Jim Preston: games as art debate is meaningless
Are games art? It's a question that comes up more and more, as the medium slowly grows out of its awkward, teenage years. EA producer Jim Preston thinks the debate is a meaningless one, as he explains in an incredibly well-thought-out feature on Gamasutra.
Preston takes his time to remind of us the state of art in general, and how art is continuously judged by its relative place in culture: a urinal can be art if Marcel Duchamp says so, and places it in an art gallery. Since it's all a matter of perspective, Preston argues that we shouldn't be bickering with Roger Ebert over whether games can be art, but instead spending our time improving the medium, and awaiting further artistic recognition from the community at large.
Makes sense to us. We'll stop waiting by the mailbox for our invite to the arty party, then.
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Preston takes his time to remind of us the state of art in general, and how art is continuously judged by its relative place in culture: a urinal can be art if Marcel Duchamp says so, and places it in an art gallery. Since it's all a matter of perspective, Preston argues that we shouldn't be bickering with Roger Ebert over whether games can be art, but instead spending our time improving the medium, and awaiting further artistic recognition from the community at large.
Makes sense to us. We'll stop waiting by the mailbox for our invite to the arty party, then.
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(Page 1) Reader Comments
...Bear?
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Honestly, some of the best art isn't art...
Dada... my Anti-art. If you just call Videogames Dada, there is an excuse for the so called "Lack of Artistic Value", because it's Dada, it's not art... but it's art...
Everyone wins? No? Fine...
Lets ship Mr. Preston a copy of Shadow of the Colosus, a PS2, and a Strategy Guide (since he'll probably need it ;)) and see what he thinks of games as art then...
also: @WiNG
It looks like a horribly giant evil demon-spawned puppy...
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Of course games are art. Ebert is just being parochial. Once the gaming generation grows up, they will consider games as stores of cultural value, i.e. art. Its actually happening already with all the 8bit music.
I once saw a gigantic mario-based video installation in a SoHo gallery and thought it would be cool to have at my house for a party.
hmmm.
Games have only just started to challenge the players viewpoint of the world. And isn't that what art is?
But, as most gamers have noticed, as the consoles have become more powerful, the games produced are becoming less adventurous and more "realistic". "Realistic" translates to browns and greys and dark greens. If there is any art in games, artists really have to step out of the mould and avoid the convergence that is taking place. There really is too much sameness. Too much to be even calling for a debate.
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The art in videogames is the same art in programming, it's the neatly timed choriography of bits and bytes dancing around... umm... something...
You get what i mean right? Games are not art in the traditional sense, they are art because of the interactive aspect...
or not... i don't know anything about art...
There is a bit of a relativism in art too. Art is what people say is art. But its more than that because art is a cultural communication device, so a substantial portion of a culture's members need to agree that something is art. Sort of like that a certain word has meaning. It does cause a lot of people understand what the word means.
So in a culture where games are perceived as cultural orientation devices (such as the college boys dorm culture) games are already art. For American society, arguably yes, but is 20 years very likely yes.
For me? Not yet.
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That would be awesome.
Maybe he should read one of those "history of the company" bullshit memos I had to read for every job I ever accepted.
For those of you too lazy to do the research, I'll enlighten you.
Electronic ARTS was a new type of game company that emerged in the days of anonymous programmers who were paid next to nothing for the work they put into a game.
In its infancy EA concentrated all its advertising and recognition on the people behind the games you loved, featuring group photos on the box of the team responsible for the product you bought.
Their stance was that the games were art produced by artists, who were skilled at their craft.
Too bad this company devolved into a factory churning out uninspired sequels to 20 year old games year after year.
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"Shut up and get back to work".
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Yet I feel that most people I meet don't really have a thoughtful conception of art, but just regard it as an extension of their emotions. While the culture as a whole holds a wide variety and often conflicting conceptions of art. I simply suggest we as gamers should not even bother with the debate, but simply work on the conditions by which games will be viewed as art by the majority of the people in the culture, regardless of what their underlying conception of art is. That is, my argument is a political one, not an aesthetic one.
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Too often todays games treat trite topics in a conventional way not contributing much to development of cultural values. But as programmers and designers become more comfortable with electronic technologies, they will have more leisure to contemplate social and cultural conditions and make a contribution to advancing the debate.
For now, they spend endless hours making sure a commando is able to jump over every crate in every corridor. Art requires relative technological simplicity and leisure.
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but really, in order to say "this is art, that isn't" objectively, you have to define what art is, and that is something very subjective, to define art...
so, the question "is games art" is stupid in itself, as it is a completely subjective matter.
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/debate
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=
Art = nothing (ie no definition/no referents in reality)
This is simply the attempt to eliminate the concept art from rational discussion.
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Crappy art anecdotes aside, I see the point. Art=relative = videogames-as-art=relative. I HATE relativism, though...
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Except that even the editorial introduction says his argument shows the debate is meaningless, not to mention the fact that his position is that we shouldn't be "adopting a philosophical or aesthetic strategy" - ie we shouldn't worry about the definition of art at all. (Why? See above.)
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