somehow overcame the limitations of his clumsy AI script, finally moved away from the dead end he'd been humping for the entirety of the firefight up to that point, drew his Vice 9 semi and iced those last three enemy gangbangers like it wasn't no thing. Ever since I've had a soft spot for the poor guy. He might be a bit of a poseur, and some of his limbs tend to disappear when he walks too closely parallel to a wall, but he's got my back. Saints for life, yo.

It's not too hard either to perceive or to explain the difference between liking a character because of gameplay experiences (like for example that time I played franchise mode in NBA 2K5 for 20 seasons and randomly and without really trying to turned Mike Dunleavy Jr. into the single greatest offensive force in sports video games since Barry Sanders in Tecmo Super Bowl) and liking a character because of orchestrated excellence in art design, sound production, and dialogue writing (like the blissfully stoned King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy, a dude as big as a planet who parties so hard his benders obliterate huge chunks of the night sky). The unique thing about video games, and one of the things that makes it difficult for critics more used to static works of art to accept them indeed as having artistic merit, is that for a game to be totally successful it needs to be populated by heroes and villains who connect with the player on both levels. Final Fantasy VI's seminal archvillain Kefka is a terrific example of having it both ways. He's memorable because he's well-designed, with an unmistakable silhouette, costume, catchphrases, and (uncommonly for a pre-CD game) audio signature, an ominous digitized cackle that no one who has ever played the game can possibly fail to recognize. He's scary in the classic movie villain sense because of good writing and plotting. He's a nihilistic psychopath who mangles the very face of the planet in order to make it more reflective of the yawning darkness inside of him. But Kefka is scary too because he properly fulfills his function as a major league butt-kicker in a game that doesn't lack for them. He shows up at various points in the story to complicate things for your group of heroes, and finally meets his downfall in a gothic, multi-tiered teeth-grinder of a boss battle that's a suitable release after untold weeks of tension and hatred.

We're conditioned to cheer when the bad guy gets his just desserts. The more gruesome the end is when it comes, the better. I remember joining a theater audience in applause when Dennis Hopper's character is grotesquely beheaded at the climax of Speed, and feeling a little unsettled about it afterwards. I was 13 and it may or may not have been my first time seeing an "R" rated movie on the big screen. There's certainly a difference between watching someone die horribly on TV at home and reacting to it in relative privacy and joining the unwashed masses in screaming for blood down at the local octoplex. Consider the difference then between merely celebrating someone else's fictional murder and actually pushing the button/pulling the trigger/using the Economizer and the Gem Box and Gogo's Mimic ability to totally Ultima x8 that sick weirdo yourself. It's weird, right? I've been playing video games my whole life so it's something I take for granted, but I can see how it might be unsettling for modern grandparents when the first, last, and only thing on little Billy's Chanukah wish list is a glorified genocide simulator.

I mean, is that where mainstream critics draw the line with video games? Can you construct a logical argument that it can be a valuable cultural and social experience to watch actors playing serial killers but it's just completely beyond the pale to utilize a device that allows you to take on the role yourself? Okay, okay, yes, rhetorical question overload. But I do feel that this is an interesting subject, particularly so given that it's an obvious hot-button issue and has been for many years now, one that has generated untold column inches on both the pro and con sides without very much if any of that heated writing coming across as at all ideologically coherent. Pundits on both sides of the debate face serious handicaps. The video-games-are-evil crowd are attention-grabbing rabble-rousers to whom the art form is so completely alien that they constantly undercut whatever established position they might claim by making statements that are misguided, erroneous, and self-evidently ignorant. (Like the group that wanted to either change the rating or flat-out ban the PC version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion because the game's makers allowed its users, if they so chose and scanned in their own clip art, to create characters with *gasp* nude boobs!) Then on the other side of the fence, as we've discussed before, are the game journalists, who are cowed enough by the industry to provide these millennial lunatic fringers the legitimizing coverage they so richly do not deserve while at the same time lacking the editorial autonomy and rhetorical fire to dismiss them once and for all. Meanwhile, billions of nude boobs (an exact figure could not be provided at press time) continue to proliferate more or less without comment on the Internet, which all of the kids who play these games can use far more literately than either their parents or the right-wing Luddite types trying to inflame their imaginations.

