Huh, interesting! I've not seen this question come up for years, and had rather assumed it was settled a decade or two ago. Which is why Ebert's ramblings were a bit strange even at the time.
The 'is [insert thing] art?' question is always tedious, in my opinion. It's a nonsense, because art tends to be very personal. One person trying to define art to another person can only ever be reductive.
I make no particular distinction between movies, paintings, music, games, comics, books, theatre or anything else. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. In all cases, it's a human trying to communicate something to other humans, and that's what makes it interesting.
I've not really seen anyone involved in making or playing games ask the 'BUT IS IT ART!?' question for years. I don't think it matters. The only people that raise the question tend to be people who are heavily invested in other mediums and for some reason feel threatened by a newer form. The same way comics were dismissed for decades. The same way rock music was dismissed. Radio, TV, film, etc etc etc. There's always a reactionary element at play, regardless of the context.
Oh, I forgot to mention: Flower at the time was a well known PS3 title, made by the team that went on to work on Journey. Flower is a beautiful exploration of nature and urbanisation.
That's fair enough. And having played ABZU and Koral myself, Flower is probably a game that I would enjoy.
That being said, I stand by my statement that the game is a niche artsy game (ironic, since it's apparently considered as a "casual game"). It's the kind of game that I would recommend to "video game connoisseurs" rather than the "average gamer".
Flower is casual in the sense that it's very easy to play, and originally was entirely motion control-based. It's also no combat, no fail state etc. Back in the day it would have been on my list of 'games to show people who don't play games'., as it avoided a lot of the more generic tropey game stuff (think: beige military shooter).
I wonder how I'd define an 'average gamer'. I don't know if there is such a thing, anymore than there is an 'average filmgoer'.
Yup. ABZU's company were founded by the people who used to work for the developer that made Flower.
By 'average gamer', I mean the people who play mostly (if not only) big name games like Call of Duty, Gears of War, or even Final Fantasy. I would say there's also an 'average filmgoer'. They're the type of people who go the theater to watch the standard big name Hollywood movies (think the Marvel/Disney movies, especially back in the day). I suppose the popular term people use nowadays would be 'normies'.
An art is just a work performed to a standard. The difficulty lies in the broad English term "game". When everything from chess to Twister is described with the same word, it's hard to nail down a hard and fast definition.
That said, being that every video game is a piece produced according to established standards, yes, a video game is an artwork.
Great write-up, not how I expected it to go. To be fair to Vince the storylines he came up with were incredible.
On the 'serious' question of "can games be art?" they certainly contain art and many are quite clearly trying to communicate something and there are writers in the industry, Chris Avellone, Josh Sawyer, and Hideo Kojima come to mind, who are certainly creating art with their stories. They have a message, or many, they are communicating ideas, and they do inspire reflection in the player. But like any art form there is high art and low art. The pulp and the literary classic. Sharknado is a film, calling it art might be a stretch. The MEG is a book (later made into a film) about a megalodon that survived from the Late Cretaceous Period to now. It's a big shark horror story. Art, err maybe, but it's no Henry V.
You could take the characters and their struggles from Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Knights of the Old Republic, and write a book and suddenly it would be art yet within the game they aren't? That doesn't make sense. Yoshitaka Amano's Final Fantasy concept art could hang in galleries and no one would be any the wiser, yet in the game it ceases to be art. What is the difference here? I have gone to concerts for film scores and game scores, in the Royal Albert Hall no less, is that music but not art? Ebert's distinction isn't clear. He says a game is won. I can't "win" Dark Souls anymore than I can "win" reading Dune. I finish it, it ends. I "score a goal" on Goodreads, I guess. Does gamifying book reading make books no longer art? This is silly. He's right chess is not art and I'm inclined to agree that most, probably 99% of games are not art, it is, after all, a matter of taste. I'm not entirely sure why films are art in his assessment, I understand why Santiago's examples aren't and her arguments were piss poor anyway but why does art have to passive? Many questions for man who can't answer.
