Gaming is better than any other art medium, true or false? (Poll)

[JuliusHackebeil]

Vinther1991 said:

JuliusHackebeil said:

Concerning your last point, I don't think it is fair to say that video games are not the best medium because there is a lot of uninspired copy paste gameplay going on. Sure, a lot of video games feel creatively bankrupt. But there are books like 50 shades of gray becoming an absolute sales phenomenon. And there is a sea of romance novels that are pretty much the same. I would argue the ratio between good books recognition (and sales) to pulp fiction books recognition (and sales) is about the same as good video games recognition (and sales) to bad video games recognition (and sales).

I hope by the way, that video games would be much more creative in how they handle interactivity.

Concerning your second point, one could even argue that the fleeting nature of video games makes them more beautiful and artistically interesting.

True, it isn't fair to point at the bad games. But I think, even among the games that are considered masterpieces (also among those I would consider as such), a lot of them either lack artistic merrit in general or the interactivety isn't what provides the artistic merrit.

You got an interesting perspective. Two things come to mind:

1) How interactivity does or does not provide artistic merit is difficult to gauge, because artistic merit is difficult to gauge. One could argue that the combat in the greek GoW games is mostly the same and has nothing much to do with the story. Or it is a way to let the player experience first hand how Kratos cannot escape the neverending violence, perpetuating the cycle himself. You could argue that the gameplay in The Witcher 3 does not change much between hour 1 and hour 40. But you could also argue that it is not about gameplay variablility, but about the decisions if and where the player directs Geralts violence towards. This decision shapes many quests and their stories.

There is also this concept of emergent storytelling: "I jumped off a ledge and bonked a npc on the head" - that is hardly a compelling story... -when you tell it. But when you experience it first hand, doing it yourself via approximation through button presses, it becomes a very gripping, thrilling story to play through. In this sense interactivity provides an almost endless pool of compelling stories with artistic merit. They just don't translate well to writing (story telling in books).

2) Interactivity, and the storytelling merits coming from it, are not confined to only hitting enemies. It is also walking through an area, or panning the camera. It is even not to interact while you had the potential to, like not shooting an enemy, or choosing a non lethal approach in stealth games.

Apart from standard mechanics for the whole game, games often have special moments of interactivity that might carry special artistic merit. God of War 1 comes to mind, when Kratos has to hug his family to transfer HP to them and protect them. Or in Brothers, when you have to use the controls from one brother to suddenly direct the other, overcoming his fears. Holding Yordas hand in ICO is even a mechanic throughout the whole game. I think there are many more examples like these.