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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Yes, but is it *art*?

  
  

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Lurid Archive
17:32 / 14.06.05
Are computer games art?

This is an old question, but somehow constantly requires a rethink as the technology moves forward. Now, clearly, this answer will in part depend on what kind of game we mean so let me start with an example.

One of the award winning games last year was Knights of the Old Republic (Kotor), set in the star wars universe. This rpg had a very strong story element which lots of fans of the series felt was much more satisying than anything offered up by Lucas at the cinema. Now, you might object that Star Wars doesn't count as art in any incarnation, but Lucas and the people with him certainly think of themselves as artists. If you allow Phantom Menace, why not Kotor?

In fact, the film tie-ins are fairly common, and the furthest I think this has been taken is with Enter the Matrix, which fills in some plot between Matrix 2&3. And the traffic isn't all one-way, and you get films like eXistenZ which to some extent mimic the structure of games. But this is a pretty weak case all in all, given that I am comparing certain games with films of questionable quality.

So this is where I want to throw it open. If computer games are art, where is the artistic merit? Which are the masterpieces (for want of a better word)?
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
18:22 / 14.06.05
There's an art to playing them.

There's an art to designing them.

There's art in the sound and art in the sound and the graphics.

But they aren't art, really. They're highly interactive (or they fucking well should be). The act of playing within a set of rules overides the experience of art, and I think that's probably for the best, because every attempt I've seen to assess games as art has dodged the playability, and missed the point entirely. You play them.

(caveat: I enjoy Rez, so feel free to hack bloody great chunks out of the above)
 
 
All Acting Regiment
18:34 / 14.06.05
It's an obvious point, but what we have now is a games industry: there is a huge market (at least in the 1st world) for videogames, which means there's more money coming in than ever before.

However, I think, and I think others here will agree with me, that now we have a market, games have to adapt to the rules of the marketplace to survive, just like Hollywood films. Largely, they are required to stick to the same formulae- essentially singular violence, group violence, or sport- if they want to sell, which means that their potential for becoming an artwork is diminished.

Perhaps we need people who are involved in the arts scene to get involved with games, do you think that would make a positive difference?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
18:41 / 14.06.05
Two thoughts have just struck me.

A: Great artwork is- to paraphrase a Spanish poet- often as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Bacon, for example, wouldn't have created such powerful images without some form of moderation, and even a horror film has degrees of suspense.

But games are, by their nature, required to present a continual challenge, which is why- presumably- you just can't hide your monsters in the shadows 90% the time. Also:

B: A work of art is often directed by someone who has knowledge in how to make something effective, be it a horror film where the director knows how to scare you, or a romance where they know how to tug your heart strings. Even a painting. The point is, what you see in a game is often decided by you, the player: you're editing and directing half the the "film", and often "you" isn't the best editor.
 
 
Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!
19:12 / 14.06.05
I would have said that they cannot be art a couple of years ago, but now I've played ICO which makes me question that statement. It's not Kurosawa, but the beauty and mood of the characters and backgrounds in this game made me feel the swell of giddiness I feel when I see a beautiful painting.

So I suppose, like movies, most of them are shit, and the rare one is beautiful. So yeah, to me they're art.
 
 
Shrug
19:44 / 14.06.05
Well first of all there are fields of art which is more what you mean? There’s painting, ballet, literature, ceramics, film, mixed media art, installations, music etc. So does video gaming fall in with these categories? Should it be included? Well yes and (arguably) ever increasingly so! And you know what it’s bloody exciting that a lot of us were around for its inception because although it is a relatively new format and in the early stages of its development it edges toward inclusion as a field of art bit by bit.
Why should it be? Looking at a couple of points briefly: aspects of gaming have become more and more cinematic with the advent of near photo realistic graphics and longer more impressive fmv sequences. Can I reference the FMV at the start of the most recent Omnimusha? One word: beautiful! Further to that FMV laden, narrative heavy survival horrors and first person adventures have almost moved away from button bashing core gaming concepts and into the foray of interactive story telling.
And to look at it another way games are stylistically whorish borrowing from film, comics, real life and art itself (which is what art is all about it's vociferous in its ransacking of fucking everything in the name of imagination, design and entertainment).
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:43 / 14.06.05
The first thing you've got to tackle here is the question, "what is art?" Other media are defined by their properties. A film is only a film if it there's a visual on a screen. A book is only a book if it has pages. Games, though, are a totally different thing. A game isn't defined by its properties, it's defined by its audience - a game is only a game if people play it. It means that you're going to struggle to try and call a game 'art' using any traditional notions of art.

