To avoid a superficial and elitst form of thinking, I’ll not start from the premise of pointing what is art and what isn’t. I think that a creation or expression based on an intention to send to others something, even if unconscious, is a form of art.
In a brief and oversimplified definition, art is the use of specific abilities to express your ideas and/or feelings. And though videogames are legally protected by the US Supreme Court as creative work, it still remains on a philosophical boundary between the art and an entertaiment tool.
Roger Ebert, a renowned film critic, stated that, even if in a controversy way, videogames could never aspire to be art, such as great part of the cinema. “One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. […] Cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.”
One of the Halo’s franchise games was characterizade by the motto of “Engineering The Fun” and was attended by experts to research and develop specific moments of happiness, frustration and fear. And we saw it being applied later on the Call of Duty games who were there introducing moments and areas to maximize the fun, regardless of any artistic intention. What makes me think that all tripple A games are not art.
In other hands we have the recently released Bio Shock: Infinit, and despite the “Win” objective that acording to Elbert would break all the artistic purpose, it introduces us a rare seen well constructed plot and a even rare dedication to the construction of dialogues, all involved in a scenario that could be present in an art gallery of NY. So as Journey in the beauty of loneliness and Limbo in the beauty of death.
Maybe this obduracy and reluctance of seen games as art comes with the age of itself. For some reason, you can’t interpret new cultural manifestations. Jazz and Samba also faced a hard approval and supposedly were directed to mediocre and small groups and there they would stay. Even though videogames reached a much bigger audience than these two, I still hear people murmuring arguments such as “What do you expect? A Super Mario statue next to Mona Lisa?”.
For last, I want to drop here a link to a video of a very talented man playing Ghosts ’n Goblins song without know it is from a videogame, with a remarkable execution, which could have passed as a classic from the western times. An assertion that not always the art is contained as a whole, but as an individual part of the set.
Now I want to ask you, what do you think? Videogames are art? And more, Guild Wars 2 is art or just entertainment?
Also, a thanks to Carlos Merigo, Saulo Mileti, Guga Mafra, Alexandre Maron and Pedro Burgos, which indirectly brought me to write this topic to our community.
