Wednesday, 24 October 2007
(Computer Games) Dan Hemmens rants about something other than Harry Potter for a change.
~
I should really begin this article by saying that the title is a little misleading. It's just that "Games Are Not Art" is a whole lot punchier than "The Entire Question of Whether Games Are Art or Not Is at Best Meaningless and at Worst Harmful to the Games Industry."
I recently noticed an article on the Escapist entitled "Games Aren't Art". Intrigued by the idea that a games-related e-zine would go against the prevailing trend in geek culture and admit that, just maybe, Hamlet has more going for it than Perfect Dark I had a look. I got two lines in before reading the inevitable cop-out: "As a result of social pressures, gaming is not an art form in the United States."
It's always the same. The reason that nobody has yet produced the gaming equivalent of the Sistine Chapel or Paradise Lost is because of social pressures, or commercial pressures. It's because of the unwashed Xbox-playing plebs who just want cheap thrills and deny us proper artistic types the pleasures of serious games about important issues.
This is nonsense. The reason that games are not art is because "game" and "art" are two completely different things, both of them extraordinarily hard to define.
A computer game is a vast composite entity. When we talk about - say - Neverwinter Nights 2, we are talking about a huge number of different things all at once. We are talking about a physical object - a copy of the game on a CD in a box in your living room. We are also talking about a digital object - the software itself. We are talking about intellectual property - the Neverwinter Nights franchise, which itself is part of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise, which all had its origins thirty years ago with a beardy guy called Gary. And of course we're also talking about the graphics, the character design, the 3D modelling, the actual images we see when we turn on the screen. And we're talking about the story, the text we see (or - for several thousand people who bought of Mask of the Betrayer - don't see) when we load up the game.
When people say that games are, or have the potential to be "art" it is never clear which part of this gestalt entity they are talking about. Do people mean that the narrative explored in a game can possess the same merits as conventional literature? Do they mean that the graphic design in a game can possess the same merits as conventional representational art? Or do they mean that the game as a whole is a work of art, like some piece of modern theatre combining dance, drama, verse and music into an exploration of whatever-the-fuck it's supposed to be about?
I don't know which of the three the games-are-art people mean, but the problem is that I don't think they know either.
If they mean the former, then there's not a lot to say except "well that is true, but not entirely useful." Games contain images, therefore they could contain a picture of the Mona Lisa. They also contain text, so they could conceivably contain the entire text of Hamlet. Both of these things are, uncontroversially, art and both of them could easily be included in a computer game. On the other hand, a CGI copy of an existing work of art is clearly not art in and of itself. Ceci ne'st pas une pipe, as it were. Of course one could argue that it is possible for a computer game to contain individual images which possess equal artistic merit to ol' Lisa, or to contain speeches better written than To Be Or Not To Be, but such a claim would be meaningless, it would be like saying that Deadwood was better than Shakespeare. There's just no way to judge that kind of thing.
The argument that games as a whole constitute a new and wonderful artform is much more difficult to rebut, chiefly because it is almost meaningless. The problem, as I highlighted earlier, is that a game is a massive combination of elements all jumbled together. However, a game does actually have an identifiable core. All the art, the music, the voice acting, the story and the design all supports one fundamental thing: the gameplay. At the end of the day, all computer games, like all other games, involve the player attempting to achieve some arbitrary goal, through a combination of luck and skill. Whether it's defeating your opponent in chess, or solving the Secret of Monkey Island, or getting your electronic D&D party to the final boss fight with Sarevok/Irenicus/Mephistopheles/The King of Shadows. Everything else about a game exists to support the core gameplay. I'll keep playing a game I like, even if it has a sucky soundtrack and ropey graphics, you can sure as hell bet that I won't keep playing a game I hate just because I like the music. I hear Bioshock has an awful lot going for it, story-wise, but I just plain don't like FPSes.
The thing is that gameplay just doesn't leave much room for artistic expression. Even the broadest possible definition of "art" doesn't include things like resource management, reflex tests and strategic thinking. "Game" and "Art" are orthogonal concepts: there is nothing in gameplay which allows you to experience art, there is nothing in art which allows you to play a game. It is theoretically possible to imagine an entity which permits both the expression of art and the playing of games, but those two functions would be wholly unrelated. A beautifully hand-carved chess set does not actually let you play chess any better than one you bought from the Works for two pounds, or a free-to-download chess program.
To draw an analogy: controversy aside, Tracy Emin's bed and Damien Hirst's dead sheep in formaldehyde are widely recognised as art (whether they are any good or not is another matter). Tracy Emin's bed remains a bed, Damien Hirst's sheep remains a sheep, but nobody in their right mind would argue as a result that beds and sheep are great unexplored artistic media. The artistic merit (or otherwise) of Tracy Emin's bed is entirely unrelated to its nature as a bed and by the same token the artistic merit (or otherwise) of an individual computer game is wholly unrelated to its nature as a game. In fact, I'd go further, and suggest that the "game" nature of a computer game necessarily compromises its value as art.
Specifically: unlike Emin's bed or Hirst's sheep, a computer game must perform a dual function. This immediately compromises its artistic integrity. My Bed was not produced in order to give Tracy Emin something to sleep on. To go back to the beautiful chessboard, it could (I would argue) only truly be considered to be capital-A Art if the actual decision to make it a chessboard rather than some other kind of sculpture was made for artistic reasons. If you are a professional chessboard maker, making chessboards to order, then no matter how well made your chessboards are, your "art" will always be limited by the requirement that everything you make be a chessboard.
Probably the biggest sticking point in my "games are not art, because what makes good art and what makes a good game are totally different" argument is, of course, story. And I'll admit that this is where I find myself tripping up, if just for a moment. I'm a big CRPG fan, and the thing about CRPGs is that the gameplay pretty much always sucks. Either they're D&D based, in which case you're cramming a turn-based combat system into a real-time format, or else they're first-person jobbies which devolve into mediocre FPS style action which I totally didn't sign up for. I loved Jade Empire but it was very much in spite of the combat system, rather than because of it. Truly, I say to myself, I play these games for the story.
Except: I played most of the way through the Neverwinter Nights original campaign. And the story for that sucked. And I loved Fallout to pieces, despite the fact that it has pretty much no central storyline (find the water chip/GECK to save your vault/village, try not to get too much VD). Even in the heavy hitters like Torment, Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire the actual "story" is paper thin by the standards of any other medium. You could probably take the core idea of Jade Empire and turn it into a decent martial arts flick, but you'd need to take out pretty much all the sidequests and devote about ten times as much time to character development as the game does. And of course they'd need to give the main character a personality.