You know a game that I'd class as art? Pac-Man. Everything fits together perfectly - not a single element is out of place. Visual and aural aesthetics, control, design - there's a coherency and purity of design. It's also iconic and instantly recognisable.

Which makes me wonder if anything much more complex could ever be called 'art'. KotOR, for example, is fun, but more than that? It suffers from clunky dialogue, a frame rate that isn't stable and not exactly smooth at the best of times, character animation that's similar to that in most other third-person adventures... Narrative, visuals, sound and technical aspects all have their faults. Gameplay, too - the stop/start nature of battles is inelegant, the shooter sections are an obvious afterthought. These things don't stop it from being a great game, but they stop it from being art.

However, I think, and I think others here will agree with me, that now we have a market, games have to adapt to the rules of the marketplace to survive, just like Hollywood films. Largely, they are required to stick to the same formulae- essentially singular violence, group violence, or sport- if they want to sell, which means that their potential for becoming an artwork is diminished.

I think this raises the question of whether or not a medium has to grow into a massive financial concern in order for certain examples of it to break free and become art. When you get to the stage where there's a vast amount of trash being pumped out by an industry, is it only then that those that aren't rubbish get the chance to stand out? You can't have the light without the dark, and all that nonsense.

What's everybody's opinion of Electroplankton? Created by a recognised artist and marketed as a piece of interactive art, but still a videogame. There's no ultimate point to it other than just messing about and having fun, seeing what you can create with it. Art? Game? Something else?
 
 
Shrug
21:58 / 14.06.05
The first thing you've got to tackle here is the question, "what is art?" Other media are defined by their properties. A film is only a film if it there's a visual on a screen. A book is only a book if it has pages. Games, though, are a totally different thing. A game isn't defined by its properties, it's defined by its audience - a game is only a game if people play it. It means that you're going to struggle to try and call a game 'art' using any traditional notions of art.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here by your logic a book is equally only a book if someone reads it, a film if someone watches it point being they can also be similarly defined by interactivity and an audience should one want to e.g the notion that nothing is art until someone decides it is art and is there to appreciate it.
Another defintion of art:
The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty.
So it is personal taste. A few games have affected my sense of beauty; parts of Prince of Persia seemed so fluid with such a pleasing aesthetic design that I thought it art, although I didn't think it an excellent game!
I have to agree that there is something irksome regarding allying videogames and art. But what exactly is it? Is it the mass production? (although literature often is) Is it the interactivity? (much art should be a tactile experience e.g. some installations but unfortunately they frown upon the tactile aspect in most museums and galleries). There is no denying that the paradigm of art is widening shouldn't our perceptions of it be too?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
22:06 / 14.06.05
I'm not sure what you're getting at here

I'm saying that you can, if you wish, define those other media purely by their properties, and that you can't do that with a game. A game isn't a game until it's played. A book is still a book even if it's not being read.
 
 
Shrug
22:44 / 14.06.05
I'm saying that you can, if you wish, define those other media purely by their properties, and that you can't do that with a game. A game isn't a game until it's played. A book is still a book even if it's not being read.

I understood what you said I just thought to be a bit faulty (no offence) our perceptions are possibly just massively dissimilar. But games aren't ethereal, they are bloody tangible things discs and cartridges with the potential to entertain etc sure you need to interact with them to benefit but equally so with other art (be it a less aggressive form of interaction). They still are games with the potential for being appreciated when not viewed/interacted with like all art. A game is still a videogame when not played it still has a physical presence it can be defined by the coded information in it.
 
 
Tom Coates
22:52 / 14.06.05
It seems clear to me that pretty much every form of artistic endeavour that has ever been attempted has required some kind of interaction from its audience -some piece of engagement, understanding, intellectual or aesthetic labour - so in that respect I think the question is a bit of a red herring - ie. of course they're art, it's a creative work with which people engage. But then you get into dangerous categorisation problems with things like the web and the telephone network. Certainly I view games I play by myself as an art, but for some reason I hit conceptual problems when other people are in the same space - because weirdly then it's difficult to state who is creative and what they're creating. An obvious definition of art has been creativity in excess of utility, and in this respect they are clearly artistic works, but maybe the problem is with the language and categorisations we're trying to place on top of this enormously new area, rather than in the environment itself.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
23:05 / 14.06.05
A game is still a videogame when not played it still has a physical presence

Well, no. It doesn't. A CD isn't a game. A cartridge isn't a game. Code on its own isn't a game (and isn't physical, either). But even if this weren't the case, I think you're wrong on a really fundamental level - for a game to be a game of course it has to be played. Interaction isn't an option, it's a necessity - interaction is the only thing that makes a game a game. Without it, you have a CD, or a cartridge, or lines of code, or images on a screen that might as well be a film.