Back (at last) to Saint's Row. I am enjoying the game very much, as I wrote, despite its rather poor and too often inflammatory and bigoted dialogue. On another level entirely, one that I promise has no connection to the quagmire out of which we've just so recently navigated, I feel bad about enjoying it. It's not the violence or the vulgar language or all of the supposedly transgressive swipes at women, gays, and minorities. I hate to say I'm desensitized to that sort of thing, because it definitely eats at me a little still and I'd really like to see those sorts of things cut out of games entirely. I realize and appreciate that the medium is maturing and there should always be a place for grown-up content in an art form that is consumed in ever-increasing percentages by adults. But, come on, the whole simulated sex with streetwalkers thing is so 2001. And enough with the Colombian drug lord missions already. Come on, every game that came out last year this side of Super Princess Peach had a Colombian drug lord mission. Just once I'd like to see a Colombian character in a video game who isn't a coke kingpin or a shortstop. Is that too much to ask? So let's not say that I'm desensitized to these ugly aspects of the game. Let us instead say that I can contextualize them, realize that despite the "M" rating this is a game for 12-year-old boys, or at least older men with comparable mentalities, make a note of my disapproval, and move on.

Which is good, because the game is fun. The particle effects are amazing, the soundtrack has Ghostface Killah on it, and there is a mode in which you try to rack up insurance money by hurling your body in front of oncoming traffic. (This would be a good concept for a reality television program.) Wait, what kind of game is it exactly? Well, there's the rub. There's no way around it. Saint's Row is completely plagiarized from the Grand Theft Auto series. Everything from the fictional car names to the in-game "radio stations" to the font in the menus is stolen. It's a brazen act of intellectual property theft that also explains how the title became an Xbox 360 exclusive. Microsoft, who must still have a few lawyers hanging around from those heady days when Bill Gates punched a full dance card with the DoJ's trustbusters, probably lent Saint's Row developer Volition a couple of "look and feel" experts.

GTA has been ripped off a ton, as do most games that sell tens of millions of copies, not that there exist many such beasts. Unlike the glut of copycat games for the PS2 that came out late in that system's hardware cycle, however, Saint's Row actually betters its source material. It's better looking, the controls are tighter, GTA's chronically broken targeting has been junked for a much more sensible point-and-kill system, and the automap actually shows the sequence of turns you have to make rather than just giving you a destination and making you guess. Once again, we have art and commerce in conflict. If you want to argue that video games aren't art, then there's nothing particularly egregious about what the programmers of Saint's Row have done here. They took an existing product that was out on the market and improved upon it. But if video games are art, or at least if they ever aspire to be recognized as such more widely, you have to take a longer view. Creating a successful product by making minor refinements to someone else's design template is good business, but bad art. The Stone Temple Pilots sold a lot of records, but anyone with a halfway functioning sense of moral outrage and a copy of Pearl Jam's Ten could tell you what they were doing wasn't art. This gets so tricky with video games, though, because as I said before, there's the aspect of the game that is presented to you, the art design, the characters, the story, the script, and then there is the part that emerges from what you tell the game to do and what it does in response.

If the first part of a game is completely lifted from an earlier title but the second part -- the major part, the part that makes it a video game and not just a Choose Your Own Adventure DVD -- is refined and improved (including many genuinely original ideas, like the targeting reticle, the way the game's progress structure naturally encourages you to sample all of the different kinds of gameplay Saint's Row has to offer, and the blessed automap that simply tells you when to turn rather than sending you on constant time-consuming wild goose chases) does that get the designers a "not guilty" verdict when it comes to the charge of plagiarism? It's hard to say. And it works both ways as well. Grand Theft Auto designers Rockstar Games would do very well to steal some of Saint's Row's innovations right back, and in all likelihood they will when GTA4 hits late this year.

The one thing that worries me is that at present the only significant incentive driving developers is sales. There's little to no recognition in the industry for video games that are brilliant but nobody buys. There aren't any awards that anyone takes seriously, and most of the people controlling how the history of all of this gets written down are still operating with the bottom line as top priority. The original PC Grand Theft Auto was a genuine work of art -- an original, compelling, twisted little top-down world which created feelings in gamers that hadn't been felt before. The idea of entering into an entire little world where much goes on around you without your input and the simple logic of the code controlling how all of these little cars and pedestrians went about their business created, perhaps serendipitously, a game where completely unpredictable things happened all the time. When the game went fully 3D when the PlayStation 2 allowed it do so, this effect increased onehundredfold.

