Feedback Field Trip -- DICE 2010 Edition

UltimaRatioRegum

Hey guys, great show as usual, and thanks for bringing Dr. Raad out, his talk was very interesting. I do have to disagree with him on one thing though, and that's that games are the only interactive art form. I mean, besides the more obvious stuff like that whole Dada log with the ax in it thing, when you get into art theory, all art is interactive. You take in whatever is presented to you, and rearrange it according to your own values to get meaning, which is why different people can look at the same thing and get a different take on it. While games are interactive, it's actually not as free and creative as you might think since most of the interaction is limited by whatever the programmers decided was necessary. Sure, you have to press buttons to make things happen, but what happens is mostly predetermined. Therefore, the only time you're ever really creating anything in a game is when you glitch, or do something that the programmers didn't intend you to do. Not to say that I agree with glitching, since it goes against the intended presentation of the work by the people who created it. It would be like cutting up a painting and saying that the artist wanted you to do it.

Or, at least, that's how I see it, which brings me to a big point about the whole game/art debate. One of the first things you have to do when you go to art school, which I did(stop laughing), is go to various art theory classes. The first thing they always ask is, 'What is art?'. What proceeds is a deluge of poorly thought out sound bites that are either too nebulous or too specific. I guess what I'm saying is that one of the reasons people have so much trouble thinking about games as art is because they have such a hard time defining art in the first place. When you add in the fact that games are a mix of a lot of different mediums, this complexity of definition is compounded.

For me, the heart of a game, and what should be measured as a work of art, is the game play itself, because that's what makes games unique. Look at a game like Tetris, which has minimal visual and audio appeal, and no story to speak of, but is still one of the best and most popular games ever made. Therefore, in my opinion, Tetris is one of the purest games around, and one of the best examples of art as game play. Conversely, there are a ton of games that look and sound way better than Tetris, but are nowhere near as fun to play, and therefore fail as games, even though many of the assets that were used in order to create them are closer to being works of art in their respective mediums.

I have absolutely no doubt that video games can be works of art, and one example of the healthiness of the video game art form comes from an unlikely place, specifically, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. This may seem like a strange statement at first, but one sure sign that a medium is creatively maturing is when it starts to examine itself. In painting it was the Impressionists, in film it was guys like Sergio Leone and his 'cine cine', or film about film. While Eat Lead was not the highest minded game ever, the fact that it shows that developers are examining game logic and history, in this case lampooning it, is a very good thing.

Like the good Dr. Raad said, not every game has to be a work of art, and I totally agree with this. I see the future of artistic expression in games mirroring the film industry, due to the large sums of money involved in the creation of both. Basically, going into the future, most of the really crazy, creative, artsy games will most likely be produced by smaller, independent studios while the bigger studios will most likely stick to more conventional fair.

I'm done for now.

P.S. If you're wondering what I went to art school for, it was sequential art. Comic books. It's like calling a janitor a custodial engineer.