Name me one thing that nobody plays, yet which is still classified as a game.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
23:12 / 14.06.05
The easiest way to answer the question, of course, is with another question - does it even matter?
 
 
Shrug
23:22 / 14.06.05
But I was saying that interaction in all art is a necessity or else none of it matters a damn.
A painting
The potential is present-you interact-Gratification.
A videogame
The potential is present-you interact-Gratification.
There are also art installations that need human interaction (in the same interactive sense as videogames) to realise their potential.
I did understand what you were saying just why you were going there at all.
 
 
Shrug
23:24 / 14.06.05
My post was in response to your previous one Spatula. I'm just going to forget about it and watch BB. Goodnight.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
23:44 / 14.06.05
Ah, I think maybe you misread my original post. When I said that, I wasn't talking about how you decide whether these things are art or not, but simply about how you define the media themselves and trying to use that to point out the difference - I think that's where the confusion's coming from.

Yes, all art has to be interacted with in order to be art - that's inarguable, because the word 'art' as it's being used in this thread is a value judgement, and it's only an audience that can make that judgement - but not all 'things' have to be interacted with in order to be 'things'.

For a film to be art it has to be experienced by an audience, but for a film to be a film it just has to be.

For a game to be art it has to be experienced by an audience, and for a game to be a game it still has to be experienced by an audience.

Make sense? A game has to be interacted with, otherwise it ceases to be anything - a game and/or art - and just becomes lines of code.
 
 
Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!
00:01 / 15.06.05
For a film to be art it has to be experienced by an audience, but for a film to be a film it just has to be.

For a game to be art it has to be experienced by an audience, and for a game to be a game it still has to be experienced by an audience.


Make sense? A game has to be interacted with, otherwise it ceases to be anything - a game and/or art - and just becomes lines of code.

Can you in any way justify this tautological wet-dream?

So, a game unplayed is lines of code, but a film unwatched isn't just light and celluloid? Why not?

It's the same fucking thing. Films don't somehow become a different class of object (or art, even) just because you say so.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
00:21 / 15.06.05
It's called play. It's kind of important where games are concerned and is an entirely interactive thing. A film doesn't have to be watched - you can stick it on and go out of the room and it's still a film. If you do the same with a game it edns up being exactly the same as the film, a series of images running on a screen while nobody interacts - plays - with it.

I think I already mentioned this earlier on.
 
 
Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!
00:36 / 15.06.05
It's called play. It's kind of important where games are concerned and is an entirely interactive thing. A film doesn't have to be watched - you can stick it on and go out of the room and it's still a film. If you do the same with a game it edns up being exactly the same as the film, a series of images running on a screen while nobody interacts - plays - with it.

I think I already mentioned this earlier on.

A film unwatched isn't a film. The medium is there to communicate an idea, feeling, or story to an audience in the same way that a game is there to be played with by a player. Interaction is required in both, although the film requires an admittedly more passive form of interaction. Without a participant, both forms of art cease to serve any function as art. Games are no different than films in this, and it's absurd to draw a distinction between the two.
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
01:08 / 15.06.05
You could make the case that the ball-rocking Rez can be considered a work of art - there's a traveling mode, which negates the challenge element and turns each stage into a pure experience. Everything is stylised to the hilt, and music is intergrated into level goals and joypad imput. It's like a little installation on my Dreamcast. Look!



Note the name of the studio that made it - UGA, United Game Artists.

And yet, at the same time, like Pac-Man or Galaxians, it's playable as hell. Maybe games only become art when the graphic design and sound design are strong enough to overcome the aging process that most games go through? Galaxians will still look sweet in 20 years, Pac Man will still be a design classic in 20 years. KOTOR won't (whoever made that point did it very well). So what you're looking for is a kind of timeless quality to the visuals and sound. A lot of Nintendo NES/Famicom stuff pulls this off very well - the SMB 1 sprite still looks great, for example.

