*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).
