A while ago Roger Ebert commented that video games would never be art and even expanded on his reasoning an article despite never having explored the medium.
But the point still remains, when do video games become art and with a World filled with chopped up cows and hanging light bulbs – are video games already art?
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XBA says: Help an old man on his deathbed fulfill his unknown desire to go to the moon.
When you start thinking of them as art.
When they look like Uncharted. Sorry, but I had to be the guy that mentioned it xD.
To me any medium that is a representation of someone or a groups creative process combined with an attempt to get an audience thinking can be art. Is it good art? Possibly yes possibly no but its art nonetheless.
Games in my opinion is the most likely to feature a sense of art simply because as opposed to most other mediums it has a wider range of areas it tries to cover. The world, the characters, the narrative, even the way the game is played. I'm not saying that games are artful as a standard but more on the fact that even in the situation where a game is aimed more towards earning a profit there will be at least one instance of there being an attempt to stir up thought and make us use our imagination to figure out the meaning within the situation. Take COD:MW2 and the whole "No Russian" mission. I'm not going to debate whether it was done well or not but one thing I'd like to point out was that in that moment you notice your character was now moving slower and can't keep up with the terrorist as they gun down innocents. There was a sense in the design of that mission that gives us a look into this character that was undercover. Though he was meant to be forgettable the scene and the gameplay managed to give that person a deeper sense of character. And when you create character or that deeper meaning in something would you not consider it art? I would and in this situation I found something I would consider as an attempt to something artful in a game that is one of the least likely to contain any sense of art.
Take games like Demon's Souls for example. What it lacks in story it makes up for in the world it is presented in. Likewise the gameplay reflects the basic concept of it. In a dark and unforgiving world it refuses to conform to the status quo of constant checkpoints and similar concepts. Does the gameplay not fit well with the unforgiving notion of the world that it is in? It does.
Long story short. Art from my perspective can be something presented in any form of medium as long as the attempt to create meaning within that product is there. Good art is when it succeeds to those things.
It's all technically "art." Art, by it's technical definition, is just an expression of creativity in a presentable form.
What people REALLY mean when they get into these discussions is what constitutes "inspired" art...and that's a question no one will ever be able to objectively answer.
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