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Are Video Games Art?

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JMeganSnow

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You can even go one step further and ask the same questions about the myriad puzzles involved in the various sub-plots. Basically, my point is this: a collection of short stories is not a novel. At the moment, all I've seen in computer games are collections of short stories (or, if you prefer, short movies) with some puzzles thrown in. Some games may be closer to being a single story or a single movie, esp. the more linear ones presently, but the story of the game is still distinct and separate from (most) of the things that you do in the game.

Think of it this way: the nominal plot of Diablo is that you're there to rescue the village from the evil demons coming out of a hole in the ground. Okay. Yay. Ninety-nine percent of what you do is killing things and taking their stuff so you can buy stuff and outfit your character. The point of the story is this titanic battle against evil. The point of the game is to make a cool character. Are these two related? Not on your life.

I don't think there are any artistic elements in video games that would let you say it's a totally different art form instead of, say, movie cum puzzles.

It seems like your only argument revolves around the fact that you dislike the way video games tell a story, or you think that it doesn't tell the story well enough. In reality there are games that excels extremely well at these elements, integrating the game play with story progression. For example, the Bungee games Halo and Halo 2, or games like Half Life, simply off the top of my head. Whether it's from a story telling perspective, or in terms of evoking emotions, or it's graphic design and musical scores, Bungee did a superb job.

However to only judge a game based on it's plot, theme, or character seems like a very narrow way of judging video games. You're trying to define the artistry of the game based on a standard that's used to judge mediums such as a novel or a movie, while completely ignoring the gameplay and the interactivity element of video games. A multi-player strategy game for example can, through gameplay, teach and emphasize values like resource management, efficiency, long term and short term planning, and for people that are really trying to be good at it -- competitiveness, mental calmness, problem solving on the fly, reading the mind of your opponent, the importance of diligence, practice, and hard work, etc. All of these things can be funneled back into reality and teach you real life values that can be applied to virtually any task you want to do.

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I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying they don't.

I've played games which attempt to recreate reality and do a great job, and it was done better than any painting I've ever seen, and in some cases real movies which were filmed in reality! I've also played games based on fantasy and science fiction.

I've played games express the directors, writers, level designers, designers, and artists values and judgements. I've played games with themes. So yes they can and do.

Play god of war, play shadow of the colossus, play zelda, even simple games like Super Mario World does.

Still I disagree with the root of this argument. Why does art have to recreate reality to be art? Several of Ayn Rand's book are fiction, does that negate them from being art? What about Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory? Is that not art because it doesn't recreate reality?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is exactly meant by "recreation of reality."

I think your issue with Neverwinter Nights is that it is so real, so close to reality, that when anything is inconsistent with reality your suspension of disbelief is shattered. But by that argument all paintings are not art, they're actually just paper with paint on them, not reality, therefore it's not art.

However, if you disagree and think paintings are art then do this for me:

Take a screenshot of a game during any instance, print it out, and it is now earned the same status of a painting.

Edited by Dorian
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Still I disagree with the root of this argument. Why does art have to recreate reality to be art? Several of Ayn Rand's book are fiction, does that negate them from being art? What about Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory? Is that not art because it doesn't recreate reality?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is exactly meant by "recreation of reality."

I think this is the heart of the issue - what does it mean to be a recreation of reality?

I take the term "recreation" very loosely. Art does not need to be a direct reproduction of physical reality in order to be art. It can do so metaphorically. In that sense, a lot of things can be considered art. Games like chess and poker for example has long been considered by many of its players to be a metaphor for life (epitomized perhaps by Bobby Fischer's famous quote "Chess is life."). Video games can be too.

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Being an artist, and having sold 7 years of my soul to the video games industry in the past, I think I'm fairly well qualified to post this:

Art's purpose, at least to me, seems to be to (1) to put the artist's emotional or physical expression into a medium in which he can share that sensation, and (2) to accomplish, as best he can, pushing that sensation into the viewer/listener/reader etc.

Some would argue that my smutty pinups are not art, however they incite lust in their viewers, which pretty much directly proves point 1 and 2. If you reject the adult material on 'societal value' premises, then you're clearly failing your Objectivist principles.