The way that CRPGs manage to convince us that we play them for the story is, in fact, a masterful piece of deception. CRPGs rely on a steady drip-feed of rewards to keep you interested: a new sword here, a new power there, a little bit more information about your companions. The "story" in a CRPG is just another reward, it gets revealed bit by bit, interspersed with fights, scavenger hunts, and sweet, sweet resource management. The game is not the medium through which the story is told, rather the story is the medium in which the game is played. Any emotional impact the story has on you is not a result of its artistic merits, but of the investment one naturally places in something for which one is made responsible. I always felt bad having to nuke my blockers at the end of a Lemmings level, that doesn't mean that they were well developed as characters.
I've beaten this horse for over sixteen hundred words now, and you're probably wondering why I've bothered. I have, after all, pretty much already concluded that "Art" and "Game" are pretty much impossible to define, and so devoting all of this bandwidth to the question of whether games are art is a bit self-defeating.
The thing is, it's not whether games are art or not that I'm really bothered about: it's the fact that people are so desperate to declare that games are art and anybody who says otherwise is just scared of change that bugs me. When Roger Ebert had the temerity to suggest that he didn't think there were any computer games out there which were as good as, say, Citizen Kane or a Tale of Two Cities there was general outrage over the matter. Although curiously nobody managed to actually point him at any titles that changed his mind.
Ebert's points, while moderately controversial, are extraordinarily mild. They basically boil down to "computer games, by the nature of their interactivity, cannot be high art." It's not like the man is saying that computer games cause cancer or highschool shootings. Yet half the gaming community is up in arms (the other half, as we saw earlier, is complaining that he's right, but only because of "social pressures").
What nobody is saying (or at least, what I can't find anybody saying in my admittedly cursory Googling around the subject) is this: Not only are games not Art, they are not supposed to be Art and they should under no circumstances aspire to be Art. Games are games are games. They are a form of interactive entertainment which challenges the player through tests of logic, strategy, lateral thinking, hand-eye co-ordination, basic mathematics, timing, and a bewildering array of other faculties. It is no accident that games which have made a serious effort to move in the direction of "Art" have dropped the idea of being "games" altogether (the most obvious examples here being the "Interactive Fiction" community).
A well-made computer game is a wonderful thing. They can make you laugh, make you cry, and make you think. They can excite you or terrify you. They can improve your vocabulary, your verbal reasoning, your critical thinking, your spatial awareness and your attention span. They can be deep and complex and engaging and immersive. None of these things make them art, they just make them good games. Playing a good computer game is an infinitely better way to spend your time than reading a bad novel or watching a bad movie. And frankly playing a computer game that you enjoy and are engaged by is probably a better way to spend your time than suffering through a truly excellent movie which you can't actually get to grips with.
Geek culture seems to have an overwhelming need to justify its icons in terms of mainstream - particularly highbrow mainstream - culture. It's something I find deeply tragic, probably because I understand it so well. Somewhere between your fifth time watching Season 3 of Buffy and your third replay of Knights of the Old Republic, you start to think to yourself that you could have spent all this time watching avant-garde theatre or reading a Recherche de Temps Perdu in the original French. Once that thought strikes, you are left with three options. You can accept that you are who you are, and you like what you like, and to hell with it. You can switch off your computer and reach for the Proust. Oh so tempting, though, is option three, which is to convince yourself that actually, Battlestar Galactica is just as culturally significant as Battleship Potemkin and that only rank prejudice prevents Deus Ex from being accounted as great a study of the dangers of authoritarianism as 1984.
Games might contain art, they might be designed by people called "graphic artists," they might come in a box with "cover art" and they might have a "story" just like a novel, but games are not, and should not be capital-a Art. Which is good, because if they were they'd bore the crap out of me.
I recently noticed an article on the Escapist entitled "Games Aren't Art". Intrigued by the idea that a games-related e-zine would go against the prevailing trend in geek culture and admit that, just maybe, Hamlet has more going for it than Perfect Dark I had a look. I got two lines in before reading the inevitable cop-out: "As a result of social pressures, gaming is not an art form in the United States."
It's always the same. The reason that nobody has yet produced the gaming equivalent of the Sistine Chapel or Paradise Lost is because of social pressures, or commercial pressures. It's because of the unwashed Xbox-playing plebs who just want cheap thrills and deny us proper artistic types the pleasures of serious games about important issues.
This is nonsense. The reason that games are not art is because "game" and "art" are two completely different things, both of them extraordinarily hard to define.
A computer game is a vast composite entity. When we talk about - say - Neverwinter Nights 2, we are talking about a huge number of different things all at once. We are talking about a physical object - a copy of the game on a CD in a box in your living room. We are also talking about a digital object - the software itself. We are talking about intellectual property - the Neverwinter Nights franchise, which itself is part of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise, which all had its origins thirty years ago with a beardy guy called Gary. And of course we're also talking about the graphics, the character design, the 3D modelling, the actual images we see when we turn on the screen. And we're talking about the story, the text we see (or - for several thousand people who bought of Mask of the Betrayer - don't see) when we load up the game.
When people say that games are, or have the potential to be "art" it is never clear which part of this gestalt entity they are talking about. Do people mean that the narrative explored in a game can possess the same merits as conventional literature? Do they mean that the graphic design in a game can possess the same merits as conventional representational art? Or do they mean that the game as a whole is a work of art, like some piece of modern theatre combining dance, drama, verse and music into an exploration of whatever-the-fuck it's supposed to be about?
I don't know which of the three the games-are-art people mean, but the problem is that I don't think they know either.
If they mean the former, then there's not a lot to say except "well that is true, but not entirely useful." Games contain images, therefore they could contain a picture of the Mona Lisa. They also contain text, so they could conceivably contain the entire text of Hamlet. Both of these things are, uncontroversially, art and both of them could easily be included in a computer game. On the other hand, a CGI copy of an existing work of art is clearly not art in and of itself. Ceci ne'st pas une pipe, as it were. Of course one could argue that it is possible for a computer game to contain individual images which possess equal artistic merit to ol' Lisa, or to contain speeches better written than To Be Or Not To Be, but such a claim would be meaningless, it would be like saying that Deadwood was better than Shakespeare. There's just no way to judge that kind of thing.
The argument that games as a whole constitute a new and wonderful artform is much more difficult to rebut, chiefly because it is almost meaningless. The problem, as I highlighted earlier, is that a game is a massive combination of elements all jumbled together. However, a game does actually have an identifiable core. All the art, the music, the voice acting, the story and the design all supports one fundamental thing: the gameplay. At the end of the day, all computer games, like all other games, involve the player attempting to achieve some arbitrary goal, through a combination of luck and skill. Whether it's defeating your opponent in chess, or solving the Secret of Monkey Island, or getting your electronic D&D party to the final boss fight with Sarevok/Irenicus/Mephistopheles/The King of Shadows. Everything else about a game exists to support the core gameplay. I'll keep playing a game I like, even if it has a sucky soundtrack and ropey graphics, you can sure as hell bet that I won't keep playing a game I hate just because I like the music. I hear Bioshock has an awful lot going for it, story-wise, but I just plain don't like FPSes.
