Are computer games art, even to Canadians?

[Blarg]

There has been argument and pontificating going on about whether video games can be art or aspire to that level, and how one would judge, prompted by something said by Roger Ebert. Various links regarding same, with some reader commentary, are up at his website, which can be directed through www.rogerebert.com.

Here's what one Canadian thinks:

[ QUOTE ]
Just to chime in late on the gaming/art debate, I should point out that gaming might actually be compared to some forms of contemporary poetry. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, for instance, denied that it was necessary for the author to control the semantic exchange that is ostensibly inherent to literature, and developed increasingly challenging ways of undermining the communicability and emotive value of language and literature. In a lot of contemporary poetry, then, it is not a representation of beauty or feeling that is meant to motivate reading, but rather the realization that a reading and a mis-reading are equally possible and equally valid.

Contrary to Roger Ebert's suggestion that real art is predicated on "authorial control" (which can never be complete, and always leaves room for resistance), several of fiction and poetry's most stirring and provocative recent works have denied the possibility of such control altogether (with varying degrees of success, of course). The inability of any medium and any communicator to ever have true authorial control and prevent his/her audience from playing with their meanings as if their art were a video game is, in fact, one of the most basic conclusions that follows from Derrida and deconstruction.

I would also hasten to add that, in a rather humorous inversion of the suggestion that video games need to take inspiration from the art forms of literature or film, several excellent poets write poetry that draws from or is based on video games -- Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, and Darren Wershler-Henry come to mind immediately.

Neil Shyminsky
Toronto, Ontario

[/ QUOTE ]

Video games as art letters #2

The discussions get very very muddled in the multiple links you can find on his site and, I'm sure, elsewhere.

Here's a contribution by a non-Canadian, I would guess:

[ QUOTE ]
I hold a Ph.D. I am a professor of philosophy. I have also played videogames since Pong, and have played most of them on most of the systems over the last 30 years. I still adore them and spend too much time playing them. I am about to play one now. But to call them art along the lines of literature, architecture, dance, theater, movies, sculpture, photography, or any other generally accepted art form is risible.

The level of writing and number of solecisms in the letters of the defenders of videogames (VGs) should serve to as a prima facie vindication of Mr Ebert's view. Moreover, the defenders of VGs doth protest too much, methinks. But we can say more.

Videogames may be difficult to make, requiring great thought, skill, planning, and care, but so is an armoire made of okra. That doesn't make either one art. VGs may be entertaining, escapist, enjoyable, and absorbing, but so is masturbation, and that doesn't make either one art. What art does that VGs do not, and probably never will, is edify and ennoble (even in the form of subversion). Moreover, and as a result, art endures. We are reading Cervantes and Goethe, performing Shakespeare and Moliere, and listening to Mozart and Beethoven hundreds of years after their works were created, with no end in sight. We aren't playing NES games 20 years after their creation. Indeed, they weren't being played 5 years after their creation. My garage is full of old videogame systems that will never be turned on again simply because new and better systems have come along. By contrast, when you buy a Chagall painting, you don't throw away your Van Gogh.

Videogames, as the name vaguely suggests, are GAMES. Games are not art, unless tennis, chess, bridge, and Monopoly are art as well. So why don't we just enjoy the great games out there and not try to make them into something they're not just to assuage the guilt we feel for letting them take up so much of our time, or to aggrandize ourselves for engaging in such a putatively lofty pursuit?

Best regards,

Dr Barton Odom
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, TX

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it considerably more persuasive, plus less laughable and less Canadian in general.

But I think much of the words people are slinging here are missing the mark.

What's your opinion? Please use plain L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E rather than Canadian by way of Derrida masturbaspeak.

Here's another link from Ebert on the subject that starts what the above link continued:

First link re: can video games be art