When you look at a painting, you feel something. Most of the time (I do think that Campbells Soup paintings are a joke, but some folks live them). When you read a book, you feel something. When you listen to music, you feel something. When you see a show, or a movie... on and on.

Video games are simply another medium in which artists, storytellers, and musicians can immerse their audience in something in order to share an experience. Just because it is a large collaborative effort, nor a commercial effort, does not disqualify it as an artistic medium. I make my art for money too-- it is what brings home the bacon. Because one profits from art does not disqualify ones effectiveness. To apply a double standard for labor vs art is to, once again, forget your Objectivist principles. Labor is labor, be it forging steel or painting a canvas. Steel workers are in the business of making raw material for modern culture and their technique could be likened to an art; artists are in the business of making things visually interesting; video game producers are in the business of making entertaining experiences. What we do is what we do-- specialization in any industry can be called 'the art of...'

I detest the double-standard that art is some voodoo metaphysical holier-than-thou 'lucky' endowment we somehow absorb. It is not. Artistic talent is something that one works hard for their entire life, always improving but rarely perfecting, at least in their own eyes. Same goes for any other field.

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Some would argue that my smutty pinups are not art, however they incite lust in their viewers, which pretty much directly proves point 1 and 2. If you reject the adult material on 'societal value' premises, then you're clearly failing your Objectivist principles.

In terms of being true to Objectivist principles, Ayn Rand defined what art was according to her philosophy. You can't legitimately change the definition and then question someone else's Objectivist principles. If you have your own definition of art, that's great, but you can't claim that it any way binds Objectivists when an Objectivist definition for art exists and is different than yours.

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In terms of being true to Objectivist principles, Ayn Rand defined what art was according to her philosophy. You can't legitimately change the definition and then question someone else's Objectivist principles. If you have your own definition of art, that's great, but you can't claim that it any way binds Objectivists when an Objectivist definition for art exists and is different than yours.

I think Ayn had a special bitter place in her heart for modern artists. I don't blame her. However-- how is it rational to officially exclude one form of visual input while including another? Wouldn't that be irrational? Is this another case of people following blindly word-for-word saying that 'because Ayn said so, them's the rules'?

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Is this another case of people following blindly word-for-word saying that 'because Ayn said so, them's the rules'?

This is the equivalent of "playing the race card", which is insulting and it gets old. I'm not going to tolerate it anymore. You, like so many others who unoriginally play the "dogma card", assume that people who agree with the Objectivist concept of (insert idea here), have not seriously considered the concept by means of their own independent reasoning and came to an agreeable conclusion. This is fallacious reasoning on your part.

If unfettered participation on this forum is of value to you, it would be in your best interest to retract and apologize for this insinuation, which is insulting to a great number of members on this board.

You specifically made reference to "staying true to Objectivist principles." You cannot legitimately claim that unless you are in fact referring to some aspect of Objectivism, in this case the Objectivist concept of art, not some aspect of bobspongism. Objectivism is a closed system and not subject to whatever bobsponge wishes to add to it, change or delete.

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*shrug* I'd just like to see someone take on my argument that video games are essentially equivalent to a movie cum puzzles and thus, even if the "movie part" is arguably art the "puzzles part" is not and thus it's not a new art form, just a combination of an existing one with, well, puzzles.

The made-by-committee argument was neatly overturned by David and I've noticed quite a few games that advertise who they were "directed" by, so I guess they're no different from a movie or play in that respect.

As for the fact that modern games aren't especially well integrated, this may be a matter that will gradually go away as the medium develops more and more. However, you can't make claims on what may happen in the future so this is just an argument for delaying the question for five or ten years and seeing what happens.

If you take a beautiful painting and turn it into a jigsaw puzzle, the resulting jigsaw painting is not an entirely new art form . . . in fact it may not even be a work of art in itself. It's a work of art (a painting) that's been used to make a puzzle interesting. Make it a 3D puzzle and add a storyline and a sound track and you still haven't changed the fundamental nature of the thing you're dealing with.

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If unfettered participation on this forum is of value to you, it would be in your best interest to retract and apologize for this insinuation, which is insulting to a great number of members on this board.

