| Kasz216 said: I sadly think most gamers don't see Super Mario Bros as art.
Which in of itself is an issue. Of the groups claiming videogames are art... they have varying defintions. For some it would be the flawless level design of a game like Super Mario Brothers. For others it is the atomosphere of L4D and how it perfectly puts you in what it would feel like to be in a Zombie Apocolypse. Others would compare it to something like Animal Crossing, where there is no real goal, and you are just given a big world in which to make your own stories. Others yet still, would say it was like Metal Gear Solid and it's use of cutscenes to be like a movie. Others see the opposite as true, that it's telling the story without having to rely on cutscenes, cutscenes being a sign that you can't tell a story properly in a game setting. While in art there are often many different movements... in general all except the newest kinds are seen as art by the experts. Modern art experts will still tell you DaVinchi's work is art.... etc. Among the experts who "decide" art, there is largely a consesus.
Additionally, there really aren't even any "experts" yet who could fully identify which of these claims if any are valid. |
I alluded to that last point earlier in the topic: the ugly truth about the academic state of art is that it's not something that's inherent to a work, it's based solely around the critical discourse that surrounds a work or a medium. Critics, not artists, decide what is art, though the sheer fact of talking about something as if it were art.
If there were popular research papers dedicated to, say, the agency of the player outside of his avatar in EarthBound, or the subversion of goal-based narrative in Shadow of the Colossus, these games would be art in academic circles by sheer virtue of being taken that seriously on a wide scale.
That's what disappoints me so much about gaming criticism as it is now: they seem very much concerned that games should be perceived as art (which is not an altogether coheren or even meaningful concern) but then they keep the critical discourse on a decidedly lower, less critical level. I don't mean to take away from people who talk about how fun games are, either - fun is an immense part of what defines games as an art form - just that people who want video games to be take seriously should do their best to take their own contributions to the discourse seriously.
