Video games are highest form of art! Why are they ONLY judged by gameplay?

+

Surma.

Forum regular
A single game could have more soundtracks than some artist makes songs in their lifetime.

Just an example of the music of the BEST games I've played:

If you only judge Golden Sun and the Golden Sun Lost Age by it's gameplay... or even dumber reason, the fact your characters cancel attack if their target is destroyed, rather than switch target... you're doing yourself, and everyone else a massive disservice, and you fail to appreciate everything the game has to offer. I used to plug my Gameboy Advance on gigantic TV speakers just to play this game on high quality audio. I used to search every little spot in the map multiple times to hunt down Djinns just to get the ultimate summons. Perhaps one of the greatest games I've ever played despite it's flaws... How the hell could have anyone given that game negative score just amazes me.



Similarly, in many other aspects, games like Cyberpunk 2077 combines music, art and story telling of books into something that is far greater even in each category.

This game has music crafted only for this game alone, nobody can doubt the battle themes from Heist or Maelstrom are 11/10.
There's is gigabytes worth of street art drawings.
Every single dialogue voice acted.
There's racing, combat, stealth, hacking, inventory systems, all the systems to make gameplay interesting.
TV commercials and shows to watch, plentiful of interesting side stories and characters to become friends with.

And this game was basically judged by "cops spawn behind you" like those exact critics who were against companies creating repetitive content with little updates, those exact critics who praised games for being a form of art against those people who were completely out of touch what games can do. (Granted the police system is still vital area of the game's immersion to the world and should have been on working condition on launch.)

I still got to applaud the people who make the game 10/10 for art, music and TV shows, everything that you managed to cram into the game.

So why was Cyberpunk judged ONLY as a GAME when it's more than that. It's an EXPERIENCE, a story that is very hard if not impossible to describe on a book format. The feeling of hopelessness in the face of certain death. Something that is NEVER even talked about. Story that is so exceptional... that people HATED the game for it?

The greatest irony is that the many people who hated the game for it's ending are the very same people that are staunch defenders of video games for it's ability to portray art.



I got inspired to talk about this after Watching "Hello Future Me" channel's video about Cyberpunk. Originally I meant to post longer wall of text with Fallout 1 pixel art and many other classics throughout the years... but I hope you can see what I mean without posting 10 different images and a wall of text.

Big triple A games need to be judged on more categories than "there's a bug, there's a bug!", it's so shameful to be a long time fan of these people who turn out to be soulless clickbaiters running after easy controversy.



I think best way to remedy this would be having the gaming community police itself, having critics commenting on each others content and pointing out the flaws of the reviewers, than letting these people basically stay unchecked through their career. Just an example I can't find a single person in YouTube criticizing Angry Joe for his shortcomings as an angry critic, and what makes his content good or bad. In gaming community we only mostly see this gigantic circle jerk of critics praising others reviews and stances and everyone in the independent media hating on the big guys at IGN. It's actually rather pathetic and sad how easily this type of power has left unchecked for so long while influencing so many people's purchasing decisions.
 
Last edited:
Hey,
cool topic :)

I think that having more of such components - like audio, video, dialogues,... - doesn't make the final product "better".

Take a book as an example. It's just a text, but it's everything you need. Actually, it may be even better than a video game, because it leaves the imagination up to you.

Personally, I don't like a video game being called an "experience", especially a repetitive/milked one, because I think that it lacks such an...experience :)
 
Last edited:

Surma.

Forum regular
Take a book as an example. It's just a text, but it's everything you need. Actually, it may be even better than a video game, because it leaves the imagination up to you.

Isn't Art about letting you know what the artist want to convey.
There's definitely more POTENTIAL for art when it comes to movies and especially games.

Of course there are plenty of movies that are rushed, that use premade props and don't have really much to say, and there are many books with interesting characters and story that offers great insights to life.

And of course when you create a movie there's always some restrictions that bigger studios make with limiting the time to a certain length, and many things that could exist in books are cut... but that's not the issue on the films themselves.

'Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring' for example has movie length of 3h 48m, so the makers definitely weren't afraid to take their time to show to their audience how different visiting the hobbit village folk was from the visit of soon to be unleashed terrors. I'd be happy to have more mature long movies being presented with a giant load of actors and animators working on these great sceneries.
 
Isn't Art about letting you know what the artist want to convey.
There's definitely more POTENTIAL for art when it comes to movies and especially games.
To name just one movie that I think got a lot of criticism, it's Miami Vice (michael mann). Less action and more work on art. Magnificent camera shots, magnificent musics (for me at least) :)
Boat.jpg
 
To name just one movie that I think got a lot of criticism, it's Miami Vice (michael mann). Less action and more work on art. Magnificent camera shots, magnificent musics (for me at least) :)

Mann is probably one of my favourite directors, beautiful framing everywhere!

vlc 2013-05-12 00-02-58-10.png


Back on topic...

How the hell could have anyone given that game negative score just amazes me.

It's often easier to judge a game on its shortcomings, rather than its positives; I think people fixate on what a game isn't, as opposed to what it is, and you can see those weird reactions from gonk youtubers where people rage and act personally insulted by how a video game turned out... it's so subjective. As consumers/gamers, it's easy to take for granted the huge amount of talent, time and effort that goes into making these things.

Which is not to say they're all perfect, but I think there's a clear line between a game that is frustrating or messy, and something that simply did not appeal to someone's tastes.

In Cyberpunk's case I think it's the latter.
 
Books rely on imagination.

Making movies makes stories concrete, but the 'reader' is still a passive consumer.

Video-games are something else entirely, were the player is active, and in many cases, the protagonist is the one the 'reader' sees through the eyes into the world.

* * *

I really dislike content-creators making clickbait rage-videos. Somebody manage to misrepresent the game portraying it falsely, and it's far more irritating that the many bugs that's mostly been fixed (not all, obviously, still some miles to go before it's 'gold').
 
Well on and under the surface of the overall experience, it is in fact a game of course. Criticized and talked about from top to bottom whether it be the story, characters, stability and performance, gameplay and mechanics, genre, bugs and glitches, world building or atmosphere. A game made by talented people for the public, and the reception will take into account all of those things I listed, and way more than that probably.
 
I think as the "typical" gamers get older, the discussion about games will move towards "games as art", as stated in the OP.
One example for me are the long video reviews of classic games that are appearing more and more on YouTube.

For example, in one talk Warren Spector (designer of the original "Deus Ex") said that video games aren't art yet (!) because there still was no "Citizen Kane" of video games – "Citizen Kane" being an example for the first film that showed the general public that films could be considered an art form.

But in his recent review of "Doom", the game designer and games journalist Tim Rogers argues, that "Doom" is the "Citizen Kane" of video games.

Another example is that on many art exhibitions, video games are already at display. There is an art exhibition in Germany that takes place every 5 years and is considered to be the single biggest exhibition of contemporary art where the state of art – literally – is being documented. (Thus it's called "documenta".)

At the "Documenta 11" in 2002 the Chinese artist Feng Mengbo made an installation called "Quake4U" where he modded the game even before modding was a thing all gamers knew – even less the general public. The following text is taken from this page and translated with DeepL:


After months of playing the shooter game Q3A (Quake III Arena) with others on the internet, Feng Mengbo used its open source code to develop his own version of it (called Q4U) for his permanent art performance. He built a self-portrait into the matrix, equipped with a mini-DV camcorder in one hand and a gun in the other. Visitors at Documenta and at home on their computers are invited to play along, although they are left in the dark as to whether they are playing with the artist or with other participants.

That was almost 20 years ago!

So, TL;DR: It's already happening, but it takes time.
 