The thing is that gameplay just doesn't leave much room for artistic expression. Even the broadest possible definition of "art" doesn't include things like resource management, reflex tests and strategic thinking. "Game" and "Art" are orthogonal concepts: there is nothing in gameplay which allows you to experience art, there is nothing in art which allows you to play a game. It is theoretically possible to imagine an entity which permits both the expression of art and the playing of games, but those two functions would be wholly unrelated. A beautifully hand-carved chess set does not actually let you play chess any better than one you bought from the Works for two pounds, or a free-to-download chess program.
To draw an analogy: controversy aside, Tracy Emin's bed and Damien Hirst's dead sheep in formaldehyde are widely recognised as art (whether they are any good or not is another matter). Tracy Emin's bed remains a bed, Damien Hirst's sheep remains a sheep, but nobody in their right mind would argue as a result that beds and sheep are great unexplored artistic media. The artistic merit (or otherwise) of Tracy Emin's bed is entirely unrelated to its nature as a bed and by the same token the artistic merit (or otherwise) of an individual computer game is wholly unrelated to its nature as a game. In fact, I'd go further, and suggest that the "game" nature of a computer game necessarily compromises its value as art.
Specifically: unlike Emin's bed or Hirst's sheep, a computer game must perform a dual function. This immediately compromises its artistic integrity. My Bed was not produced in order to give Tracy Emin something to sleep on. To go back to the beautiful chessboard, it could (I would argue) only truly be considered to be capital-A Art if the actual decision to make it a chessboard rather than some other kind of sculpture was made for artistic reasons. If you are a professional chessboard maker, making chessboards to order, then no matter how well made your chessboards are, your "art" will always be limited by the requirement that everything you make be a chessboard.
Probably the biggest sticking point in my "games are not art, because what makes good art and what makes a good game are totally different" argument is, of course, story. And I'll admit that this is where I find myself tripping up, if just for a moment. I'm a big CRPG fan, and the thing about CRPGs is that the gameplay pretty much always sucks. Either they're D&D based, in which case you're cramming a turn-based combat system into a real-time format, or else they're first-person jobbies which devolve into mediocre FPS style action which I totally didn't sign up for. I loved Jade Empire but it was very much in spite of the combat system, rather than because of it. Truly, I say to myself, I play these games for the story.
Except: I played most of the way through the Neverwinter Nights original campaign. And the story for that sucked. And I loved Fallout to pieces, despite the fact that it has pretty much no central storyline (find the water chip/GECK to save your vault/village, try not to get too much VD). Even in the heavy hitters like Torment, Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire the actual "story" is paper thin by the standards of any other medium. You could probably take the core idea of Jade Empire and turn it into a decent martial arts flick, but you'd need to take out pretty much all the sidequests and devote about ten times as much time to character development as the game does. And of course they'd need to give the main character a personality.
The way that CRPGs manage to convince us that we play them for the story is, in fact, a masterful piece of deception. CRPGs rely on a steady drip-feed of rewards to keep you interested: a new sword here, a new power there, a little bit more information about your companions. The "story" in a CRPG is just another reward, it gets revealed bit by bit, interspersed with fights, scavenger hunts, and sweet, sweet resource management. The game is not the medium through which the story is told, rather the story is the medium in which the game is played. Any emotional impact the story has on you is not a result of its artistic merits, but of the investment one naturally places in something for which one is made responsible. I always felt bad having to nuke my blockers at the end of a Lemmings level, that doesn't mean that they were well developed as characters.
I've beaten this horse for over sixteen hundred words now, and you're probably wondering why I've bothered. I have, after all, pretty much already concluded that "Art" and "Game" are pretty much impossible to define, and so devoting all of this bandwidth to the question of whether games are art is a bit self-defeating.
The thing is, it's not whether games are art or not that I'm really bothered about: it's the fact that people are so desperate to declare that games are art and anybody who says otherwise is just scared of change that bugs me. When Roger Ebert had the temerity to suggest that he didn't think there were any computer games out there which were as good as, say, Citizen Kane or a Tale of Two Cities there was general outrage over the matter. Although curiously nobody managed to actually point him at any titles that changed his mind.
Ebert's points, while moderately controversial, are extraordinarily mild. They basically boil down to "computer games, by the nature of their interactivity, cannot be high art." It's not like the man is saying that computer games cause cancer or highschool shootings. Yet half the gaming community is up in arms (the other half, as we saw earlier, is complaining that he's right, but only because of "social pressures").
What nobody is saying (or at least, what I can't find anybody saying in my admittedly cursory Googling around the subject) is this: Not only are games not Art, they are not supposed to be Art and they should under no circumstances aspire to be Art. Games are games are games. They are a form of interactive entertainment which challenges the player through tests of logic, strategy, lateral thinking, hand-eye co-ordination, basic mathematics, timing, and a bewildering array of other faculties. It is no accident that games which have made a serious effort to move in the direction of "Art" have dropped the idea of being "games" altogether (the most obvious examples here being the "Interactive Fiction" community).
A well-made computer game is a wonderful thing. They can make you laugh, make you cry, and make you think. They can excite you or terrify you. They can improve your vocabulary, your verbal reasoning, your critical thinking, your spatial awareness and your attention span. They can be deep and complex and engaging and immersive. None of these things make them art, they just make them good games. Playing a good computer game is an infinitely better way to spend your time than reading a bad novel or watching a bad movie. And frankly playing a computer game that you enjoy and are engaged by is probably a better way to spend your time than suffering through a truly excellent movie which you can't actually get to grips with.
Geek culture seems to have an overwhelming need to justify its icons in terms of mainstream - particularly highbrow mainstream - culture. It's something I find deeply tragic, probably because I understand it so well. Somewhere between your fifth time watching Season 3 of Buffy and your third replay of Knights of the Old Republic, you start to think to yourself that you could have spent all this time watching avant-garde theatre or reading a Recherche de Temps Perdu in the original French. Once that thought strikes, you are left with three options. You can accept that you are who you are, and you like what you like, and to hell with it. You can switch off your computer and reach for the Proust. Oh so tempting, though, is option three, which is to convince yourself that actually, Battlestar Galactica is just as culturally significant as Battleship Potemkin and that only rank prejudice prevents Deus Ex from being accounted as great a study of the dangers of authoritarianism as 1984.