I agree with Ebert in asking why are developers and players so bothered by this question, it doesn't bother me. Games are games. Films are films. Books are books. Paintings are paintings. There is certainly high art and low art, kitsch, shit art, obvious non-art like the banana taped to a wall masquerading as "deep", if you need an essay to explain your art you failed in making art. Art is communicative. Games communicate things, sometimes lofty, sometimes low, just like short stories, novels, films, music, and all sorts of other creative endeavours. Perhaps art really is just painting, sculpture, and drawing and all those other categories are distinct things which we don't quite know how to define. Or perhaps Final Fantasy X is art but Fortnite isn't. Perhaps grinding out levels in Pokemon is not artistic experience but talking with Giovanni in the Team Rocket Hideout is. Same as reading trashy romance is not engaging with art but tackling War and Peace is.
Games contain art but are not solely art, that's my answer.
I figured you'd have something to say given the essay you just posted on KOTOR, Redd.
Anyways, you brought up many good points...
Ah yes, video game music. Not that I would be able to incorporate it to my article, but I actually forgot this. Ironic because the only reason I got into the Trails series is because I started listening to its soundtrack on YouTube.
The distinction between "high art" and "low art" is also on point. A lot of people are probably iffy on the idea of video games as art because to them, Mario and Rembrandt (for example) being in the same category is just weird.
As for Goodreads. In a sense, it is kind of "gamifying" reading. Thinking about it, that's definitely one of the appeal of the site to me. It's kind of like Steam/Xbox achievements. Sure it's self-reported so you might say that people can lie about it. But people have been using exploits if not outright hacking to get in-game achievements anyways. Heck, Steam used to have a gallery of games that's purpose is to boost your achievement numbers on Steam.
I think the point of the 'gaming element means it's not art' argument is to say that it's not an artistic experience because you're more focused on winning. It's the difference between e-sports and gaming as people originally experience (I would call it "classical gaming" but that sounds rather pretentious, lol).
Like you, I also have questions for the late Roger Ebert. I wish I can have a talk with him about this, pick his brain a bit. But alas, he's already gone to his eternal reward.
"Games contain art but are not solely art".
That's also my answer put succinctly. Like I said in my article, it's a bit of a cop-out, but it is what it is.
Great one. I do wonder what Ms. Santiago's motivations were - as a video game designer herself - to do a whole TED talk on why what she is doing should be considered as art. It's kind of cringeworthy behavior, in my humble opinion.
I love writing, it's truly my passion. But if someone publicly attacked the act of writing, calling it either a "waste of time" or "cannot be considered as art" or any other form of criticism like that, I would simply say "cool bro, interesting opinion..." and move on with my life haha.
"I do wonder what Ms. Santiago's motivations were - as a video game designer herself - to do a whole TED talk on why what she is doing should be considered as art."
Well I don't want to shoot from the hip, so I'll leave that question be, lol. That being said, I did found in a later research that Flower, one of the games she used as an example of how video games can be art was actually developed by her company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatgamecompany
I wouldn't say that this was a conflict of interest on her part, but it's definitely gauche (or "cringeworthy behavior", to use your words) that she would use her own game as an example.
What an interesting question. Maybe games aren't art, but instead, perhaps, a medium for art? Maybe, art is just a word for a beautiful thing, in which case, the definition varies even from person to person. Who knows?
Is war, at any level, art? Or is it merely a skill that can be sharply refined, and not art? If war is not art, then the game, which in its purest state is a mock-war, is not art either. Or is math, at any level, art? Any game wherein a player is not limited by the precision of his reflexes can be reduced to matrices and geometries and odds of given outcomes.
The physical realities of war, the immovable realities of mathematics, the arbitrary realities of games. Perhaps these are not art. Perhaps these are the nature that art imitates. What does that mean for the discussion? I have no idea, this is the most half-baked thought I've had in a while.
Hmm... I wouldn't say that war is art, considering it's a destructive thing, and art is associated with creation. I know that Sun Tzu has a book called 'The Art of War' but in the original Chinese it's called 'Sun Tzu's Military Method' and an earlier translation went by 'The Book of War'. In any case, we would just go back to the question of 'what is art?'
As for whether aspects of reality (like math) is art, I suppose you can say it's God's art. I know EMJ (known for politics/culture but have talked/written on art) claimed that photography isn't art. His basis was that there wasn't "mimesis" involved since a photographer simply captures something that's already there.