Game writers call the unscripted and bizarre things that happen in sandbox games like GTA "emergent gameplay." Since none of these events were at all scripted and many were never imagined even by the programmers who created the games, who is the real artist? The player? The software? Elvis? These are excellent topics, people, feel free to jump in at any time. Game designers, who are all thieves in the sense that the very process of generating millions and millions of lines of intricate repetitive programming more or less necessitates great leaps of corner-cutting and code recycling, have something with which to contend that no playwright, novelist, sculptor, or musician ever imagined. The ultimate accomplishment, the Citizen Kane of code, will also be the end of programming as we know it. Some day some squinting genius is going to execute a program so magnificent it will render him and all other coders completely obsolete -- true artificial intelligence. If man is driven to create and contemplate art as a way of both reinforcing and understanding what separates him from the animals, wouldn't the invention of a sentient intelligence to compare with man's be the greatest work of art the human race has ever contemplated? I mean, after Frampton Comes Alive. Nobody's touching Frampton.

Comments
2007-01-24 12:49:19
1.   Ken Arneson
Great punchline.

As to whether such an invention would be great or not is unknowable until it happens. SciFi is filled with speculation that it is not: Borg! Cylons! Terminators!

The people who are actually working on this stuff (numenta.com) envision boring, mundane applications for this stuff: video object recognition, assembly line bottleneck detectors. But surely, someday, someone will use the technology to create a great new form of art, or a creation that creates a great new form of art. Who gets the credit then, the creator, or the creator of the creator?

2007-01-24 13:58:21
2.   Ali Nagib
1 - So does this mean that Dr. Soong really did all those paintings, played all that violin, and did that hammed up Shakespearean acting? Spiner's gonna be pissed.
2007-01-24 15:03:20
3.   Benaiah
I play video games, though no where near as much as you do, but I am still not buying video games as art. I saw Tucker Max say that video games had replaced novels as the art of our time. I feel physically ill every time I think about that. Video games are still consumed thoughtlessly by most, and are usually designed without the intention to tellingly look inside the human condition. Using the broadest definitions of what art is- Scott McCloud defined it as anything humans do that doesn't aid in reproduction or survival- then just playing video games is art, and I don't want to get into some "hierarchy of art mediums" where music is the best, but only classical, and then paintings and some where near the bottom is comic books and television, I just think that real art, great art, does something that video games don't do. If you put the five best video games ever- say for the sake of argument: Final Fantasy VII, Grand Theft Auto, Mario Brothers I, whichever Madden you choose and Halo, or some other first person chooser like it- you would have a group of very interesting, often beautiful, diversions that resist more than a surface level deconstruction. Maybe you disagree, but until I read someone tell me how an unquestionably great game, like Metal Gear Solid, is more than just entertainment, I won't be sold.
2007-01-24 15:50:18
4.   Mark T.R. Donohue
It's funny, whenever you see anybody credentialed making a case for video games as art, whether it's an architecture critic or a fine arts writer or whomever, they're usually praising something like Myst, which is a pretty-looking enough game, but kind of passé for the 'corest of the 'core -- the first couple Myst games, the most famous ones, are just Hypercard stacks with ambient sound effects layered in. (Not to mention oddly unresolving stories and perversely unintuitive puzzles.) My list of favorite games would certainly include a lot of things like Super Puzzle Fighter, SimCity, Civilization, Dr. Mario, and so on that would certainly be beautiful to a Pythagorean ("all is number") but are a little abstract and angular for modern aesthetics.

But then again, look at a game like Psychonauts, which is like playing a psychedelic watercolor painting come to life and has a mind-bending, sophisticated (and very, very funny) storyline that draws upon concepts from various schools of academic psychology. Not only would it make a fine movie, but the controls and the levels in the game all draw upon its themes in clever and seamlessly integrated fashion. I don't know if it's my favorite game of all time, but I think it's the one I would first point out to someone questioning whether or not games can be art.