Well on and under the surface of the overall experience, it is in fact a game of course. Criticized and talked about from top to bottom whether it be the story, characters, stability and performance, gameplay and mechanics, genre, bugs and glitches, world building or atmosphere. A game made by talented people for the public, and the reception will take into account all of those things I listed, and way more than that probably.
This right here. It's an interactive medium. Gameplay is a part of that. Judging a game based on "art" alone is just as silly as judging it based on gameplay alone.
 
This right here. It's an interactive medium. Gameplay is a part of that. Judging a game based on "art" alone is just as silly as judging it based on gameplay alone.
Frankly, in my opinion, I could say that it depends one can go without the other.
If we take Minecraft. It's cubes, no story, with fairly basic gameplay (As they say in France, it doesn't break a duck's three legs). But what some players does with it is works of art.
Base
Minecraft.jpg

Players works
Cyberpunk.jpg
Cyberpunk_1.jpg
If we take Beyond Blue, with a basic gameplay (narrative/educational game), it is also a work of art for me.
Beyond_Blue.jpg
 
The whole argument about whether games are art or not, doesn't really help, I think it just detracts from more interesting discussions.
Games are cultural products like books, movies, music, pictures, sculptures etc. As such they can be analyzed, enjoyed, critizised, have influence on culture as a whole etc. Some cultural prodcuts are amazing, others are rather boring, a lot of it is a matter of personal taste. And each medium has to be analysed based on its particular characteristics.

As others have said, games are interactive, so if you want to review a game, you have to take gameplay into accoount. And if a game is so buggy the art, story and quests are affected or if the graphics don't do the beautiful art design justice, then you can't just argue "the pure art behind all this is so great everything else doesn't matter". No, you have to analyse the complete thing, not just the ideas behind it or parts of it.

Of course, when it comes to you personal opinion, you can still think of it a the best experience you've ever had, but it doesn't mean that people who critisize the issues don't have a point. Personally, I really liked some parts of the game, I think the art design and worldbuilding is brilliant and some characters and sidequests are really cool, but when I look at the whole package, it just all comes apart.
 
I think there's a difference between wanting to represent Art in a game, and having artistic elements in the same game.

Every game has artistic elements. From Super Mario Bros., all the way to Cyberpunk, every game is composed of music and figurative art. Those are the artistic elements.

But most games are made to entertain, not to represent Art in its purest form. The ultimate goal of a developer is to create a game, and games are meant to entertain people. They can look and sound good, but that doesn't make a game a work of Art. In my humble opinion, of course.

Now, there ARE games that are very, very close in being a piece of Art (BRAID springs to mind). But most of the time, games are commercial products containing "some" form of art, not Artistic objects that happen to have a commercial value.

You may say, "but music is a form of art, AND is made to entertain!"... Well, yes and no. Classical music, progressive music, most rock music, hell, even some form of chiptune music, i would consider art. But most music nowadays (modern danceable reggaeton, for example) has next to zero artistic value, because it doesn't innovate, it doesn't tell anything new or tell anything at all, it just wants to make people buy a product. It's like buying a Burrito, just, you're buying yourself a piece of consumable music.

So, no, not every game is Art or is trying to be artistically relevant, but indeed there are artistic elements (even very good ones) to be found inside basically every game. I know it's confusing, but that's how i see it.
 
There's a linguist who analyzed lots of critics' and art catalogue texts. He was looking for speech/text patterns that convince people, that an object can be considered art. He found that there are four different "layers" of speech/text patterns that can be found in such texts – and if at least three are combined in a text, the probability that a person considers the described object as art is very high.