There’s a book by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, “Games: Agency as Art” (2021). Though, I’ve not read all of it, from what I’ve gathered, Nguyen disagrees with Roger Ebert that art is communication. A stop sign can tell me something, but it isn’t art until it is placed within part of an art exhibit where it can serve some intended purpose. That much is obvious, but communication is much too broad to define what art is, when white noise and even silence can be not art at one point and then be art in a different context. I’m reminded of that John Cage piece which was literal silence. Apparently that had a standing ovation. Intentionality might matter more than communication on its own.
Art doesn’t have to be passive as well. Theater art regularly breaks fourth walls and invites audience participation and agency (to some limited degree). A lot of games take advantage of the gamer’s agency, to great effect. Soma, Portal, Stanley’s Parable, Chrono Trigger, FF6, FF7, FF7R, Silent Hill, Planescape: Torment. The real difference is that, unlike most performance art, the audience immersed in a game is also the performer.
Part of Ebert’s gripe might also be the question of how one can get to the “sublime” (originating from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, meaning something like the feeling of aesthetic greatness) within a game - a medium that is active, has rules, and leads one from point A to point B - and if that’s the game’s overarching intention. (I reject the idea that a game being won has anything to do with its aesthetic status, that’s just part of A to B. Some games make you finish a story. TLOU isn’t won, so much as you’ve finished the game by participating in the narrative arc. The final feeling after the arc of the game or after its accomplished intention is what makes or breaks the aesthetic experience. So I’m giving Ebert the benefit of the doubt, that this is what he actually meant - that going from point A to B with a goal in mind cannot make art or at least it would be hard for anything like that to be art.)
Yet Ebert discounts games while maintaining films as art. Some games are films with audience participation/immersion, with the aim being the same as any sort of fiction, getting the climax, even if we consider the existence of in-game achievements.
The sublime is indeed important for distinguishing between high art and low art. What separates Dante’s Inferno from Stephen King’s It. The potential for it is what separates, to me, art from not art. I think some JRPG titles can get there even despite their linearity. Games like Chrono Trigger, Soma, Silent Hill, and FF7 definitely get there. In these games, what I felt afterward encapsulated my experience of the whole game - that everything in the game world led up to that final feeling, whatever it was, hope, dread, closure, whatever, and it affected my perception of the world. These feelings forced me to think. Silent Hill led to my interest in psychiatry as a subject, FF7 made me consider environmental activism as a young boy, Chrono Trigger was the first to make me think about the butterfly effect (before that word was popularized), Planescape: Torment is also probably similar in philosophically contemplative effect (though I’ve never played it), and Soma gave me such massive dread (about what being a brain in a vat would be like or being left alone in an abyss would do to my sanity or if a copy of my consciousness on a virtual reality would still be me).
Honestly speaking, biased as I am, I would rank Monster Hunter World as more artsy than these art games mentioned by Santiago.
I think you're right that there's more to art than just communication or the message. An anti-drug PSA would not be considered as art by most people. On the other hand, a film that shows people's lives being ruined by drugs or a video game which portrayed a drug that turns people to literal demons are a different story.
Like you, I also have a lot of examples in which video games made me think in a lot of ways. I said before that the Phoenix Wright games taught me more about faith than any theological treatise. Heck the only other media I can think of that comes close in this regard is 'The Supreme Crime', a novel that was released in 1901.
Could Phoenix Wright be in any other medium like film or book and be just as impactful? I don't think so. The fact that the player participates as Phoenix Wright in the games simply drives home the point of believing in someone who seems obviously guilty.
Back to Mr. Ebert. Like I said in my comment to Redd Oscar, I wish I can have a conversation with the guy about this topic. But since he has passed away, all we have now are speculations.
Yeah, I agree with you. Ebert’s prose is good, but there’s enough room for interpretation that there’s a chance that his readers - fans and critics alike - may end up doing exegesis or responding to an exegesis. It’s pretty obvious to me what he’s indicating, but it’s not quite obvious if he understands that there’s a gap in what he’s trying to say. Maybe reading more of Ebert’s work can help us understand why he thinks film is art. But really, I would predict that the most likely interpretation is still going to be that he does not see the way that his film-biased aesthetics undermines his claim that games are categorically not art.