What are you insinuating?

How many great numbers are insulted? Let's have a census of insulted people, please.

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*shrug* I'd just like to see someone take on my argument that video games are essentially equivalent to a movie cum puzzles and thus, even if the "movie part" is arguably art the "puzzles part" is not and thus it's not a new art form, just a combination of an existing one with, well, puzzles.

The made-by-committee argument was neatly overturned by David and I've noticed quite a few games that advertise who they were "directed" by, so I guess they're no different from a movie or play in that respect.

As for the fact that modern games aren't especially well integrated, this may be a matter that will gradually go away as the medium develops more and more. However, you can't make claims on what may happen in the future so this is just an argument for delaying the question for five or ten years and seeing what happens.

If you take a beautiful painting and turn it into a jigsaw puzzle, the resulting jigsaw painting is not an entirely new art form . . . in fact it may not even be a work of art in itself. It's a work of art (a painting) that's been used to make a puzzle interesting. Make it a 3D puzzle and add a storyline and a sound track and you still haven't changed the fundamental nature of the thing you're dealing with.

I have addressed this argument.. actually, saying that the puzzles are a part of the "storytelling" in videogames. I'll elaborate on it though, since I admit it was vague on my part.

When you read a book, or look at a picture, you have to decode it to extract any value from it. You have to understand what the artist was trying to say, or the end they were trying to achieve. By this, I don't mean you need the Idiot's Guide to Literary Symbolism (I'm not even sure it exists, and I can rarely ever stand symbolism), but what I DO mean is that language, in itself, is a sort of puzzle. When you're reading a book, there are times when you come across a word you don't understand - you look it up so you can continue with the book. Like an author uses words to advance throughout the novel, so a videogame designer/coder uses interaction (even if this means through puzzles). They're not meant to keep the player from progressing, and good ones aren't meant to distract; they're meant to engage the player, and to help him advance through the story.

(And when I say language is a puzzle - I don't mean that it's elusive, I mean that you have to put together the pieces to make sense out of it.)

I think this is the heart of the issue - what does it mean to be a recreation of reality?

I take the term "recreation" very loosely. Art does not need to be a direct reproduction of physical reality in order to be art. It can do so metaphorically. In that sense, a lot of things can be considered art. Games like chess and poker for example has long been considered by many of its players to be a metaphor for life (epitomized perhaps by Bobby Fischer's famous quote "Chess is life."). Video games can be too.

What she means by a "recreation of reality" is that art takes realistic things and abstracts them. For instance, an example that Ayn Rand uses frequently throughout the Romantic Manifesto is an apple - in a painting it may be luscious, flawless, round, and bright red - but how many apples do you really see that look like that? Its function is to represent ideas derived from reality, not to record and replay it.

I would say that absolutely, art does not have to be completely realistic, per se, in order to be of value. Take The Matrix for instance (one of my favorite movies). I DO think, however, it has to have some basis in reality, and obviously has to be intelligible by us - otherwise it will render itself intellectually worthless (like many works of modern art).

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I think Ayn had a special bitter place in her heart for modern artists. I don't blame her. However-- how is it rational to officially exclude one form of visual input while including another? Wouldn't that be irrational? Is this another case of people following blindly word-for-word saying that 'because Ayn said so, them's the rules'?

Look bob, I don't disagree with your opinion on art, nor do I claim to be an Objectivist -- I agree with a lot of Objectivist ideas, but not all.

However Objectivism, by definition, is what Ayn Rand says it is. There's really no room for argument, because since she invented it, she gets to call it what it is. No one says you can't disagree with her, but when you talk about Objectivist principles, you are essentially talking about it as the way Rand states it.

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What she means by a "recreation of reality" is that art takes realistic things and abstracts them. For instance, an example that Ayn Rand uses frequently throughout the Romantic Manifesto is an apple - in a painting it may be luscious, flawless, round, and bright red - but how many apples do you really see that look like that? Its function is to represent ideas derived from reality, not to record and replay it.