Games might contain art, they might be designed by people called "graphic artists," they might come in a box with "cover art" and they might have a "story" just like a novel, but games are not, and should not be capital-a Art. Which is good, because if they were they'd bore the crap out of me.
~
Or maybe there's a bit in the first scene where the audience have to sit there for an hour while the protagonist tries to apply a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle to every object on the stage. Each time his attempts fail he says "That doesn't seem to work". Over and over again he says it, ad nauseum, until he finds something to use that damn chicken with.
Or perhaps the play is about audience members being eaten by a giant floaty head that's being chased by ghosts. When an especially chubby audience member is eaten, the ghosts turn blue and run away.
Once that thought strikes, you are left with three options. You can accept that you are who you are, and you like what you like, and to hell with it. You can switch off your computer and reach for the Proust. Oh so tempting, though, is option three, which is to convince yourself that actually, Battlestar Galactica is just as culturally significant as Battleship Potemkin and that only rank prejudice prevents Deus Ex from being accounted as great a study of the dangers of authoritarianism as 1984.
Amen.
Yesterday, I finished reading Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars. I'm not going to review it for Ferretbrain, because it's one of those things - like J.G. Ballard novels - where I'd feel presumptuous passing judgement on it; I'd be reduced to saying "it's really good, but I can't quite explain how good it is, because the person who wrote it is much smarter than I am". That said, I do feel that by reading Suetonius, or Ballard, or Umberto Eco, or Milan Kundera, I am in a very real sense expanding my mind, broadening my views and enriching my intellectual palette.
The very same day, I bought a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh booster packs and felt a certain childish joy on discovering an Elemental Hero Rampart Blaster in one of them.
Now, there's no way in hell you're going to convince me that collectable card games are an art form. I have not attained a greater understanding of my fellow man by purchasing those booster packs. They have not prompted me to explore avenues of thought I had previously neglected. They have not suggested to me that perhaps I could live a better life. In fact, I've achieved nothing except making my Elemental Heroes deck a bit more powerful. And that's fine. There is nothing wrong with dumb entertainment, whether it's nerdish messing about with dice or macho messing about with footballs or childish messing about with cartoons; I'd argue, in fact, that it's necessary to enjoy something dumb and meaningless once in a while to avoid getting jaded by an exclusive diet of high culture.
This, I would argue, is the difference between a postgeek and a self-hating geek. :)
Oh, yes, what were we talking about? As ever you make a compelling case, Dan but I have to admit I do have a certain sympathy for the games are art crowd. Wait. No. I have no sympathy for *the crowd* but I have sympathy for the concept. I mean, computer games are still a relatively new media - we haven't even brushed the limits of what they can do and how they can affect us (in a positive, rather than gun-toting way). The fact of the matter is, I really like computer games so I'm not quite ready to give up on their potential just yet. There I said it. Throw tomatoes at me if you like. I'd agree, however, that at the moment, they aren't art, despite one or two interesting experiments. And I will also say that the games that have struck me as being the most like art have also struck me as being the least like games - Short's Galatea for example.
I think it is the very interactivity of the videogaming medium which acts against it being art. The game designers which talk the loudest about cleaving true to an artistic vision tend to be the sort of people who back in the mid 1990s (and heck, occasionally even today) would have been cranking out "interactive movies" by the score. If there's one thing the "interactive movie" boom taught us, it's that if the player doesn't feel in control of the action of the game, it's not going to be satisfying, no matter how in love you as the game designer are in your story. And the thing about giving the player control is that you inherently make the artistic impact of the game depend on the player's actions. Sure, Oblivion might present a tale of genuine artistic merit if you, as the player, decide to play it that way; alternately, it might be the gripping tale of a man who jumps everywhere to boost his jump skill.
Art is art no matter who's looking at it/reading it/sitting in the audience; the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa even if you hide it in a cupboard, a good play is still a good play even if you doodle in the programme for the entire performance and don't actually watch it. A computer game, conversely, can be Serious Business or stupid fun depending on who happens to be playing it at the time.
Art is demonstrative: you have artists producing a play or sculpture or painting or symphony that a hypothetical audience could potentially watch, look at, or listen to (whether or not the artist chooses to display their product to an audience isn't relevant). Computer games, like all other games, are participatory; they're set up so that someone can sit down and play them. Crucially, games demand a certain level of skill and adeptness on the part of the player if you are to succeed, whereas no art form - no matter how much audience participation it involves - makes any such demand of its audience; you wouldn't get a pantomime ending abruptly because the audience didn't yell "OH NO IT ISN'T" loudly enough. I could imagine a kind of interactive artwork being produced, a computer-based program where there's no game element whatsoever, and you simply look around and are amazed and slightly humbled by the awesome thing the programmer happens to have built - it'd be a bit like looking around someone's Sim City save game, or something like that. You wouldn't, however, call such a thing a computer game.
Michelangelo did not require the Pope to jump through hoops or solve puzzles before he revealed each new segment of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. Computer games do not allow you to see everything they have to offer simply by sitting there and watching the computer present each stage of the game in sequence.
Ah, yes, L'Homme de Pac...
There are right ways and wrong ways to play games - or, at least, tactically optimal and tactically suboptimal ways to approach them. The same isn't true of art.
Oh, and the "people's choice" award went to Football Manager 2007, a game consisting entirely of charts, tables, menu screens and diagrams, where all the action of the actual games of football is represented by coloured dots moving around on a map.
Oh Gawd, I'm stuck on the wrong side of the fence here. I think part of the problem with the computer games are art debate is that the "yes they are" team tends to be comprised of wankers.
Dice games have existed since Roman times but nobody pretends they are art.
But then the scope of a dice game is infinitely less than that of a computer game...
I'm a bit confused by your next point(s) though so bear with me here...
Art is art no matter who's lookign at it/reading it/sitting in the audience; the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa even if you hide it in a cupboard... a computer game, conversely, can be Serious Business or stupid fun depending on who happpens to be playing at the time."
You seem to be saying (God, that's a fucking awful thing to say to say to somebody, I'm so sorry!) that a computer game is depedent (? is that the right term?) on the person playing it for the experience whereas art has some transcendental quality that makes it art regardless of what quality of idiot is regarding it? But this patantly untrue. I mean, we see Romeo and Juliet together and you see a classical tragedy about some ill-starred lovers and I see an unsatisfying screwball comedy about the inadequacy of the Verona-to-Mantua postal service, how does this differ from the player who gets into the epic spirit of Oblivion and has a wonderful time saving the world, compared to the player who embarks upon Olivion: The Flower Picking Simulator?