Huh, interesting! I've not seen this question come up for years, and had rather assumed it was settled a decade or two ago. Which is why Ebert's ramblings were a bit strange even at the time.
The 'is [insert thing] art?' question is always tedious, in my opinion. It's a nonsense, because art tends to be very personal. One person trying to define art to another person can only ever be reductive.
I make no particular distinction between movies, paintings, music, games, comics, books, theatre or anything else. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. In all cases, it's a human trying to communicate something to other humans, and that's what makes it interesting.
I've not really seen anyone involved in making or playing games ask the 'BUT IS IT ART!?' question for years. I don't think it matters. The only people that raise the question tend to be people who are heavily invested in other mediums and for some reason feel threatened by a newer form. The same way comics were dismissed for decades. The same way rock music was dismissed. Radio, TV, film, etc etc etc. There's always a reactionary element at play, regardless of the context.
Thanks, Michael, a good read and discussion.
Oh, I forgot to mention: Flower at the time was a well known PS3 title, made by the team that went on to work on Journey. Flower is a beautiful exploration of nature and urbanisation.
That's fair enough. And having played ABZU and Koral myself, Flower is probably a game that I would enjoy.
That being said, I stand by my statement that the game is a niche artsy game (ironic, since it's apparently considered as a "casual game"). It's the kind of game that I would recommend to "video game connoisseurs" rather than the "average gamer".
Ah yeah, Abzu is some of the same people, right?
Flower is casual in the sense that it's very easy to play, and originally was entirely motion control-based. It's also no combat, no fail state etc. Back in the day it would have been on my list of 'games to show people who don't play games'., as it avoided a lot of the more generic tropey game stuff (think: beige military shooter).
I wonder how I'd define an 'average gamer'. I don't know if there is such a thing, anymore than there is an 'average filmgoer'.
Yup. ABZU's company were founded by the people who used to work for the developer that made Flower.
By 'average gamer', I mean the people who play mostly (if not only) big name games like Call of Duty, Gears of War, or even Final Fantasy. I would say there's also an 'average filmgoer'. They're the type of people who go the theater to watch the standard big name Hollywood movies (think the Marvel/Disney movies, especially back in the day). I suppose the popular term people use nowadays would be 'normies'.
An art is just a work performed to a standard. The difficulty lies in the broad English term "game". When everything from chess to Twister is described with the same word, it's hard to nail down a hard and fast definition.
That said, being that every video game is a piece produced according to established standards, yes, a video game is an artwork.
Great write-up, not how I expected it to go. To be fair to Vince the storylines he came up with were incredible.
On the 'serious' question of "can games be art?" they certainly contain art and many are quite clearly trying to communicate something and there are writers in the industry, Chris Avellone, Josh Sawyer, and Hideo Kojima come to mind, who are certainly creating art with their stories. They have a message, or many, they are communicating ideas, and they do inspire reflection in the player. But like any art form there is high art and low art. The pulp and the literary classic. Sharknado is a film, calling it art might be a stretch. The MEG is a book (later made into a film) about a megalodon that survived from the Late Cretaceous Period to now. It's a big shark horror story. Art, err maybe, but it's no Henry V.
You could take the characters and their struggles from Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Knights of the Old Republic, and write a book and suddenly it would be art yet within the game they aren't? That doesn't make sense. Yoshitaka Amano's Final Fantasy concept art could hang in galleries and no one would be any the wiser, yet in the game it ceases to be art. What is the difference here? I have gone to concerts for film scores and game scores, in the Royal Albert Hall no less, is that music but not art? Ebert's distinction isn't clear. He says a game is won. I can't "win" Dark Souls anymore than I can "win" reading Dune. I finish it, it ends. I "score a goal" on Goodreads, I guess. Does gamifying book reading make books no longer art? This is silly. He's right chess is not art and I'm inclined to agree that most, probably 99% of games are not art, it is, after all, a matter of taste. I'm not entirely sure why films are art in his assessment, I understand why Santiago's examples aren't and her arguments were piss poor anyway but why does art have to passive? Many questions for man who can't answer.
