After poring over many of the discussions on this website, I have noticed a conversation that recurs frequently.

It goes something like this:

""Nintendo fanboy:  Look at these sales figures!  Nintendo pwns!111!!

Sony/Microsoft Fanboy:  Yeah, but only because they appeal to the mass market.  PS3/Xbox 360 has better games for core gamers""

These two approaches imply two very different economic models that we could use to analyze games, and I am very interested in the opinions of this community on this issue.

If games are in fact economic goods, then the goal of any game developer is to sell games to whomever will buy them.  According to this model, the "best" games are the games that sell the most copies and generate the most profits.  If this is the case, then there should be no distinction between "core" gamers and "casual" gamers as a value judgement, but rather purely as a marketing distinction.  Applying a pure version of this model to the games market would imply that Nintendo in fact does pwn. 

But we can all agree that many times the games that sell the most copies are not the "best" games, and that some of the "best" games do not sell well.  This observation implies that there is some aesthetic rubric we could superimpose on games to judge their merit much as we compare works of arts; but though we may decide that one is a masterpiece while another is kitsch, many times the trailblazing "better" artist starves while the mediocre artists pump out crowd-pleasing potboilers and make good money.  In light of this theory, the disctinction between "core" and "casual" gamers in very similiar to the distinction between weathered cognoscenti and uninitiated dilettantes, much the same way that the late Beethoven string quartets will put most listeners to sleep while elevating a small cadre of musical acolytes to the heights of pleasure.

After gaming for most of my life I am convinced that many games are in fact works of art.  What else would move an eight-year old to tears during the ending sequence of Chrono Trigger?  Still, the finer nuances of many exemplary works are lost on most people, even many who consider themselves gamers.  How else can we explain the meagre sales of games like Ico for the PS2 or Demon's Crest for the SNES.  And many games that most "core" gamers would consider canonical masterpieces lack the sales numbers of the many versions of Madden football that EA grinds out. 

That is why I have started this thread.  Every other genre of art has an extensive body of rigorous, scholarly criticism of its canon, replete with theories and anaylses of recurring forms.  In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom discusses the process of canon formation and how artists are inevitably influenced by their predecessors.  Only those artists that can harmonize the rigid structures of tradition with original creative thought can hope to amount to more than a cliché.  This is why I cried the first time I finished Chrono Trigger.  It's designers had maneuvered through every stereotype of the RPG genre; such as the besieged kingdom with an ailing king, the princess who years for the freedom of a commoner and the robot that learns to love; yet they strung them together in a novel context that mocked the overused emotions inherent in these situations and forced them to play different roles. 

If we are going to maintain that games are works of art and not just cheap entertainment, let us devise formal rubrics for evaluating the structure and form of games.  Perhaps it would be easiest to start with one genre and follow its evolution through several examples on several platforms, noting which games introduced novelties.

I am very interested in any thoughts any of you have on this matter.

Thanks

The only objective way to rank games is through sales. Any other way of ranking games is purely subjective and impossible to actually resolve.

The thing about the 'Game as Art' movement is that it leads to 'auteur' games, where the developer basically just screws around and doesn't take the player into consideration at all. Sometimes this is successful like in MGS4, and sometimes it leads to total gormless messes like Too Human.

Think about it this way: What do you think of when you think of the word 'Art Film'? I know I think of a sad clown smoking a cigarrete in a dark room. Black and white. Five minutes later, the words "Fin" show up on the screen. I'm glad we have 'game as fun' people.

It is a bit of both i think, certainly games are meant to make a profit and companies want to sell as much as possible. The art in games is the graphics , design, gameplay, music, etc etc. Music in games is now on par with anything else out there, graphics are getting even more amazing and have terrific art direction (not to mention the concept art phase of games has some amazing drawings worthy of being put in a gallery). Gameplay is an art of how to make games fun, it's not easy either considering how many terrible games there are simply becuase of flawed gameplay.

I hear your point about "auteur" games, that they are risky and can either be screwy or genius.

But I strongly disagree that sales are the only way to compare games objectively.  Sales do not measure the quality of a game, because the sales figure is also a function of marketing and advertising.  For example, Dark Sigil for the DS looks like it is going to be a great game, but everytime I walk into a store to reserve it, they give me a funny look because they don't have it in their system.  It probably won't sell well. 

Compare this to the marketing of Mario Kart Wii (don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic game), but any game is guaranteed to sell at least decently when it has banner ads on nytimes.com.

Can't you think of some games that are much better or worse than their sales figure?  By anaylzing these games we can at least begin to forge a discourse of game theory and analysis based on something besides economic viability.  I like Ph4nt's point about gameplay as art, but how what are the variables we can use to analyze gameplay?  Learning curve?  Replay value?  Somehow I think there is something deeper...

Interesting discussion you have here, and it's too bad more folks haven't joined it.

Personally, I don't see games as "art" at all: I see them purely as commercial objects whose purpose is to entertain. This view neatly avoids the complications you've set forth; it acknowledges that game quality is purely subjective (i.e. only my tastes matter to me) while also realizing that sales can be indicative of the majority's opinion (although as you wrote, sales are influenced by other factors as well).

I guess this means we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, though, since you want to see games as art, whereas I think that when game designers see themselves as artists, they're increasingly likely to forget that their only job is to entertain me.

I'd say economic games that could be works of art...

yet are nowhere good enough yet to be called art.

Videogames are art... kinda in the same way a grade schoolers finger paintings are art currently.

The only game i'd consider "art" worthy is "Killer 7".

Even then i doubt it'd pass the "smell" test.  Since basically for things to be art... enough people have to agree with you.

"Artists" who only want to make "art" fail to grasp the nature of the beast. You cannot set out to make "art" and succeed. A product must accomplish something, and "being art" is not an actual value; it's an abstract concept, which means many things depending on the context. And values are context, not context-sensitive.

The only way a game can be "art" is if it succeeds in fulfilling values which matter to the end user. A select group of elitists declaring a game to be "art" is meaningless if the majority do not see value in the game. Ultimately, the "games are art" mentality is bandied around by developers who don't want to make a game for anybody but themselves, and by gamers who want to believe they're somehow "better" than other gamers.

Also, a side-note: it's funny how a lot of people don't realize this, but most of the famous paintings, sculptures, and other "art" made over the years were done on commission, and all were designed for a specific task in mind. They were not made with the idea of "being art". Yet would-be "artists" see only the results of these products and not the reasoning behind their existence.

I agree that some games get adversely effected by bad publicity and other issues.

But my point is, there is no way to say, objectively, that Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a better game than Carnival Games without pulling out a sales figure.  You're just making subjective statements about quality.

In my opinion an 'Artist' creates a peice of art which is (essentially) a creative work that only serves the purpose of delivering a message, and a 'Craftsman' produces a creative work which has a primary purpose other than delivering a message. In other words, 'Art' is about communication while a 'Craft' is not ...

With that in mind, I don't think games are really 'Art' because their primary purpose is to entertain.

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.