Posts Tagged ‘Games are Art’

Darren hijacks the show from the start to talk about his favorite topic, 2D fighting games. Once he runs out of games to talk about its back to business with talk of recent and up coming posts a well as some talk about coffee and Kinki University.

Click here to download Podcast 4 (62MB)

The chances are you won’t have listened to the third podcast. In it I suggested that Space Invaders in the right context could be art.

Artist Douglas Stanley seemed to agree. At Leipzig he unveiled the ‘Invaders’ piece. A 9/11 based game with two towers inserted into Space Invaders. The message is a damning comment on the Iraq war. You can’t win, the war continues forever.

Look at my last post.

I’ll wait.

See the last sentence. People don’t. Cries of insensitivity abound. For those touched by 9/11 it is still fresh. Censorship of serious social comment is extreme though. Movies have used the tragedy as a back drop for years, and for profit.

It’s hard to shake the feeling Stanley’s mistake was venue. Art is context. Debuting at a game show lacks the gravitas of a gallery which could have shielded the piece from claims of insensitivity and immaturity.

It’s difficult to be objective about it. Games are so often belied that to be able to classify them as art would silence critics. The problem is the majority of popular games could never be defined as art.

The roadblock sat between games and art is money. As long as developers are reliant on sales and profit they have to make the game that consumers will like. This is achieved through play testing. This leads to further iterations and changes. This process may make a masterpiece of design but not art as it detracts from the message the piece was to express.

Art has two defining features, that it stated to be art and that it is to convey a single person’s vision. Small independents and designers powerful enough to exert full control have the power to continue to move games closer to art. Just don’t expect to like them.

We don’t manage to discuss every thing on the menu despite talking for an hour and a half. It’s Wii parties for starters, Street Fighter 4 and recent XBLA games for the main course with a ‘games as art’ discussion for dessert.

By then you should be full so be happy we decided leave the fighting games retrospective till next time.

Click here to download Podcast 3 (58MB)