Art by its very nature is interactive, even participatory if you will (I'm genuinely uncertainly as where those two terms fade into each other). You *walk* round an installation. You *suspend your disbelief* during a play. You *choose* the angle at which to view a painting. These are all active processes to a greater lesser or extend. Responding/participating/engaging with a work of art goes on on far more levels than shouting "he's behind you" when the bad guy comes on a stage at a panto. When you read a book, you read some bits faster than others, thus essentially prioritising and emphasising certain aspects of the book. Maybe you skim descriptions but concentrate on dialogue? Maybe action sequences excite you so you read them more quickly, holding your breath a little (not in a Tory sex way but because you're caught up in the action and it makes your heart pound like you're involved). It's true that computer games are *more* participatory but there is not *such* an easy to draw between conventional art and a computer game. I'm not saying that computer games are art; I'm just pointing out that it's not actually all that simple to say "they're not art because of these reasons" despite Dan's rhetorical flair.
And I would argue that art does demand a level of "skill" from those who engage with it. If you go to see a Shakespeare play, it really really helps if you can speak English. And if you're vcaguely knowledgeable about the language of Elizabethan England then you're going to at least be able to get some of the jokes and thus a richer experience than somebody who can't. If you don't know why certain houses had stewed prunes in their windows, a certain section of Measure for Measure isn't going to make much sense to you. Maybe this makes me an elitist who needs to get get her head out of her arse, I don't know, but isn't this the intellectual quivalent of jumpign through a few hoops to get to the bonus level?
Conversely, we can't get to the end sequence of, say, Planescape: Torment without playing the game through. This requires a certain amount of puzzle-solving, resource allocation and combat tactics on our part. If Clumsy Pete and Dexterity Dave go to the theatre they get presented with precisely the same experience, although their interpretation may differ. Conversely, if they play a game which demands a certain level of manual dexterity then Clumsy Pete's going to get a very different experience from Dexterity Dave (it'll involve a lot more "Game Over" screens for a start).
So, in your Oblivion example our chap who gets into the epic spirit of the main plotline is going to see the game content in an entirely different order and from an entirely different perspective from the guy who just picks flowers, and the two players might even see completely different content.
I would submit that what you are talking about is participation in the interpretation of art, whereas I'm talking about participation in theexecution of art. It doesn't matter what angle you look at the Mona Lisa from, the woman is still smiling in a landscape of brown. On the other hand, it does matter in Fallout whether you play a diplomatic character or a combat monster.
* This sort of thing is why I think "interactive movies" and other attempts to fuse game and art are doomed to failure. If the artistic angle is more interesting than the gameplay (which is theoretically possible, but I've never seen it happen), then the game elements are just irritating roadblocks thrown in your way which prevent you from oohing and aahing at the artist's handiwork. If the gameplay angle is more interesting than the artistic dimension (which I have occasionally seen) then the artistic elements are at best reduced to mere background fluff, at worst obtrusive and wreck the flow of the gameplay (we've all played games with too many cut scenes, right?). If the gameplay angle and the artistic angle aren't interesting, you are left with a pile of crap... and while in theory the solution is to make sure the gameplay and artistic presentation are equally interesting, in practice that's a nigh-impossible tightrope to walk.
That said, a nuclear engineer who deliberately blew up a power plant in order to produce a delightful wasteland wouldn't be an artist, no matter how much art his actions inspired; similarly, you might find the simplicity and variability of Go to be especially inspiring, but that doesn't make the man who invented Go an artist any more than it makes an artist of two guys playing Go. You can express the gameplay of Snakes and Ladders or Go with mathematical equations, and I know many mathematicians who would say that the latter set of equations would be more aesthetically pleasing than the ones for Snakes and Ladders. They would also giggle at you if you suggested that mathematics is an art form. (For starters, if it were then you wouldn't need nearly as much training; there'd be no "right" or "wrong" answers, no correct or incorrect way to solve an equation.)
I can almost see a Go or Chess player seeing themselves as an artist, and playing to produce an aesthetically pleasing match rather than playing to win. They would lose very quickly; the beauty of a Go or Chess game relies on people approaching the game as if it were a game, to be played to win - treating the game as if it were a work of art would, in my view, rob it of any potential to become a work of art it might possess.
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for money, indulgences, and one hell of a boost to his reputation. Shakespeare wrote plays to feed his family. Anyone who says "I am creating ART!" when they sit down to produce something is sure as hell not going to produce art, and 90% of the things we consider high culture these days were initially meant to be profitable entertainment; for most of human history, the only difference between "high culture" and "low culture" is that "high culture" was for the rich and "low culture" was for the poor. It's only comparatively recently that we've developed this self-flagellating idea that for something to be High Art it mustn't actually be enjoyable; I suspect if you looked into it you'd find that the concept is a Victorian innovation.
Also, where would this leave someone who was watching someone else play a game? Could watching someway play Counter Strike really, really well render the actions of the player art? Surely it could according to the definition we're advancing so far...
I suppose my point is, surely you can both execute and interpret/appreciate art at the same time. In fact, the distinction between the two could even be seen as artificial - surely a musician inherently does both, unless the fact he's executing the art means somehow it cannot be art for him. In which case art becomes entirely a subjective experience, in which case you couldn't make a categorical statement about whether games were art anyway.
I think Arthur's "absence of dependence on action" definition isn't a wholly useful one. Kyra has already brought up the idea of Installations, which are experienced differently depending on what you choose to look at and which order you walk around in.
To run with the musician example, for a while: one could theoretically imagine a musical "game" - one might, for example, have to play a particular piece of music as fast as is possible (and indeed I understand people sometimes do this with the Minute Waltz and the Flight of the Bumblebee). Such an act would not have any artistic merit, because it is being undertaken not as an artistic exercise, but as a test of one's technical ability.
One could also imagine an avant-garde play in which (as Arthur suggests above) the first scene is repeated over and over again until the audience succeeds in some arbitrary task. This quite possibly *would* be art, because the "gameplay" element can be assumed to be present for legitimate artistic reasons.
On his blog, Ebert wryly suggests that Andy Warhol would be totally onside with the idea that a computer game could be art, and he would demonstrate this by taking a game, leaving it in its shrinkwrap, and sealing it in a perspex case labelled "Video Game".
The point here (or at least my point) is that of course one can imagine hypothetical scenarios in which gameplay is a component of art, or in which elements of art appear in a game. A game is, after all, a big collection of images and text. However I think it's really important for gamers and the games industry to realise that good gameplay is a valuable end in itself.
And a play doesn't exist (or isn't being performed correctly) if the actors don't pay attention to the script. That doesn't mean there isn't a clear distinction between performer and audience in plays or music. Obviously pretty much all artforms involve somebody actively doing something at some point; the distinction I'm making is that art doesn't demand anything of its audience in the presentation of the experience. (Kyra is correct in saying that it might ask plenty of us in terms of interpretation, but that's not what I'm talking about). It is true that a musician's art is art for him, but I submit that the appreciation you have of a tune that you get from listening to it and the appreciation you have from performing it are two different things.
