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I don't think so. For one thing, I wasn't certain that I'd laid out any criteria for defining art, but re-reading my previous posts it seems I have. Maybe art is art because it allows the audience to paint their own experiences and interpretation over the top of it. In which case the example you suggest doesn't fit - those choices are all false, an illusion created by the designers. You're not necessarily bringing anything of your own to the experience.
Leaving that aside, though, what you've described there could quite easily be ineffective as a game - and, to me, it's far more important that a videogame plays well than that it's classed as art. A myriad of choices so your experience may differ could just be a number of branching storylines within one game, but how the player gets to steer themselves down any one of those branches is important: does ze get to feel as though the game is honestly reacting dynamically to hir involvement, or is it a more structured, limiting implementation, where the point at which the game branches is blatantly obvious?
It also presupposes that the only 'worthy' videogame is one that contains a lot of plot. Why limit ourselves like that? Surely one of the best things about the form is that it allows us to leave ideas about storyline and auothr-created menaing behind us?
Really though, I'm not at all keen on the use of the word 'art' as a value judgement. We don't have discussions in Books about whether a specific novel can be classed as art, or if a single can in Music. The reason for that is that those media are accepted for what they are and of cultural value.
I'm not saying I don't understand the reason why we keep having this discussion, by the way. There are distinct parallels to be drawn between the historical perception of videogames and that of, say, movies. For years movies were seen as a mindless passtime, good only for entertaining the childish or the uneducated, something that could never have any real importance because they only appealed to the working class - "and hell, if it's appealing to those people then there's no way it can have anything significant to bring us". TV and novels have been dismissed in precisely the same way, as has every new entertainment medium that's ever popped its head up. Look where that's got us - we mourn the ignorance that's lost us so many examples of early film and television. It's a source of constant amazement to me that those who complaing about comics not being accepted, or pop music being derided as shallow and inconsequential are prepared to remain ignorant of another medium and wave it away with exactly the same dismissals that they complain about elsewhere.
That doesn't mean that we're going to get videogames accepted by trying to define them as art. This need to equate certain games to high points in other media suggests to me that we ourselves are unconvinced of their worth - we do it as much to convince ourselves as we do others.
Didn't mean for this post to go on so long, nor for it to cover as many bases as it does, but I think it's all relevant to the original question. I'd like to read some replies from people who don't play videogames, but I suspect that once again the very presence of that word in the thread title will have ensured that most people have simply ignored it. |
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