What Is One Thing That Film Can Do That No Other Art Form Can Accomplish?

Having once fabricated the statement higher up, I take declined all opportunities to enlarge upon information technology or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, particularly given the book of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the mistake of my ways. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Possibly it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long fourth dimension. Let me just say that no video gamer now living volition survive long plenty to experience the medium every bit an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Marker Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC past Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did and so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken.

I advise to have an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. Information technology's just xv minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.

She begins by proverb video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has always been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the keen poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is articulate.

Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo'south ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may exist closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.

She then says spoken communication began equally a form of warning, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and vocal. Really, speech probably evolved into a course of storytelling and song long earlier writing was adult. And cave paintings were a class of storytelling, peradventure of religion, and certainly of the creation of dazzler from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is fifty-fifty now filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cavern of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern French republic should only exist looked at in the context of the shadows bandage on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with cipher to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Whatsoever gifted creative person volition tell y'all how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I concur. But of class that depends on the definition of art. She says the virtually articulate definition of fine art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess thespian I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined equally the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero substantially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from piece of work, which is unremarkably carried out for remuneration, and from fine art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every i. For example, I tend to remember of art as commonly the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not fine art? One could think of it as countless private works of art unified by a mutual purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Aye, simply it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't offset dancing all at in one case.

I obvious divergence between fine art and games is that y'all tin can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, just I would say then information technology ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a picture. Those are things yous cannot win; you can only experience them.

She quotes Robert McKee'southward definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is too motivated by the aforementioned want. I might contend that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would debate that his novels are so motivated. Merely when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the sense of taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Fine art is a mode of communicating ideas to an audition in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are independent in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Nighttime of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Dear Vocal of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your ain art object from the materials at manus.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point defective a convincing definition of art. But is Plato'due south whatsoever better? Does fine art grow ameliorate the more information technology imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what nosotros might call the artist's soul, or vision. Endless artists have drawn endless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, nearly are very bad indeed. How exercise nosotros tell the difference? Nosotros know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (in a higher place), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Co-operative Davidian chemical compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents co-ordinate to the rules of the game. Although the role player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like i more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a slap-up game, just as potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, she defends the game not as a tape of what happened at Waco, but "equally how we feel happened in our civilization and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in contrast honour the game a Fail in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing it every bit art.

Her next example is a game named "Braid" (in a higher place). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our by...you lot come across enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there'south one key difference...you can't dice." You tin can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I tin can larn about my own past by taking dorsum my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

Nosotros come up to Instance iii, "Flower" (in a higher place). A run-downwards city flat has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural mural. The game is "about trying to notice a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Practice you win if y'all're the kickoff to find the residue between the urban and the natural? Can yous control the blossom? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?

These three are just a small choice of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into creative expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Braid" has had a "great marketplace bear upon," she says, and "was the pinnacle-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "disquisitional acclaim."

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "every bit simplistic." Apparently, I'm hopelessly handicapped considering of my love of cinema, merely Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modernistic video games. He has express technical resources, only superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-upward gamers" promise for games that accomplish higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already being made) "are beingness rewarded by audiences by high sales figures." The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through turn a profit participation.

The three games she chooses as examples exercise not enhance my hopes for a video game that volition deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No ane in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined every bit art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art course. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Serial of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They take my approval, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming confronting parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they desire to be able to look upwards from the screen and explain, "I'g studying a not bad form of art?" Then allow them say it, if information technology makes them happy.

I allow Sangtiago the last give-and-take. Toward the terminate of her presentation, she shows a visual with half-dozen circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her dauntless new earth of video games equally art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.