In the case of someone watching somebody else playing a computer game, we're still in a situation where a consumer (the player) needs to get actively involved in order to make anything happen; you're not so much gaining any kind of artistic insight into anything, you're just admiring somebody else's skill at shooting bad guys. There might be wonderfully creative and artistic elements woven into the game, but depending on the player's level of skill and decisions while playing the game you might end up missing them - or you'll encounter them, but it'll fall flat because the player himself isn't paying attention.
You might raise the example of a musician playing a composition by somebody else, but I would argue that doing so requires no artistry on the part of the musician, merely technical skill with his or her instrument: all of the creative effort has already been achieved by the person who composed the song.
What I am saying is that games ask the consumer to actively do something in order to enjoy the entertainment presented, whereas most things we'd count as art don't. Even in an installation, you're a passive observer passing through a place that has been set up by somebody else. You can choose to look at as little or as much as you like. You do not have to dance a little jig or answer a little riddle to unlock bits of the installation, any more than a musician's audience is expected to follow along on a guitar hero controller in order to hear the song properly.
But one could imagine a hypothetical installation in which you did. I think it's an unnecessary distraction to say that art *cannot* require you to solve puzzles, because art can do and be pretty much anything.
A game can be art in the same way that a bed or a sheep or a tin of campbells' soup can be art. Whatever makes them art (and I don't think we can pin that down easily if at all) is obviously different from the thing that makes them beds or sheep or soup.
My basic point in the above article is that although a particular tin of soup might be art, that does not make soup in general art, nor does it mean that the soup-drinking community should be fighting to have soup recognised as a legitimate artform by the establishment.
Going further and saying "soup isn't art because it is edible" or "soup isn't art because it is produced in a factory" only confuses the issue.
It's an interesting observation, and since I (like most roleplayers) dabble in game design it's an attractive one. You could also point out the way in which the War of the Ring board game perfectly captures the feel of Middle Earth, or the way that Chess has entered our popular consciousness to such an extent that we use terms like "pawn" and "checkmate" without even thinking about it.
The thing is, I think that these things are very much matters of craft, not art. War of the Ring was designed to be playable first, atmospheric second, and ultimately it only really captures the feel of Middle Earth because we already know what Middle Earth is supposed to be like. I don't think game mechanics have the level of detail required to deal with complex concepts.
In Jamie's recent article about Cabaret, he points out how the musical shows the way in which Naziism was allowed to rise mostly unchecked, because people felt that it did not impinge on them personally. I don't really know how you could explore that sensibly through game mechanics.
You seem to have started this sentence talking about creative products and ended it by talking about the components of creative products. That can of soup wasn't art until Andy Warhol painted a picture of it. It's obviously ludicrous to say that paint-mixing is a legitimate artform, and it's also ludicrous to suggest that the paint which comprises a picture is art by virtue of being a tool used by an artist.
I would agree that it is possible for a game to be used for artistic purposes, but doing so wouldn't retroactively make the game art. Furthermore, I think that while just about anything can be placed in an artistic context - and so can become a component of an artwork - I don't think every single object has the potential to be art in its own right. Tracey Emin's bed didn't become art until Tracey carefully took it out of its usual context (as a household object), carefully arranged it (or disarranged it), and placed it in an artistic context.
Computer games are a medium like any other. Some mediums can contain artistic elements (and I don't claim that computer games do not). The products of some mediums, in fact, can be pieces of art in and of themselves. However, it would be a fallacy to assume that every single medium could potentially produce an item which could be regarded as a piece of art (as opposed to a piece which contains artistic elements). Newspapers, for example, while they might contain articles about art, and might have fabulous front pages with excellent photography on them, are not "art": I would suggest that computer games exist in the same category, and for very similar reasons, to wit:
- A newspaper would not be an especially good newspaper if it did not report the news in a journalistic fashion; editors generally can't simply make stories up simply because they think the stories they've invented would be more aesthetically pleasing. (They sometimes make stories up because they think they'll sell well, but this is widely frowned on and is generally held to reduce the quality of the newspaper, not enhance it.) Even on April 1st, you don't get newspapers that are entirely full of fabricated stories. This dedication to truth and informing the public is therefore placed above any artistic considerations; in fact, any artistic considerations are simply a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
- Likewise, a computer game which had poor gameplay simply wouldn't be a very good computer game. Occasionally computer game companies will pump out a game with gorgeous graphics and sound but which don't play very well. (Psygnosis were especially well-known for this, back in the day: Lemmings is pretty much the only exception in their repertoire.)
"Is this game Art?" is a question along similar lines to "Does my newspaper smell nice?" It's trying to measure the subject at hand according to wildly irrelevant standards.
I am increasingly of the opinion that nobody should declare anything "art" until everybody who was alive when it was first published/performed/exhibited/whatever is dead. Restraining ourselves to describing such things as "interesting" will make us all look much less silly when future generations, and the ultimate test of whether a cultural artifact is meaningful art or transient entertainment is whether anyone is still interested after a century or two.
There's a subtle reason for that, which is that you've spent the past half-dozen comments trying to argue that the components of a creative product are what determines whether or not it is art.
Newspapers are another excellent example of why this approach doesn't work. You can say "newspapers aren't art" and nobody in their right mind will disagree with you, but if you say "newspapers aren't art, because they don't consist entirely of fictional stories" then you're going to annoy a large number of documentary filmmakers and photographers, as well as Wordsworth, Dickens and anybody else who used art to present the world as it really was.
You seem to be working on the assumption that for something to be "not art" it must possess some quality or attribute which somehow *disqualifies* it from being art. This is fairly obviously not the case.
That's not actually what I'm saying at all.
What I am saying is that if one is making a work of art, then one has a certain creative freedom. You may pick and choose which elements of fiction and which of fact to use to suit your purposes; if it would be more aesthetically pleasing for your installation to include puzzles, then by all means you should include puzzles, if it would be aesthetically inappropriate for your artwork to include elements then you would keep the game elements out.
In film, in painting, in theatre, this freedom exists. The documentary maker may put whatever he likes on the big screen. Dickens may describe whatever he desires. Photographers can apply all kinds of filters, effects, and photoshop tricks to their pictures, to their heart's content.
