Sarevok wrote:Art is just an adjective to describe something To quote what I said earlier art is just another fancy word to wax poetic about things you really like.
See, people taking "art" to mean whatever they want the word to mean is the root of the ceaseless debate on this topic that has raged on the 'tubes for more than a decade.
P.S.
Every Halo game except the first was a turd.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
The only reason I can see games being dismissed from being art is the fact that the gameplay element is so disconnectable from the whole work. Gameplay's sole purpose is entertainment through competition within a set environment with set rules, whether it's against the game itself through single-player, or against other people through multi-player. Even games with the best stories are composed of long stretches of gameplay punctuated by plot points or story moments. That or you get something like MGS where the game's basically a movie but with bits of gameplay to prevent it from being classified as the former. Either way, the game developer needs an excuse to make people shell big bucks to buy something that's more than either just a purely competitive arcade platform, or a movie with terrible production values. Unless your point is that the whole thing IS a great purely competitive arcade platform, like Unreal Tournament.
Every medium that's considered true art, such as illustration, paintings, artistic photographs, comics, or movies, are considered art because they are various elements purposely composed to convey an abstract meaning. So you get more than just another picture of a cloudy sky, or more than just a montage movie of random WW2 battle scenes. All of these devote themselves wholly to conveying meaning or story, but a modern game has the art part usually nowdays in the form of a series of cinematics or dialogue plus a whole gameplay segment that can be totally disconnected from the work and plays no CRUCIAL role in storytelling. Take out the gameplay and you've still got the art in the form of a poorly-made movie. It contains bits of art but what we know as the modern game is not wholly art.
I would also bring up the example of kite flying. Kite flying is a competition sport, a leisurely activity and at same time a work of art. There are many beautiful and unique kite designs in the world that even cynics would have to admit as intricate artworks. Just because something is done for fun or can be used as a competetive sport does not mean it cant be an art.
I have to tell you something everything I wrote above is a lie.