I would say that absolutely, art does not have to be completely realistic, per se, in order to be of value. Take The Matrix for instance (one of my favorite movies). I DO think, however, it has to have some basis in reality, and obviously has to be intelligible by us - otherwise it will render itself intellectually worthless (like many works of modern art).

Absolutely. Hence as far as representing reality, art does so metaphorically or symbolically, as opposed to literally. That's precisely what I am saying though -- that games can in fact be a "recreation of reality" (and thus fitting the criteria for art) as long as you derive some sort of meaning from it that pertains to reality. Games like chess for instance certainly become a metaphor for life for many of it's players. It can be the same with video games.

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Look bob, I don't disagree with your opinion on art, nor do I claim to be an Objectivist -- I agree with a lot of Objectivist ideas, but not all.

However Objectivism, by definition, is what Ayn Rand says it is. There's really no room for argument, because since she invented it, she gets to call it what it is. No one says you can't disagree with her, but when you talk about Objectivist principles, you are essentially talking about it as the way Rand states it.

Yes, but when you take rational examination of static things like visual art, in order to disqualify one type and qualify another, you have to add metaphysical/mystical attribute to one and not the other, which in essence would be irrational, and then thereby making her definitions self-contradictory? It seems like if one follows Ayn's rules on what constitutes art, one must abandon much of the foundation which she laid down beneath said art theories.

I agree with a lot of O'ist stuff, but not all, and one thing makes me wonder-- if it is such a perfect closed system, why is it such a debated philosophy?

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Yes, but when you take rational examination of static things like visual art, in order to disqualify one type and qualify another, you have to add metaphysical/mystical attribute to one and not the other, which in essence would be irrational, and then thereby making her definitions self-contradictory? It seems like if one follows Ayn's rules on what constitutes art, one must abandon much of the foundation which she laid down beneath said art theories.

It would help if you used direct quotes from Rand, and then state logically and exactly what you disagree with. As far as I can tell there really isn't anything "mystical" about Rand's definition of art. In terms of visual arts, it isn't enough to simply have the visual aspect -- it also requires that there is a meaning in order for it to be art. If I simply kicked over a bucket of paint on a canvas for instance, it isn't what I would consider art. One problem with the need for meaning however is that it seems entirely (or at least mostly) subjective. Another is whether the meaning that the artist is trying convey is more important, or the meaning that the audience perceive.

I agree with a lot of O'ist stuff, but not all, and one thing makes me wonder-- if it is such a perfect closed system, why is it such a debated philosophy?

It's closed because Rand says its closed. Doesn't mean you have to agree with it, and obviously many people don't. The bottom line is since she invented it, it is what she says it is. You can disagree with it, arguably improve or correct it, but then it wouldn't be Objectivism (per Rand).

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*shrug* I'd just like to see someone take on my argument that video games are essentially equivalent to a movie cum puzzles and thus, even if the "movie part" is arguably art the "puzzles part" is not and thus it's not a new art form, just a combination of an existing one with, well, puzzles.

If you take a beautiful painting and turn it into a jigsaw puzzle, the resulting jigsaw painting is not an entirely new art form . . . in fact it may not even be a work of art in itself. It's a work of art (a painting) that's been used to make a puzzle interesting. Make it a 3D puzzle and add a storyline and a sound track and you still haven't changed the fundamental nature of the thing you're dealing with.

I think that the answer is that a lot of games are not puzzles. The ones who are puzzles really don't qualify as art but there are many games like the Final Fantasy series where they are recreating reality on an incredibly grand scale. The stories are epic, there are theme's and plots and many times they are quite well written and executed.

I do think based on that fact that some games should be considered art :-)

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my argument...
  1. even if the "movie part" [of a video game] is arguably art the "puzzles part" is not
  2. thus [video games are] not a new art form

If video games were merely movie art + non-art puzzles, then it'd still be art, albeit not a new art form. So if the "puzzles aren't (can't be??) art" argument is true, then I have no problem with 2.

However, it's questionable to say that no existing games (qua puzzles) qualify as art, and even more questionable to imply that puzzles/games can't ever be art.

