While we are talking about coopting movements without really believing in themor we could discuss paying lip service to an ideal in the name of public image while not really doing that thing. (Independent only linked twice because it was the first google search result)
I want to talk at Jim, Andy and Zenny but really I need to shout at CK here.
For the TL;DR of this and to ready about it put much better.
Go to this article about Fine-Art Photography and pay attention to this quote.
In the UK as recently as 1960, photography was not really recognised as a Fine Art. Dr S.D.Jouhar said, when he formed the Photographic Fine Art Association at that time - "At the moment photography is not generally recognized as anything more than a craft. In the USA photography has been openly accepted as Fine Art in certain official quarters. It is shown in galleries and exhibitions as an Art. There is not corresponding recognition in this country. The London Salon shows pictorial photography, but it is not generally understood as an art. Whether a work shows aesthetic qualities or not it is designated 'Pictorial Photography' which is a very ambiguous term. The photographer himself must have confidence in his work and in its dignity and aesthetic value, to force recognition as an Art rather than a Craft"
Realise
how completely fucking whack this shit is. Photography is over 100 years old at that point, is a 100% visual medium directly 1:1 comparable to painting as being able to take in "visual aesthetics", has clear components of mastery of a craft baked into it and there was still fucking people saying that it was "art".
Dude what the fuck are you doing letting a bunch of close minded douchebags in a tiny community well outside your own negatively impact your own ability to consume art? Fuck these idiots that think
mostly text based games or games who's primary gameplay element is walking around are real gamesas if this was not one of the original genres and a very pervasive one for nearly 20 years. Just because they aren't super common NOW doesn't mean that they aren't games. Silent movies are still fucking movies.
Don't even get me started on puzzle games not being "real" games.
Art critics of other mediums don't need to respect games for them to be art. All the people actually consuming games don't even need to respect games for them to be art. Games will be taken seriously as art by the people that they matter to in that way. That population will grow as the medium ages if it continues to flourish. All that it should take for it to matter is that YOU respect games on their own merits as a piece of art. They sometimes are compromised art. They are sometimes failures as art. Sometimes they might not even be art and be a completely consumer based product. I personally am certainly not going to let a bunch of regressive artistic conservatives ever hold me back from consuming the weirdest fucking games I can get my hands on to see what new things someone is trying. Of course people that want games to stay the same as they were 10 years ago decry anything different as not art. The Avant Garde is always where art is going and there is always people that will decry it as "Not Art". Say what you will about
Fountain nearly 100 years later it has proven to be one of the most influential pieces of its time. Not bad for something that isn't art that came from a
movement that was also not art. That is the cool thing about the New Thing. It isn't always good, it isn't always the way things are going to end up. If the market for exploratory first person narrative focused games implodes tomorrow and never ever comes back then it would be nothing more than a tiny blip in the history of Video games, a failed branch like say Third Person Action RTS, a genre I can name at least TWO big budget titles in. Just because it failed to become popular doesn't reduce the fact that they are in fact video games and as such something I am fully capable of considering as art. They are certainly never going to be canonized and officially sanctioned as "Art" by the Video Games Academy of Collectively Notable Art Pieces, but that in no way removes the fact that Sacrifice TRIED to tell a story using both interactive and noninteractive sequences through audio and visual outputs that had objectives, win and loss states, branching path choices and impacts on those choices.
You neither need or should actively want other people's validation of your hobby as a form of art. Can you not appreciate the way a game makes you feel or respond? How well put together a game is? How sometimes the flaws in execution can actually improve them as a piece of work, whether it be by making them more fun or more emotionally affecting.
I mean seriously
if Gacey clowns are art then we get to call Psychonauts a piece of artwork(and they are). If Mulan and other amazingly corporate Disney movies are art then so is something like Assassin's Creed (and they are).
You think video games are fucking special in this way that they get to be amazeballs pieces of art right out of the gate? Or taken extremely seriously as art straight away? We are only 40 years into Video games here dude. You know what Film had in its first 40 years? Some pretty good shit actually, like Nosferatu had even been around just over 30 years after movie cameras were invented. You know what had literally just happened then though? Sound. In that decade was when they had sound. Colour was a long way off. We were 20 years away from Citizen Kane. 30 away from Ben-Hur with Charleton Heston. Movies came a really long way in 40 years, but it barely even fucking started to get exciting. Here we are 130 years on and Movies have spun off into entirely new mediums and ways to deliver content that let you tell completely different story structures like you never could in Film when it started. Oh hey you have like 6 minutes to tell a story with no sound and in black and white. Compare that to Television now which is a spin off of movies and you can do Breaking Bad and tell a massive story over 5 years to a massive audience.
So yeah. Video games are pretty far from perfect. They have a long way to go. So does film. So does literature and it is only a few thousand years old.
They are all art. They are all exciting. Fuck what a gaggle of close-minded smeg heads on the internet have to say about it. Especially when they tout bullshit about freedom of speech, not tone policing conversations and preach inclusivity but fail at all of these things. When they try to tear down dissenting opinions of video games and silence those voices (see campaign to remove negative reviews of Bayonetta 2 and wanting to remove them from Metacritic scores), when they literally want to exclude certain genres and players with storied histories in the medium from the discussion (Text based games and lets not pretend that Myst A PUZZLE GAME THAT YOU WALK AROUND IN FIRST PERSON 100% OF THE TIME was like pretty much the best selling PC game ever until Starcraft and Halflife) and when this concept that it is incredibly inclusive to demand everyone forfeit all personality in the face of "fitting in". Inclusiveness by way of erasure is outright repulsive.