I'll post these patterns here – I translated them from German to English using DeepL – and if you read them and then read this thread again, I think you will find a lot of them : ) And you can use it as a blueprint to write art reviews of games yourselves ; )

I. Material-craftsmanship layer
- Description of details and their relation to the whole
- Description of techniques and work processes (e.g. collecting and arranging material)
- Use of material/technical terminology
- Naming and citing other authorities/experts (for [art] techniques)

II. Aesthetic-psychological layer
- Describing the usual effect on the recipient (e.g. "initially off-putting").
- Describing the emotions and judgements of others (professionals or lay people)
- Signalling innovation of the work through innovative language
- Interpreting work as a reflection of a zeitgeist
- Aesthetic correspondence between description and described, use of poetic language.
- processual verbs as a signal for dynamics (e.g. "to work through sth.")
- Appeal structure, text as invitation to quasi-common contemplation

III. (Art)historical layer
- Embedding in a genre
- Tradition, or a departure from tradition - linking curatorial and staging embedding with the art object
- Demonstrating intertextuality and intermediality (in the
broad sense)
- Establishing a reference to the present
- Embedding in the history of media - differentiation from other art

IV. Connecting to whole oeuvre/the biographical layer
- Marking the status of the artists as authorities or innovators
- Connection to other works by the artists
- Retelling the idea/concept behind the work
- Anecdotes from the artists' lives
- Quotes from the artists
- Interpreting the socio-political background of the artists as a driving force or background for production
- Describing the habitus of the artists and their behaviour, drawing conclusions about the works

EDIT: Just read some reviews of Disco Elysium, they are really full of these patterns!
 
You may say, "but music is a form of art, AND is made to entertain!"... Well, yes and no. Classical music, progressive music, most rock music, hell, even some form of chiptune music, i would consider art. But most music nowadays (modern danceable reggaeton, for example) has next to zero artistic value, because it doesn't innovate, it doesn't tell anything new or tell anything at all, it just wants to make people buy a product. It's like buying a Burrito, just, you're buying yourself a piece of consumable music.

See and that's why I think the question "art or no art" has zero merit. A lot of what is considered art changes with the times and with personal opnion. No conservative music critic in the 60s would have considered Rock music art and nowadays they are publishing pretentious articles about Jim Morrison in the broadsheets.
Shakespeare originally wrote his plays to entertain people. They were not meant for art critics, but for "normal" people. But that didn't mean they were bad or shallow. I think most people nowadays agree that they contain some incredible characters and intrigue as well as some fantastic quotes and that is WHY people found them entertaining (and they probably also liked the stupid jokes). Now is this art or entertainment? Or both?
Is Gone with the Wind art but 50 Shades of Grey isn't?

I have given up trying to catergorize things as art or no art, I simply see them as cultural products and can analyze and or enjoy them without having to draw a line first. That doesn't mean they are all of equal quality, but that elitist "art vs entertainment" argument gets avoided.
 
No conservative music critic in the 60s would have considered Rock music art and nowadays they are publishing pretentious articles about Jim Morrison in the broadsheets.
Shakespeare originally wrote his plays to entertain people. They were not meant for art critics, but for "normal" people. But that didn't mean they were bad or shallow.
It's no wonder that you use historical examples. As my post above yours shows, one of the important arguments (or "layers") is the historical perspective. The work has to stay relevant through some time. So it's fairly normal that video games being perceived as art takes time. It's the "youngest" medium.
 
Interesting thread!


Cyberpunk 2077 contains a lot of artistic elements, but most of them are a compromise.
For my taste there are too many limitations to call the whole package a piece of art.
(Edit: Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the game and there are some really great moments. I personally love the sound design and the music.)

But, I think the game could be art in a social context, e.g. if:

- It was intended to make the ncpd (police system) over-react and then tame it down within a patch due to criticism of the players.

- it was intended to pump-up expectations, in order to make the players believe that pre-ordering is bad.
 
Last edited:
Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If it's art in your mind, it's art. Trying to convince others something is 'art' is missing the point completely. For me, Silent Hill 2 is high art that works on multitudinous levels, creating the pre-eminent gaming-art masterpiece, singe-handedly proving beyond doubt that games can work on the same level as books films music. To the next guy it's a janky piece of *&@£. The world seems to have forgotten that personal opinion is ALL that matters in entertainment / leisure pursuits.
 
Top Bottom