Games can certainly be selective recreations of reality based on their creator's metaphysical value judgments. You can make a game where not treating your allies right means they aren't around to help you in the endgame, or where committing crimes makes you untrustworthy. A game where ammo has to be carefully conserved and rationally rationed out has different value judgments from a game where ammo is infinite.

I suspect you agree with the above on some level, but still discount games as art because, in most game cases, violating the game value judgments makes the winning the game harder but generally not impossible. E.g. you still might be able to beat the game (with much, much more difficulty) if you mistreat your allies and commit crime, and thus some might say that the game doesn't emphasize friendship and non-initiation of force. I'm not sure that this is your thought on the matter, but I disagree with such a premise at any rate. I think it's a case of trying to squeeze interactive art into passive art constraints.

IMO most games are rather one big (integrated?) puzzle as opposed to a series of unrelated puzzles. Would that make a difference in terms of games as art?

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What she means by a "recreation of reality" is that art takes realistic things and abstracts them. For instance, an example that Ayn Rand uses frequently throughout the Romantic Manifesto is an apple - in a painting it may be luscious, flawless, round, and bright red - but how many apples do you really see that look like that? Its function is to represent ideas derived from reality, not to record and replay it.

Not quite, Catherine, but pretty durn close. The recreation of reality aspect just means that it depicts something that exists in reality (albeit perhaps combined with other things so that the whole may not be something you'd find in reality, like a woman with snakes for hair, but all the parts are things you could encounter in reality).

The abstraction process is the means by which the artist conveys his metaphysical value-judgments. If an artist paints an apple as an idealized apple: red, round, ripe, juicy . . . then that says one thing about how he regards reality. If he paints an apple core or a rotten apple, those say other things. The style of the painting also conveys his value-judgments. If the apple is a beautiful apple but his style is a smeary mess, that conveys yet another thing. Part of the science of esthetics is demonstrating what is objectively conveyed by different methods of abstraction. One of the other things to note is that totally non-representative things (shapeless blob sculptures, smears on canvas, weird collections of noise, etc.) are not art. They are con jobs that attempt to be identified as art by pretending that art is synonymous with the mediums by which art are conveyed. Thus visual art is anything you can look at, audio art is anything you can hear, etc.

I find it useful to note that Ayn Rand did not include photography in art, because even though photography is very selective it does not embody this, as you say, process of abstraction. Now, since we have wonderful software for altering pictures it is possible to turn a photograph into a work of art by cleaning out everything you don't want and thus turning it into this kind of abstraction. This is not, however, a new form of art but simply a new method of "painting" (I use the quotes because it doesn't involve any actual paint).

Now, in considering computer games specifically we have artistic elements that are already embodied in some other art form, across the board. Animation, acting, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, these are already extant forms of art, a video game is a combination of these. Yet here also we have an example of a form of "combo" art that is a new art form: the movie. In fact, the type of video games that could potentially be considered works of art are very similar to movies, so similar that there is really only one new element that needs consideration: the "interactivity" element.

This interactivity element boils down eventually to one thing: puzzles. Whether you have to thread your way through a conversaton with an NPC to further the plot or figure out how to kill a monster or find a key or hit the right buttons in the right sequence, these are all puzzles. They differ in degree and kind, of course, and some may require more physical dexterity and skill, but they all are identical in the respect that you must figure out how to accomplish X in order to do Z. Z usually is "get further in the game", at least for main-plot stuff, although for "easter eggs" and "extras" it may simply be that you can "unlock more content".

I found this particularly funny in the Prince of Persia games because the extra content you can unlock, for the most part, is "The Art of Prince of Persia". I.e. if you hit the right points in the game you get to see a bunch of concept drawings. And Prince of Persia is a particularly well-integrated example of a computer game . . . largely because you don't have any options. You complete the puzzles and the plot advances pretty much without your input.

If you look at games where you have a great deal more input as to what makes up the plot (Elder Scrolls: Oblivion comes to mind) you find that there are numerous subplots that advance by means of discrete sets of puzzles but NONE of them are integrated with the main plot in any way whatsoever.

There are variations between these extremes, of course (and other games that fall completely outside this paradigm, like internet chess), but it eventually boils down to one thing: the video game is a movie that, depending on what puzzles you choose to solve (and sometimes how you solve those puzzles) you may get to see different parts of the movie.