So there you go. Timeless games become art. I'd rather experience them as games first, though - who the fuck wants to play art?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
01:13 / 15.06.05
Without a participant, both forms of art cease to serve any function as art.

Yes. I agree. You even quoted the bit of my post where I said the same thing.

Isn't it exactly the fact that games require a more active form of interaction than other media that makes trying to judge them as art, based on the same criteria as you would work in those other media, utterly futile? The term 'art' is given to the best examples of whatever form you're talking about at the time, yes? So if a game's going to be called 'art', it has to be a superb game first and foremost.

The ill-defined concept of 'gameplay' - if it doesn't have that, then a piece of software's a poor excuse for a game and can't be called art because it fails in its primary purpose.

That's the point that I was originally trying - and failing, apparently - to make. Some traditional works of art - films, paintings, etc. - leave the audience cold, but they're still called art because they have an aesthetic beauty, even if it's one that purposefully pushes the audience away. A lot of Warhol's stuff, for example - he deliberately prevents the viewer from engaging with it on any sort of emotional level. Games, on the other hand, have to draw the audience in to be successful - unless a game is actually enjoyable, unless it can invite an audience in and pull *some* kind of emotion out of them, engage them, then it's a failure.

The same as Dudley said, really, only less succinct.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
01:19 / 15.06.05
Dudley> Doesn't that mean that a game has to be abstract - visually, at least - in order to qualify?
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
01:29 / 15.06.05
Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't - I reckon Street Fighter II CE counts as a timeless game, but again, personal prejudice.

OK, secondary qualification - games done in an art/animation style may also suceed as art, since attempts to be photorealistic tend to lead to poser-esque horror or Night Trap. We don't need no fuckin' Night Trap.

Sooooo, what else can we consider to be an "artistic game"?

Jet Set Radio, definately. The Street Fighters. Gunstar Heroes. Guardian Heroes, possibly (Treasure are fucking godly at games). Gradius II!

I think it needs to be taken as a given that an "art" game has to suceed as a game in it's own right, since that's what the art of the form implies.

Oh, and Wario Ware.
 
 
Shrug
01:34 / 15.06.05
Paper Mario it's wonderously self referential.
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
01:38 / 15.06.05
Yeah, I can see the Paper Mario style not dating.

Oh, cool little titbit - the director of Ico and the forthcoming and utterly gobsmacking Wanda no Colossus (I believe Fumito Ueda, although Moby Games has lied to me before) was inspired by an earlier game that I think could stand as art - Lemmings. He said it made him want to create life on the screen. Cool.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
02:42 / 15.06.05
But they aren't art, really. They're highly interactive (or they fucking well should be). The act of playing within a set of rules overides the experience of art

I think that they are art, to reduce it down and steer away from the subject of interaction for a moment, the process of creation and attention to the look and atmosphere of a game is surely a tactical process that leads to the emergence of an artform. The fact that you play a game, the interaction itself does not detract from the fact that someone, somewhere has designed a particular videogame to have a certain style and aesthetic and this is exemplified by the variety of looks that we encounter in computer games. There's a world of difference between Grand Theft Auto and the version of Pinball that came with my PC but they're both very good to look at and for me that means there was an aesthetic process locked into their design.

And yes, just because a game doesn't draw an emotional response doesn't mean it isn't art, it's simply art that has failed to catch you, in much the same way that you might feel no emotional response from a particular photographers work.
 
 
astrojax69
03:51 / 15.06.05
i don't think we can make the blanket statement 'computer games are art' - nor probably its converse.

football - to use another aspect of this forum's topic range - can be art; certainly it can be theatre, and no-one here, i suspect, would decry 'theatre is art', would they? but a bland game is not theatre, certainly not good theatre, and wouldn't be deserving of the epithet 'art'

what i suspect is that many computer games - good ones (howsoever that might be defined, esp taking the point that pacman be art!) at any rate - certainly have a hefty element of 'art' (both in their aesthetics and their craft), but the fundamental point of them isn't to comment on, or become, the instantiation of our culture, but to entertain, to challeng, to amuse. this is a game's primary role.

a secondary role might be that it look good - as a tv news set might, or a packing on a medicine bottle - but the primary purpose is the craft of its intent to be a game, and art is not a primary factor. there can be art 'in' games, but i contend they are not art.

i am probably wrong! (an anthropologist from beyond infinity, say the year 2564, might look at this thread and laugh - ha ha ha i wonder....)
 