I agree with Ebert in asking why are developers and players so bothered by this question, it doesn't bother me. Games are games. Films are films. Books are books. Paintings are paintings. There is certainly high art and low art, kitsch, shit art, obvious non-art like the banana taped to a wall masquerading as "deep", if you need an essay to explain your art you failed in making art. Art is communicative. Games communicate things, sometimes lofty, sometimes low, just like short stories, novels, films, music, and all sorts of other creative endeavours. Perhaps art really is just painting, sculpture, and drawing and all those other categories are distinct things which we don't quite know how to define. Or perhaps Final Fantasy X is art but Fortnite isn't. Perhaps grinding out levels in Pokemon is not artistic experience but talking with Giovanni in the Team Rocket Hideout is. Same as reading trashy romance is not engaging with art but tackling War and Peace is.
Games contain art but are not solely art, that's my answer.
I figured you'd have something to say given the essay you just posted on KOTOR, Redd.
Anyways, you brought up many good points...
Ah yes, video game music. Not that I would be able to incorporate it to my article, but I actually forgot this. Ironic because the only reason I got into the Trails series is because I started listening to its soundtrack on YouTube.
The distinction between "high art" and "low art" is also on point. A lot of people are probably iffy on the idea of video games as art because to them, Mario and Rembrandt (for example) being in the same category is just weird.
As for Goodreads. In a sense, it is kind of "gamifying" reading. Thinking about it, that's definitely one of the appeal of the site to me. It's kind of like Steam/Xbox achievements. Sure it's self-reported so you might say that people can lie about it. But people have been using exploits if not outright hacking to get in-game achievements anyways. Heck, Steam used to have a gallery of games that's purpose is to boost your achievement numbers on Steam.
I think the point of the 'gaming element means it's not art' argument is to say that it's not an artistic experience because you're more focused on winning. It's the difference between e-sports and gaming as people originally experience (I would call it "classical gaming" but that sounds rather pretentious, lol).
Like you, I also have questions for the late Roger Ebert. I wish I can have a talk with him about this, pick his brain a bit. But alas, he's already gone to his eternal reward.
"Games contain art but are not solely art".
That's also my answer put succinctly. Like I said in my article, it's a bit of a cop-out, but it is what it is.
Great one. I do wonder what Ms. Santiago's motivations were - as a video game designer herself - to do a whole TED talk on why what she is doing should be considered as art. It's kind of cringeworthy behavior, in my humble opinion.
I love writing, it's truly my passion. But if someone publicly attacked the act of writing, calling it either a "waste of time" or "cannot be considered as art" or any other form of criticism like that, I would simply say "cool bro, interesting opinion..." and move on with my life haha.
"I do wonder what Ms. Santiago's motivations were - as a video game designer herself - to do a whole TED talk on why what she is doing should be considered as art."
Well I don't want to shoot from the hip, so I'll leave that question be, lol. That being said, I did found in a later research that Flower, one of the games she used as an example of how video games can be art was actually developed by her company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatgamecompany
I wouldn't say that this was a conflict of interest on her part, but it's definitely gauche (or "cringeworthy behavior", to use your words) that she would use her own game as an example.
Currently playing the Azure one!!
Same here, haha.
What an interesting question. Maybe games aren't art, but instead, perhaps, a medium for art? Maybe, art is just a word for a beautiful thing, in which case, the definition varies even from person to person. Who knows?
Is war, at any level, art? Or is it merely a skill that can be sharply refined, and not art? If war is not art, then the game, which in its purest state is a mock-war, is not art either. Or is math, at any level, art? Any game wherein a player is not limited by the precision of his reflexes can be reduced to matrices and geometries and odds of given outcomes.
The physical realities of war, the immovable realities of mathematics, the arbitrary realities of games. Perhaps these are not art. Perhaps these are the nature that art imitates. What does that mean for the discussion? I have no idea, this is the most half-baked thought I've had in a while.
Hmm... I wouldn't say that war is art, considering it's a destructive thing, and art is associated with creation. I know that Sun Tzu has a book called 'The Art of War' but in the original Chinese it's called 'Sun Tzu's Military Method' and an earlier translation went by 'The Book of War'. In any case, we would just go back to the question of 'what is art?'
As for whether aspects of reality (like math) is art, I suppose you can say it's God's art. I know EMJ (known for politics/culture but have talked/written on art) claimed that photography isn't art. His basis was that there wasn't "mimesis" involved since a photographer simply captures something that's already there.