Does anyone remember the old "Choose your own adventure!" books? Are those not identical to the older text-based games where you would thread your way through by typing commands? What we have are existing forms of art to which some non-art elements have been added.

Oh, and chess is not art. I don't care WHAT medium you're using for chess, it's not art. It's not "life in microcosm" except metaphorically. A movie, play, or painting is "life in microcosm" literally. You can't define what something is by what it may be said to be metaphorically. Life is not a stage and all the people therin simply players. If it is, I want to know what happened to MY copy of the damn script.

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Oh, and chess is not art. I don't care WHAT medium you're using for chess, it's not art. It's not "life in microcosm" except metaphorically. A movie, play, or painting is "life in microcosm" literally. You can't define what something is by what it may be said to be metaphorically. Life is not a stage and all the people therin simply players. If it is, I want to know what happened to MY copy of the damn script.

Whether or not chess is art, you're misunderstanding the metaphor of "chess is life". What that means is that the values needed for one to succeed in chess is very much the same values to need to succeed in life. Knowledge, practice, rational thought, rigorous analysis, will to win, etc. It's not "life is a stage and the people are players".

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It's not "life is a stage and the people are players".

That's a quote from Shakespeare, thank you, and an example of a metaphorical statement. "Chess is life" is another example of a metaphorical statement. You cannot say that chess is art because it can be said to do, metaphorically, what art does literally. Just like I don't have a script for my life because Shakespeare says life is metaphorically a stage . . . just like I can't have a conversation with the wind because it metaphorically whispers.

Metaphors aren't real.

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Metaphors aren't real.

Really? Because it would seem like the arts, be it paintings, movies, or novels, are filled with them. Even Shakespeare.

Are you saying that there is a difference between literal metaphors and metaphorical metaphors? Or that metaphors aren't considered art? Can poetry be considered art? Because a lot of them consist almost entirely of metaphors. What about a book like Animal Farm? It's obviously metaphorical even though it's literally about a bunch of talking animals.

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I think this argument is bogus. The vision in a work of art does not need to be that of a single person. In a complex production, different people implement various aspects of the vision - such as the script writer, director, artists, and producers. The history of video games resembles the development of movies in the shift in focus from the medium to content. Games are vulnerable to the same vision-destroying tendencies as movies - the desire to appeal to everyone, development hell, "design by committe" - none of these things are inherent to the medium.

On the question of collaborative works such as movies and now video games I find the Objectivist definition of fundamental characteristics (ITOE) to be most useful: "Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others." We can apply this to the creative process.

A classic example would be auteur filmmaking in which a single person conceives, writes, directs, and perhaps even performs in the lead role. Such an individual is the fundamental contributor. All others are subordinate to that creative mainspring, and the film's distinct characteristics depend upon that individual. Suppose for example that the movie is a musical. The writer-director may write the lyrics and melodies, and then direct a composer to flesh out the score according to a particular style. Although the composer delivers the actual music, fundamentally the work belongs to the writer-director whose abstractions determined the distinctive characteristics that made the rest possible. We can then identify a single individual as the artist, because that individual defined the work; all others had fundamentally subordinate creative roles.

The way movies sometimes get made, so-and-so wrote the novel, somebody else adapted the screenplay, yet another person directs the actors, the actors takes liberties with the script, the studio execs demand rewrites and cut scenes without the director's consent, and on and on until what you have is a terrible mishmash because no single person defined the work. It makes me sick to think about. I don't know whether Rand would have called that art or not, but I know it's not my ideal.

The ability to identify authorship according to fundamental contribution makes it possible to say that a work of art having multiple contributors nonetheless truly belongs to a single individual. So I am not prepared to say that there cannot be a single artist on account of a medium's collaborative nature. There can indeed be a single ego defining the work of art.

This also applies to video games or any such collaborative creative endeavor: the artist's contribution must be fundamental – it must be the defining characteristic, i.e. that which makes the greatest number of others possible.

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Really? Because it would seem like the arts, be it paintings, movies, or novels, are filled with them. Even Shakespeare.