Depends on your tastes, though. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is another one that springs to mind, although there's nothing particularly atypical about it. It's just an astoundingly beautifully executed and satisfying game on every level. (We haven't even touched the topic of the original music composed for games, which is a huge industry in Japan and has inspired some very successful symphony tours over here.) The Call of Duty games are more effective to me in representing what the experience of World War II was like than any war movie I've seen. The Sims was never so much a game as it was an interactive piece of performance art. The quality of the writing of the Sierra and then LucasArts games of the early 90's was amazing (has yet to be topped in the industry), but Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango are held back slightly by their gameplay limitations -- lots of pixel hunting, lots more arbitrary inventory combinations. And I was playing before gamefaqs.com existed, remember.

I don't know if any of the AAA mainstream titles of today qualify. I don't think sports games really fit into the same category as most other games, since they're trying slavishly to imitate the real world while most other vids try and facilitate escape from it. The Grand Theft Auto games are packed with entertainment, but they're the V.G. equivalent of a popcorn flick. Ditto games like Gears of War and Halo. It's true that most gamers play rather intellectually devoid titles and don't even fully engage what's presented to them there. But then again, tens of millions of Americans bought Milli Vanilli and Britney Spears records. Fine art is never huge in its time -- I only hope that technology will allow us to play games like Psychonauts, Wind Waker, and Okami in the future when their original home consoles (Xbox, GameCube, and PS2 respectively) are all forgotten.

But seriously, go play Psychonauts if you can track it down. You may not love it, but it definitely will expand your ideas about what it's possible for a game to accomplish. There are two levels in particular I am thinking of right now -- I wonder if anyone else who has played the game can guess which ones?

2007-01-25 06:49:32
5.   Benaiah
4 - The interesting thing about the Sims is that the performance art aspect of it is not the video game, it is the person playing the video game. Chuck Klosterman wrote an article about the game, the only thing I can remember from the article is that he thought the Sims were overly concerned with capitalist consumption. The Sims is a game where people pretend to do what they really do all the time. I will give it to you that the Sims is modern art, but that is an exceptional game, one that was out of character with the ones before it (SimCity 3000 isn't anything like the Sims) and those after it (later updates of the Sims actually made the game less and less artistic and more like Klosterman's conspicuous consumption fantasy). I haven't played Psychonauts, but my point wasn't that games can't have artistic merit, only that the medium rarely strives to give insight into the human condition, which I think all great art does. The Sims is exceptional because it is a grand prank on everyone that bought it, and its huge popularity only glorifies its harsh post-modernity.

I am definitely being dogmatic, so I guess I should admit that the video games are certainly capable of being art, its just that most (the vast majority) of them aren't.

2007-01-25 08:34:03
6.   Ali Nagib
5 - My questions to you would be: Is Britney Spears music art? Is "Armageddon" art? Is the latest Jackie Collins novel art? If your answer to any of those questions is "yes," then you can't fairly say that Halo or GTA is in no way art. If the argument is about whether it's GOOD or even great art, that's another story. Every single method of artistic expression is capable of being both life-alteringly significant and utterly devoid of any meaning. I'm sure that at some point, people said that Jackson Pollock's work wasn't "art" because he just threw paint at the canvas. (I never did see the Ed Harris movie, but I have seen some of his 'masterpieces' live). There's not really much point is arguing whether Madden or SimCity is good art, since it's ultimately a subjective judgement. We can still critique both on artistic terms, since the medium that they are expressed in is capable of being judged that way.
2007-01-25 09:06:46
7.   Benaiah
6 - Those examples are perfect descriptions of what most video games are. They have certain artistic standards and qualities (the special effects or music), but the art is kitsch. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera describes kitsch as a world that pretends that excrement doesn't exist. I think that is a pretty fair description of Britney's music, if not video games. To Kundera, everything can be understood is kitsch, and there is a video game kitsch that usually negates video games as art. The video game kitsch is that the distraction is more important than the content. A game like "Grand Theft Auto" doesn't serve to educate, inform, coment on, or generally do anything other than entertain, which is fine. But considering the subject matter, the lack of intellectual content makes the game a de facto proponent of video game nihilism. Maybe this is coming out as gibberish or reactionary, but understand, I like Grand Theft Auto, I don't think it has a negative affect on society. I just don't think it is art, even if there is artistry in its creation.