 
The Strobe
08:56 / 15.06.05
(I'm currently on horrid dialup so will return to this post in future, in more depth).

There's a very good Edge piece from a few years back - I still have it, although not to hand this second - that spends about five pages examining that very question.

And they hit a problem: they believe that art, by its nature, can't include choice. There's an element of choice, I guess, in interpreting art, but the object you are interpreting is fixed, definite, limited. A game throws choice at you. One person's experience will be entirely different to another; criticism can't encompass all possibilties.

So, in short, purely because games contain choice, they can't be art. And if they don't contain choice, they can't be games.

Not entirely my opinion, but it's worth bringing up. I'll dig out the article tonight and see if I can provide some more relevant information.
 
 
The Strobe
09:02 / 15.06.05
I think, also, the boundary we're going to come up against time and time again will be design against art. Design is about how a thing is made, how it is constructed, how form fits function. A few people in this world would argue that the shape of a car, the whole car itself is art, but most would argue it's better described as design and engineering.

A game is great design, and great engineering; that covers the aesthetic appeal, the form, the function, and the mechanics (some of my favourite games are that because of their engineering - their mechanics - above all else).

But I'm not sure games have the capacity to become art. Some do. Some, for a few brief seconds, do. Rez is dedicated to Kandinsky, and I think there the aesthetic, abstract nature of it did over-ride the gameness of it at times.

Also consider: many of the things we think of as the "artistic" aspects of games are cribbed from other genres. KOTOR is mainly great because of its script. Scripts are not unique to games. If I'd commend anything in it, it's not the game, but the writing. And whilst writing may be art, that doesn't make the game in which that writing is contained art. Art is about more than components, it's about the whole.

Like I said, will dig out quotations when I have better reference material to hand.
 
 
iamus
12:21 / 15.06.05
I think, like has been mentioned above, that the most fundamental aspect of classing games as art or not comes in the interactivity. The whole pivot on which the medium is balanced is the point of connection between player and played. When trying to consider the medium as an artistic one it's really the only factor to be considered. Aesthetics shouldn't come into the argument at all. It does and should for some other mediums because their pivot, the point of interaction between themselves and the observer is specifically aesthetically based.

You would judge the artistic merits of a painting on it's composition, use of colour etc. but you wouldn't judge a book on how the lines of text look on the page, you would judge it by the loops it takes your mind on when interacting with it. A book is not still a book when not being read. It's wood pulp and ink. It may be ink arranged into codified, exacting arrangements, but they're not words until we make them words by applying meaning. In the same way, a game is just pits and troughs on a bit of plastic creating patterns of light on a screen until we give meaning to that interplay by interacting with it. (Though see the end of the post for a possible contradiction to this).

So the art comes in the gameplay. But gameplay can mean many different things depending on the context of the game. I don't think any medium by itself can be art. Are houses art? Definately some houses are. Are all movies art? Debatable (aside from the fact we use the term "arthouse" to classify some types of film). The medium has the potential within it to produce art, almost everything does. But it isn't art in and of itself.

If you do the same with a game it edns up being exactly the same as the film, a series of images running on a screen while nobody interacts - plays - with it

Not really true. In the abscence of a player, a game will continue to interact with itself. Ghosts will continue to search for, then kill Pac-Man. CJ will waste away, get run over by a car, shot or complimented on his pectorals. The inhabitants of Doubita will go to their jobs, get out of each others way in the street and then go to bed and every time they will all do things a little differently. It could be said that the game gives itself meaning by interacting with itself, but I'm not sure. It's possible other meduims do the same things in different ways. It's possible this has no bearing on it's artistic merit either.
 
 
The Strobe
12:52 / 15.06.05
Meludreen's suggestion that the art comes in the gameplay, and how houses can sometimes be "art", ties neatly in with my suggestion of the engineering/mechanics of the game being what we give credit.

Unfortunately, I don't think the game interacts with itself at all - that's a big misconception. The game doesn't play itself. The objects within it continue to adhere to the rules of the system - ghosts bumble around mazes, pedestrians in San Andreas wander around, and the cars drive around, and occasionally someone commits a crime - but they're just following rules, AI patterns.

They're not playing the game because they are already in the game.