Are you saying that there is a difference between literal metaphors and metaphorical metaphors? Or that metaphors aren't considered art? Can poetry be considered art? Because a lot of them consist almost entirely of metaphors. What about a book like Animal Farm? It's obviously metaphorical even though it's literally about a bunch of talking animals.

Okay, now you're starting to irritate me. Go back and read my post and figure out what I actually said.

Metaphorical statements exist. They are used in art. However the things metaphors imply do not actually exist and are meaningless conceptually for organizing your mental contents. Just because I can say time is a river that doesn't mean that I can use it to do my laundry. I'm not defining time as belonging to the conceptual category river, I'm saying that it shares some characteristics of rivers so I'm using the word as a handy descriptive tool.

A "literal metaphor" is a contradiction in terms. If you go out and say, "The Hudson is a river" people will look at you and say, well DUH. It is a river. That's not a metaphor. If you say, "art is life in microcosm", that's not a metaphor because it's literally true. If you say chess is life in microcosm, however, that IS a metaphor because it is NOT literally true.

In other words the statement:

The Hudson is a River

Time is a River

Therefore Time is The Hudson

is ridiculous, because the second statement is a metaphor not a factual statement.

Have I explained enough yet? If you can't grasp my point from all this I'm going to be forced to assume you're being annoying on purpose and warn you.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I am really happy to see this thread. Have any of you played Myst or any of the sequels? I would say that Myst is a great example of a computer game that is a work of art. Moreso, there is a lot of contemporary art right now that is is interactive or experiential. I think some serious objectivists may argue that is not art, but you can't disagree that it is really amazing and the creators have great mastery of electronics. I think video games certainly fall into this genre of interactive experiential media, but whether or not this media is art, I am still not sure. I actually make some myself, but feel incredibly humbled when looking at some of my favorite artists who show at conventions like Ars Electronica and Siggraph. I do feel though, that a lot of experiential/new media can be really didactic or political. Here are some links, enjoy:

Jim Campbell

http://www.jimcampbell.tv/

Paul Demarinis

http://www.well.com/~demarini/exhibitions.htm

here is a game, Facade, that pushes the new genre of interactive storytelling, something I am really interested in, the rendering is pretty low-fi for lack of better words this late at night, but, the concept is grand and I think I would enjoy playing it. This game embodies a lot of what Janet Murray talks about in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck

http://www.interactivestory.net/

I think for me in the kind of work I do, I try to distinguish between art and media. For instance, Ayn Rand loved great architecture and found it inspirational, but it wasn't art, and in architecture's case it is because it served a function. I think a lot of experiential media serves a function or has an application, and in that case, I would say it is not art. It really is a tought question but my hope would be that people don't get hung up on the question and continue to make provocative "media art" or "digital art" or "digital media" with grand themes inspired by objectivist philosophy. I am sure the outcomes, whether art or not, will be amazing.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm going to resurrect this thread and give my opinion that video games can be art, just like movies. Lord of the Rings and Band of Brothers are examples of artistic movies, whereas Rob Schneider's Male Giggolo movies are not.

Similarly speaking, I think some video games can definitely be considered art...particularly RPGs. There are times in certain games, where I can be almost moved to tears by the music, scenery, or plot events. Many games, particularly newer ones, have scenery that, although fake, is nice to just sit back and look at. Then there are RPGs, particularly the ones made by Squaresoft, where the storyling is so engaging that it will completely suck me in, and I will get so involved with it that I actually experience a bit of sadness when a character dies.

Diablo II, Squaresoft games, Zelda, Super Metroid, and Medal of Honor, among others, have music that is (or would be) absolutely gorgeous when played by an actual orchestra. In the newer games, of course, the in-game music really is played by an orchestra. I've found that, apart from movies, video games are now the best place to hear truly wonderful music. It is often successful at being sad, happy, epic, haunting, tense, victorious, etc. Sometimes it bothers me that such music is wasted on video games...not because there's anything wrong with video games, but because so few people will ever experience it. There is a video game symphony concert coming to the Kennedy Center this week, and I'm seriously considering going to see it.

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