There’s a book by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, “Games: Agency as Art” (2021). Though, I’ve not read all of it, from what I’ve gathered, Nguyen disagrees with Roger Ebert that art is communication. A stop sign can tell me something, but it isn’t art until it is placed within part of an art exhibit where it can serve some intended purpose. That much is obvious, but communication is much too broad to define what art is, when white noise and even silence can be not art at one point and then be art in a different context. I’m reminded of that John Cage piece which was literal silence. Apparently that had a standing ovation. Intentionality might matter more than communication on its own.
Art doesn’t have to be passive as well. Theater art regularly breaks fourth walls and invites audience participation and agency (to some limited degree). A lot of games take advantage of the gamer’s agency, to great effect. Soma, Portal, Stanley’s Parable, Chrono Trigger, FF6, FF7, FF7R, Silent Hill, Planescape: Torment. The real difference is that, unlike most performance art, the audience immersed in a game is also the performer.
Part of Ebert’s gripe might also be the question of how one can get to the “sublime” (originating from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, meaning something like the feeling of aesthetic greatness) within a game - a medium that is active, has rules, and leads one from point A to point B - and if that’s the game’s overarching intention. (I reject the idea that a game being won has anything to do with its aesthetic status, that’s just part of A to B. Some games make you finish a story. TLOU isn’t won, so much as you’ve finished the game by participating in the narrative arc. The final feeling after the arc of the game or after its accomplished intention is what makes or breaks the aesthetic experience. So I’m giving Ebert the benefit of the doubt, that this is what he actually meant - that going from point A to B with a goal in mind cannot make art or at least it would be hard for anything like that to be art.)
Yet Ebert discounts games while maintaining films as art. Some games are films with audience participation/immersion, with the aim being the same as any sort of fiction, getting the climax, even if we consider the existence of in-game achievements.
The sublime is indeed important for distinguishing between high art and low art. What separates Dante’s Inferno from Stephen King’s It. The potential for it is what separates, to me, art from not art. I think some JRPG titles can get there even despite their linearity. Games like Chrono Trigger, Soma, Silent Hill, and FF7 definitely get there. In these games, what I felt afterward encapsulated my experience of the whole game - that everything in the game world led up to that final feeling, whatever it was, hope, dread, closure, whatever, and it affected my perception of the world. These feelings forced me to think. Silent Hill led to my interest in psychiatry as a subject, FF7 made me consider environmental activism as a young boy, Chrono Trigger was the first to make me think about the butterfly effect (before that word was popularized), Planescape: Torment is also probably similar in philosophically contemplative effect (though I’ve never played it), and Soma gave me such massive dread (about what being a brain in a vat would be like or being left alone in an abyss would do to my sanity or if a copy of my consciousness on a virtual reality would still be me).
Honestly speaking, biased as I am, I would rank Monster Hunter World as more artsy than these art games mentioned by Santiago.
I think you're right that there's more to art than just communication or the message. An anti-drug PSA would not be considered as art by most people. On the other hand, a film that shows people's lives being ruined by drugs or a video game which portrayed a drug that turns people to literal demons are a different story.
Like you, I also have a lot of examples in which video games made me think in a lot of ways. I said before that the Phoenix Wright games taught me more about faith than any theological treatise. Heck the only other media I can think of that comes close in this regard is 'The Supreme Crime', a novel that was released in 1901.
Could Phoenix Wright be in any other medium like film or book and be just as impactful? I don't think so. The fact that the player participates as Phoenix Wright in the games simply drives home the point of believing in someone who seems obviously guilty.
Back to Mr. Ebert. Like I said in my comment to Redd Oscar, I wish I can have a conversation with the guy about this topic. But since he has passed away, all we have now are speculations.
Yeah, I agree with you. Ebert’s prose is good, but there’s enough room for interpretation that there’s a chance that his readers - fans and critics alike - may end up doing exegesis or responding to an exegesis. It’s pretty obvious to me what he’s indicating, but it’s not quite obvious if he understands that there’s a gap in what he’s trying to say. Maybe reading more of Ebert’s work can help us understand why he thinks film is art. But really, I would predict that the most likely interpretation is still going to be that he does not see the way that his film-biased aesthetics undermines his claim that games are categorically not art.