So there's no interaction; there's just rules. At best, you have the equivalent of Conway's Life: a simulation that can only be observed. What stops it being a simulation-for-observation is when the player dives in, and controls CJ or Pacman, and an object that exists outside the game (the actual player) starts interacting with objects within the game (everything else) through the player character (Pacman, CJ).

Games can't play themselves, usually. A game playing itself is a 0 player game of tic-tac-toe; two artifical intelligences pitted against each other. Or a beat-em-up in "watch" mode. But even then, it's just a rule-system reacting to another rule-system.

Aha, hit upon it: in a 0-player game, there is no free will, no choice being enacted. Just rules. Without the player, you have an automata. The player(s) make it a game.
 
 
Olulabelle
13:13 / 15.06.05
I would argue it's nonsensical for the inclusion of choice to be used as a method for categorising something as 'not art'.

In an exhibition many years ago where film makers made 'art' and artists made films, Peter Greenaway (I think) made a chest of drawers the width and height of a room. Next to it was a ladder and the idea was that the 'viewer' could move the ladder anywhere and look inside any drawer. At Video Positive in Liverpool I saw a piece of interactive art where the viewer created sounds by moving under different coloured lights. At least four people could do this at a time - making the sounds work together, or not, as they chose. Not unlike a game.

Some of the best webart is entirely based on choice.

Interactivity is a vital component of many installations, and interaction by it's very nature necessitates choice.

So to suggest that the interactivity or choice making element of a game can be used to disclude it from the concept of 'art' is fairly flawed, but I do think it's an interesting way to approach the subject. By considering if any game aspects can be determined as 'not art' it may be easier to define those that are.

Footnote: I have been pondering on how Street Fighter can be considered art and I have come to a complete standstill. I'm really not trying to be obtuse, but can someone (Cyberballs?) please explain this to me?
 
 
iamus
13:40 / 15.06.05
Firstly, I think this post may be branching off into a whole different discussion. Apologies for threadrot if so. If anybody thinks so but still wants to continue this then tell me and I'll start another thread.

Unfortunately, I don't think the game interacts with itself at all - that's a big misconception.

I was struggling to reconcile this, but I think this is where I stand on it. A book is interacting with itself in a fundamentally similar but more static way. The beginning, middle and end are structured the way they are precisely because of the way they relate to each other, relying on rules of structure and narrative. A GTA pedestrian walks where it does and the way it does for the same basic reasons, because of the way the game is structured. But is there really free will when you introduce the player, or is it a randomised but still rule-bound element?

The Player Character can only do what the developers what you to make it do. You can't sit down with the Ballas, passing a forty around and discussing the futility of all this violence, because without the violence they are redundant. They are defined by the violence. They will always be an enemy, there to shoot or be shot (or run over, or crushed or drowned etc.).

So when you take it all back, the purpose of the player to the game is simply as a randomising element, just as rule-bound as the rest. The player is there to pump information into a rigidly defined ruleset in order to get those rules to act off one another in interesting and unique ways. You square off against another character in Soul Calibur. You and the program are doing exactly the same thing, choosing from a list of pre-set commands (no matter how vast that list is). What is the fundamental difference when you put on the battle theatre and let the computer take hold of both character's perspectives? The game is there to interact with us just as much as we are there to interact with it. It's a gene/meme symbiosis.

When you don't play, gamerules will continue to act off of one another regardless of whether the player helps or not. The only thing that changes with the addition of a player is that different sets of rules get a chance to spark off one another. However, what you can experience is defined entirely by the rules you are allowed to play within. The player can choose to make a plane fall out of the sky where it wouldn't normally, but that's only because the game allows us to.

The game is always playing itself, even when the player is there. It's only because it plays itself that we are able to play it too. It's in the application of context through interaction that art comes about. Does it provide context if a game interacts with itself using the same rules with which a player interacts?
 
 
The Strobe
13:41 / 15.06.05
Some of the best webart is entirely based on choice.

Examples?
 
 
iamus
13:46 / 15.06.05
Lula,

Street Fighter is art to me because of the elegance of the system and it's beautiful balance. All the pieces fit together so well (like Pac-Man, like Tetris) that it is capable at times, of effectively removing the barrier between the game and the player. Known as being "in-the-zone", it allows (and this sounds really wanky) a kind of zen-like playing without playing. Whenever I'm at my best at street-figter, I'm not even thinking about what's going on. It's instinctive, pure expression. (Which, incidentally is what I find most artistic about gaming as a medium. Ta for prompting that one!)
 
  

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