| Sky Render said: The great conundrum you have to deal with in figuring out what art is, is what I shall dub (in a very Malstrom-esque fashion) the Magical Quality Scale. With the Magical Quality Scale, it's possible to rate a game as being good or bad based on something besides raw sales. You just tack on a concept like "art", and then you have a whole slew of choices to rate something by. Suddenly a game that sold under 100,000 copies is brilliant because it's "art" on the Magical Quality Scale! Oh boy, that's great! But in the real world, people state their opinion of a product with their wallets, not with their words. So does this mean that the votes of consumers mean nothing? Well, no, the Magical Quality Scale has them neatly tucked away as "Sales Numbers", and conveniently labels them as "unimportant". Now here's where it gets ugly. Games cost money to make. If they sell poorly and don't make enough, they have failed as products. But then the Magical Quality Scale comes in to make it all better and declares that failed product as "art", meaning it was a success after all. Except that it wasn't. The product costs the publisher a lot of money, the promised sequel never appears, and the studio sometimes even folds. So what does the Magical Quality Scale do, then? Besides make poor developers feel better about their failures and elitist gamers feel better about their niche tastes? Absolutely nothing. Declaring a game as "art" is as meaningless as declaring a cat to be a dog. Even if you convince a few people you're right, most will remain not only unconvinced, but entirely oblivious of your labeling. Let the Magical Quality Scale go. It's a vaporous illusion, and it only means what you let it mean. Sales numbers exist and determine the fate of video games everywhere, but the label of "art" only succeeds in making a small group of people feel better when a game they like is a commercial failure. |
You write as if all artists have a hidden agenda of promulgating the secret goodness of products that are economic flops. I assure you that the purpose of my starting this discussion was in no way to advance my agenda of proving that Chrono Trigger and The World Ends With You are "better" than Madden '07, despite the sales figures implying the opposite; mosty because no one would even need to make this argument :) I apologize if I came accross as such.
Things will get much clearer if we define art. One popular definition is that art is anything we experience that serves neither to advance the amassing of resources or to aid in reproduction, but rather in exploring the human condition. I'll be running with this definition for now, but I am very open to other suggestions.
Now, Sky Render pointed out very astutely that many historic masterpieces were commissioned works. However, we can make this discussion far more meaningful by noting that many works of art that have withstood the test of time were not economically viable in their own times. This is usually the fault of a paucity of publicity and preconceived notions about specific artists. Considering that most people buy games before they play them, sales figures fail as a means for describing or comparing the actual experience of playing any game. I want to devise a framework for discussing the experience of playing, and your points have shown me that such a framework must avoid assinging value judgements to games.
Instead, let us ask the following question:
"When historians write the history of video games, which games will they consider revolutionary, or influential, or ground-breaking, or as models that other games sought to emulate, and why?"
Because when they write that book, Madden '07 is going to get a line or two, and TWEWY will get at least a chapter on how it forces players to simultaneously engage in two separate yet intertwined games at the same time on two different screens, with two different control schemes.
Art need not entertain, so long as it innovates, and in Shakespeare's (or Milan Kundera's) conception, reveals us to ourselves as we actually are.