Game designers and newspaper editors alike do not have this freedom. A newspaper editor can't choose to have his writers present a particular factual story as a poem any more than he can choose to fill his newspaper with outright fiction; either decision renders the newspaper useless as a newspaper. A game designer can't choose to simply strip a game of all gameplay; if Square-Enix hire you to design Final Fantasy XIII, and you decided that the game would be aesthetically superior if you stripped out inventory management, combat, and the party structure, you'd no longer be designing a Final Fantasy game, and unless you threw in a bunch of different gameplay elements you wouldn't even be designing a good game.
Newspapers, like games, must necessarily incorporate elements which directly conflict with any artistic intent which exists on the part of their creators. I believe this disqualifies them from being art outright - if the artistic elements overwhelmed these anti-artistic elements then you wouldn't be dealing with a newspaper or a computer game or any more, but something similar but different. At the very least, it surely makes it vastly more difficult for them to produce good art.
Every Monday the times prints a column consisting of a poem and a brief interpretation/analsysis. Does this mean that the poem no longer counts as art because it exists in a medium whereby you say the anti-artistic elments overwhelm the artistic ones?
And to come back to a point that was buried several thousand posts back, I would argue that the act of intrepretation/analysis is not so very different to, or in fact is merely a different sort of, interaction.
Essentially what you seem to be saying here is that Games contain quality X. Art does not contain quality X. Therefore games cannot be art. This is horrendously limiting in every conceivable way. I'm open to the idea that games/newspapers/cheese are not and cannot be art but I don't think it's helpful -or possible - to come up with a list of qualities that are artistic or anti-artistic. Quite frankly it's mad; people have been trying, and failing, to do this *for centuries* and, although you're pretty cool, I'm slightly sceptical that you're going to be the guy to nail it.
I'd also like to point that John Carey's working definition of art, at the moment, goes something like "art is anything someone says is art." Now you can argue about this 'til the cows come home but it nevertheless it's really the best we've got.
As Dan says in his article, the "are games art" debate is meanginless and pointless because nobody can work out what art actually *is* Furthermore, although I think the argument that they're not art because they're games (in grossly simple terms) is convincing, the argument that they can't be art because they have A Certain Quality in them is simplistic and unsatisfying.
I'm going to restate my position without using the term "quality" because it's caused too much confusion. By definition, a newspaper's purpose is to provide factual information on current events. The consequence of this definition of "newspaper" is that the creative freedom of its editors and journalists is severely constrained. (Compare with, say, writing, where the closest definition we have of "a novel" is "any fictional account which hits a particular word count".) My position is that this constraint is sufficient to prevent a newspaper from being art, even though it may contain works of art, because without a certain amount of freedom of expression art is nigh-impossible to produce. (Look, for example, at the sort of propaganda paintings you get out of North Korea. They're the Communist equivalent of Hallmark cards - bland, shallow, and approved by a committee.)
Similarly, by definition a "game" involves challenges based on luck or skill. It is accepted wisdom in the computer game industry that games based entirely on luck are less satisfying, so most computer games you see will involve skill-based challenges. I'm of the opinion that this is also a sufficient constraint on people's freedom of expression that it makes producing "art" difficult to impossible; to my mind the computer programs which most closely resemble art are Interactive Fiction programs which dispense with puzzles almost entirely. (I remember one where you get to control a guy who's about to commit suicide, and it consisted entirely of walking around, looking at things, and remembering events that those things remind you of.)
I think there are things out there already which we think of as computer games, but aren't, and have the potential to be art. Second Life is more properly a simulation as opposed to a game - you can go anywhere, do anything, and build anything (so long as you have the money), and I could imagine a talented community of artists creating magnificent art there. Of course, it isn't full of artists, it's crammed with furries and vampires and pedophilia advocates, but that's the price you pay for letting every dork on the internet set up shop there. The Sims could almost fall into this same category, but it doesn't give the player complete creative freedom; if you want your Sims to behave in a particular way, you have to jump through various hoops to put them in the correct mood. If you had a situation where you could decide that some Sims are perfectly happy living in squalour, or that some Sims never, ever get angry, then I might be convinced to regard The Sims as a potential tool for art. But at that point, it wouldn't be a game anymore, because there's no challenge if you can directly control the reactions of your Sims.
Also, although the overt purpose of a newspaper is the reporting of factual events to assume this is, in fact, what a newspaper does is the equivalent of, oh I don't know, beliving the study of history does the same thing. With anything that happens, there are angles, interpretations, bias, human error, different priorities, stylistic choices - writing a newspaper story is *literally* an act of creation, even if we pretend it's an act of reportage. Hell, we even read some nespaper *for* the bias. People read The Guardian identify as the sort of people who read The Guardian with those sort of values - every event reported must be done so, must be created in fact, to fit that expectation.
Art versus anti-art is not a black and white issue. You can't make lists about it, select definitions, decide that this is art and this is not for this quality or not that quality. You can't even readily define what art *is* - you've taken the fairly complex and subtle argument of the article and made it simple in all the wrong ways.
Dan says: "Game and Art are orthogonal concepts: there is nothing in gameplay which allows you to experience art, there is nothing in art which allows you to play a game"
You say: "A game contains cheese. Art does not contain cheese. Therefore a game cannot be art."
And are you seriously suggesting that art can only be art if it is created in an atmosphere of what you consider to be "a certain amount of" (what is a certain amount? Two litres? Six tonnes? two grammes?) of creative freedom. Yes, there's 1984 at one end of the spectrum but let's look somewhere in the middle since extremes are unhelpful. What about Jane Austen? Is she no longer a creator of art because she wrote her books in the way she wrote them and about the subjects they're about *to some extent* at least because she was a 19th century woman and therefore wasn't allowed to stand toe-to-toe with the literary men of her day, nor write about things deemed unsuitable for a lady. Is Dickens no longer an artist because he was writing to the pressures of serialisation and, *to some extent* to the demands of his reading public?
BTW: I have found something which is either definitely not art or the purest art imaginable. Here it is. Perhaps we could draw surprising new conclusions if we studied it carefully.
Actually I think it's one of those perspective things. You're very scientific about it and you obviously have a very clear about what - for you - comprises art. But obviously I come from a wibbly, hand-wringing arts background that won't let me have a clear idea about *anything*
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16392
Then again, his name is John Blow, and that's completely hilarious.
He gives two examples of games which he considers to be art, but doesn't actually explain how or in what way they *are* art, he just says that they, y'know, are. Like so many people he seems to be equating "artistic" with "small press."
He seems to be expressing the opinion that games should offer you something "more" than an arbitrary reward for performing an arbitrary task. Unfortuately that is exactly what a game *is*.