In some ways, I think video games are anti-intellectual, in that appreciation is sensual and imediate, rather than rational. Gamers aren't encouraged to think about the game and its implications after the fact, only to experience it immediately. Even games like Myst, which obviously require huge amounts of intellectual participation, aren't remotely like art. Calling Myst art is like calling the crossword puzzle art. Both require skill and creativity to create and consume, but art is elsewhere.

2007-01-25 09:20:15
8.   Ali Nagib
7 - So something is art if it educates, informs, comments on, but not if it solely entertains? Even if we take this definition of art (which I most certainly don't), I would argue that GTA certainly has as much intellectual content and commentary value that, say, "The Godfather" does. The difference is that Francis Ford Coppola chose to force his audience to ONLY experience the intellectual content, whereas GTA gives the user the choice of how they consume the art. You want to play the plot like a movie and ignore every sidequest? Go for it. You want to ignore the plot except for the purposes of opening up new places to kill and destroy? More power to you. The latter doesn't preclude the former, and I can't see how the diversity of experience makes it LESS art. If anything, it makes it more, because instead of simply passively letting "Goodfellas" or "Starry Night" sit in front of you and do its thing, GTA allows you to truly be a part of the art. This is a plus, in my opinion, not a minus.

I was thinking about the other, broader definition of art you mentioned earlier:

"Using the broadest definitions of what art is- Scott McCloud defined it as anything humans do that doesn't aid in reproduction or survival"

Doesn't this basically preclude the notion of professional art? If I'm supporting myself by making art, aren't I doing it at least in large measure to ensure my survival? I'm not sure that this definition of art is the best, but I certainly think it's much closer to the truth than the one that you've suggested.

2007-01-25 09:42:14
9.   Benaiah
8 - I think that language is limiting here. "Art" is doing double duty, and so let me explain what I mean. I suppose I am saying that video games are not "high art" or at least that is what they usually are. I don't think that art has to educate, inform or comment on anything, but "high art" demands intellectual appreciation. Deconstruction and interpretation should be possible, if not actually encouraged. To say that Grand Theft Auto- a game that has, to my knowledge, never been talked about as more than, at best, an inversion of popular morality and an attempt to push the decency to its breaking point- is in the same league as The Godfather- a film with a nuanced perspective and shaded morality that ultimately seduces the audience into a morality that the film itself finds repugnant- merely because Grand Theft Auto also deals with crime and does so interactively, is ludicrious. What is the intellectual argument of "Grand Theft Auto"? Is a children's play where the audience is encouraged to sing along with the performance on the same level as Handel's Messiah, if not superior, since one is interactive and the other is not?

All art is interactive, the appreciation is the interaction, in fact, post-modern art criticism negates the importance of the artist, because only the art and the audience matter. However, video games are even more post-modern in that the interaction is real, the audience actually changes the game. In fact, the audience can create the game, since, as Mark notes, many never before seen scenarios are played out. However, this interaction is less interesting and perhaps less critical than an interation that is based only our appreciation.

Oh well, I realize that my views won't be shared, and to a certain extent I admit that this is as small minded as those who say that modern art isn't art because "their three year old could make it". My defense is that I am not saying that video games as art is impossible, merely that it doesn't happen very frequently. Further, I think the realities of video game creation and the expressions of the medium make it unsuitable to certain types of artistic expression, which happen to be the ones that I think are the most valuable.

2007-01-25 09:44:11
10.   Benaiah
8 - As for the Scott McCloud quote, your quip about professional artists is besides the point. Professional artists are a luxtury that in and of itself could be considered art. In a society that was only concerned with reproduction and survival there couldn't be something as wasteful as artists. Only an artistic society enables professional artists.
2007-01-25 10:46:57
11.   Shaun P
4 Music. Any discussion of video games as art has to reference the music.

To this day, I remember the first time I ever played Final Fantasy II on the SNES - three days after Christmas, 1991. The music in the opening sequence blew me away - I had never heard anything like it from a video game before. "Art" is the simplest way to describe it - it envoked things I had never felt before. It was beautiful and inspiring and magical and perfect.

And that game, like every Final Fantasy game after it - perhaps like every video game that came after it - is something far less if there was no music.

I don't know a lot about art, but I think that as long as games continue to include musical scores that are, by themselves, works of art, the games themselves ought to be considered art.