We now return you to the scheduled mainstream geekery. :)
Computer games don't resemble "let's pretend", though, because "let's pretend" when you get down to it is more about interpersonal interaction than it is about "winning" or "losing" or anything else. It also isn't very satisfying to anyone above, say, 5 years old; it's arbitrary, lacks any kind of structure, and leads to argument as to whether or not someone died when someone else shouted "bang!" There are two responses to that (three, if you include just plain giving up). Some people add rules systems - whether these come in the form of a rulebook or a computer program - to provide structure and an element of fairness, and that's how we get tabletop and computer RPGs. Others get into collaborative writing, or freeform roleplay communities on livejournal, or otherwise find ways of telling collaborative stories while respecting each other's creative freedom.
CRPGs, as Dan has established, have the challenge/reward setup of pretty much every other computer game. LJ roleplay communities don't, but at the same time can't really be simulated by a computer game.
As far as the "games" in interpersonal relationships go, it's an analogy, a metaphor. Nobody in a relationship actually sits down with a chessboard and plots out what they're going to do next. There is no rulebook for real life. Computer dating sims aren't the same as real relationships (and the dating sims have the same challenge/reward structure as every other computer game).
You know, if you google about you'd probably find people who consider World of Warcraft a work of art. There's certainly people who set up extraordinarily elaborate roleplaying communities within it, effectively adding a "let's pretend" element to the XP-grinding framework that the program provides. That's the thing about conversations like these: whenever someone comes up with a grand theory of Why Games Can Be Art, the games they count as "art" are invariably "games what I like", and the games they count as "not art" are invariably "games I don't enjoy, and look down on as a result".
Compare with the situation in, well, any other artistic medium you care to mention. I don't like James Joyce, and couldn't make any headway into Ulysses at all. I still recognise it as a work of artistic significance; it's not that I think it's overhyped or anything, it's definitely a significant achievement, it's just not one I could ever bring myself to read all of the way through. To my mind, the big test of any games-as-art theory would be saying to the person propagating it "Could you name one game which you would acknowledge as a work of art, but which you personally don't enjoy?", because I'm willing to bet that a lot of the people who promote game-as-art theories will flounder, given that challenge. Certainly, John Blow's piece seems to be all about him pointing out games that he likes and games he disapproves of.
By whether the arbitrary tasks are fun to perform in and of themselves, and whether the arbitrary rewards are interesting. There's a lot of subjectivity here, but there's a lot of subjectivity about what constitutes "good" and "bad" in general.
Taking CRPGs as the basis, because most games with artistic aspirations tend to have a role-playing element, or at least a strong plot, my central thesis is that the plot, the story of those games is part of the task/reward structure. Now that doesn't mean that some games don't have better plots than others, but that's neither here nor there, both are still offering you a reward for performing a task. I was talking to a friend yesterday and she mentioned that Final Fantasy X has a brilliant plot, but tedious gameplay, while Final Fantasy X2 (not to be confused with Final Fantasy XII) has a stupid plot but brilliant gameplay. She's played FFX2 several times, but barely managed to finish FFX.
My problem with the hilariously named Mr Blow is that he seems to be denouncing the current state of the games industry, without offering any real alternatives for how games could be "art" without being boring as all hell.
On a side note, it occurs to me that there are a great many games which actually *are* considered to be "more than mere entertainment" - you yourself cite Chess and Go as examples. They're considered highly worthwhile things to do with your time, but they aren't considered to have any similarity with "art", and nobody ever suggests that Chess could be improved if they could make us care more about the pawns.
Ah, you see I come at this from exactly the opposite perspective. I like computer games precisely because they *are* "just a distraction". The thing is that I don't think "distractions" or whatever you want to call them are something one "grows out of", if anything I think they're something one grows into. The more time you spend doing useful, productive things with your life, the less you worry about the time you spend pretending to be a genetically engineered assassin.
Mr Blow seems to want a world in which computer games can fill the same role in our lives as books, television series, and movies. They never will, because those roles are already filled by ... well ... books, television series and movies. People keep trying to improve computer games (and roleplaying games, for that matter) by having them emulate other things, and it never never works. Farenheit tried to be an "interactive movie" and by all accounts it sucked goats. Fable tried to make serious points about choices, consequences, good and evil, and wound up being an utter farce. Wii Sports tried to be a fun party game where you get to run around pretending to play tennis with your friends, and it totally rocks.
As a couple of whimsical side points, I think we never grow out of "let's pretend" - or at least I think if we did, we'd lead rather bland lives. And surely computer games are, to some extent, related to this impulse? Yes, it's "let's pretend you're a kick ass hitman!" rather than "I'm going to be the pirate king and you're going to be the governor's daughter.." but, for me, part of what really makes a computer game stand out is how well it manages to let you enter pretend-space. Guitar Hero has very basic gameplay (press buttons when told to) but it's still fantastic because you genuinely feel like you are THE GOD OF ROCK.
And isn't this temporary-loss-of-self something that art has always aimed to inspire? I'm not saying you look at the Mona Lisa and think "wow, I feel like a Renassiance chick with an ambivalant facial expressin" but more that contemplating a painting, listening to a piece of music, reading a book jerks away from the preoccupations of being yourself and into a space of intellectual and/or emotional ephiphany.
Woah, that sounds embarrassingly pretentious. Please don't jump on me and point out that I'm not likely to see the face of God when playing Guitar Hero.
As gaming hardware's developed, the ability to embellish that explanation - and thus justify more nuanced and subtle gameplay - has increased, even though the gameplay itself isn't necessarily very different in spirit from those early arcade games. What is Doom (and, by extension, the first-person shooter genre as a whole) if an evolution of Pac-Man? It's all about a dude who runs around a maze collecting stuff; some of that stuff allows him to slay the monsters who are chasing him, but woe betide our hero if he's cornered when he's run out of his ability to kill the ghosts...
There may well be artistry in coming up with the plot wrapper for a game, but it's a wrapper; it's there to contextualise the gameplay, and if the gameplay isn't solid a good wrapper just isn't enough. Guitar Hero has a hell of a wrapper, but if the actual guitar-playing bit of the game was dull nobody would care. You can find people creating beautiful stories on RP servers in World of Warcraft, but that doesn't change the fact that the actual gameplay element of WoW is sheer grind. In fact, I'd argue that part of the reason people love to roleplay in World of Warcraft is that outside of the grinding and the fighting the game doesn't support very much, which gives players the creative freedom to do more or less what they like outside of those two contexts: you don't have to jump through gameplay hoops to have your in-game marriage ceremony or gay pride march, it's a matter of pure human-to-human communication.
There may well be art in World of Warcraft, but - here's the kicker - it exists far away from the grinding provided by the actual gameplay. If you look on WoW forums you see a real conflict between the folk who are there for the grind - for the gameplay - and the people who are there for the roleplaying, who tend to be less interested in the grind and seem to treat WoW less as a game and more as a medium for let's pretend - and there is a distinction there.