2007-01-25 11:20:34
12.   Ali Nagib
9 10 - "In a society that was only concerned with reproduction and survival there couldn't be something as wasteful as artists. Only an artistic society enables professional artists. "

Which societies did you have in mind? As technology has increased over time, so has the ability for jobs to be specialized. How do you know that the Cro-Magnons that did cave paintings 35,000 weren't "professional" artists, in the sense that they didn't have to spend their entire existence solely focusing on survival and reproduction? (In fact, some anthropologists think that even the earliest paintings weren't done by just any old guy, but some sort of "shaman" or other people specifically designated for the purposes of artistic creation and interpretation) Couldn't that mean that ALL society since Homo Sapiens emerged had at least the potential to be artistic? These are trivial issues, but I think they're still interesting.

As far as the larger discussion goes, we've clearly descended to the traditional "it's only 'art' if it's good" debate, which I've found is ultimately pointless. You segregate "high art" from "art" but then continue to conflate the terms further in your argument.

"To say that Grand Theft Auto- a game that has, to my knowledge, never been talked about as more than, at best, an inversion of popular morality and an attempt to push the decency to its breaking point-"

Well, maybe you aren't reading the right people. I'm certainly no expert on all the levels or outlets of artistic criticism, but to suggest that no one has even tried to do so is silly. More specifically, it doesn't matter whether or not anyone has done so to this point; rather, it only matters if they could. There's no question in my mind that the characters, stories, images, sounds and even emergent properties of a game like GTA have at least SOME intellectual value, moral insight, or other attempts to address broad issues of humanity in specific terms. Whether or not they have AS MUCH as "The Godfather" is completely irrelevant. Once again, you show that you're not really concerned about whether or not a video game like Grand Theft Auto can be appreciated artistically, but whether or not it meets your subjective standards:

"To say that Grand Theft Auto. . . is in the same league as The Godfather. . . is ludicrous"

In fact, I never said that GTA was AS GOOD as the Godfather. I said that it has "as much intellectual content and commentary value." In fact, I only picked "The Godfather" because it shared some similar themes and settings and is generally regarded as "high art." When you say, "GTA isn't in the same league," it's really just a fancy way of saying "The Godfather is better." Fine, you're entitled to say that, but that isn't a criticism, it's merely a subjective comparison. But you can't use a subjective comparison to determine whether something is art, or even 'high art' based on your definition. You can't have it both ways. Either you're willing to remove all subjective criteria about the quality of a piece of art and judge it "art" or "high art" based on objective criteria, or you're just saying "I like A better than B." Which frankly, I don't care about.

2007-01-25 12:21:12
13.   Benaiah
12 - The point about societies stands, designated cave painters are still a function of artistic societies. There are no painters in a Hobbsian world, which is Scott McCloud's point.

While my opinion that The Godfather is better than Grand Theft Auto is subjective, I don't think it was without merit. I in brief gave my reasons for this. Further, I was attempting to demonstrate why the medium itself demanded certain compromises that made GTA inferior.

As I pointed out with my Scott McCloud quote, a broad enough definition of art can certainly incorporate all tripe as "art". However, art is not a one sized fits all category. "Blood on the Tracks" and "Superman 64" are both "art" in some extremely broad sense, but what is the point of intellectual discussion if you can't talk about why one is vastly superior to the other?

"You can't have it both ways. Either you're willing to remove all subjective criteria about the quality of a piece of art and judge it "art" or "high art" based on objective criteria, or you're just saying "I like A better than B." "

How can one remove the subjective criteria from art? It is an entirely subjective concept. Unless you are a believer in Platonic forms, there are no objective standards to judge art by. We can only wrestle with the conventions and interpretations that have been devised for the purpose. Using what little experience I have (mostly film criticism and philosophy of aesthetics) I think that video games are a medium with severe limitations.

Video games certainly could become great art, I can imagine expressionistic video games where the player is made to experience certain emotions through their decision making or surreal video games that frustrate and demand analysis and discussion. However, there are no video games (that I know of) like that. Instead, ALL video games (with the exception of some flash stuff on the internet) is made for profit and sold to entertain. As a result most video games are vapid and all video games lack the freedom of movement that is found in the best art. Video games are impure art, almost like functional art (architecture, culinary) except it serves no function.

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