Video Game Art A Myth

Anthony has written an article about why it is hard to call video games an art and what his opinion on real video game art is. Video Game Art A Myth

I dont mean the title of the article literally; I believe video game art is very much a reality. My goal here is to let you all know the universal understanding of video game art is extremely narrow and is in dire need of expansion.

Dictionary dot com has a few different definitions for art. The one Ive chosen to run with is:
High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.

As you can see the modern interpretation of art in and around video games is an accurate one but even in this day and age it is typically a hard task to try and convince someone of the artistic merit of a video game. Why is that though? Well one reason would be the complete and utter lack of innovation and anything new and shocking. The industry is stale and lacks the amount of fresh experiences to truly merit a likeness to art. This lack of innovation in games is caused by the preconceptions on what video game art is and I hope people one day understand the real potential video games have for being art.

The obstacle of video game art is the development team. It is one thing for a lone artist to pick up a paint brush and paint an image which is provocative and skilful and it is entirely another for a team of 60 game developers to create a seamless artistic expression with the same level of consistency and quality. When you make a game, typically your role is to make a character, a level, an explosion, network coding or something else. Each developer is putting his or her own artistic flare into the work they produce, which isnt a recipe for a consistent artistic expression. It is a major flaw that is probably the first and most destructive gauntlet for an artistic direction within a game. While the end result is art in itself, it is the same form of cluttered expression of art we have seen time and time again.

The definition of copyright from dictionary dot com is:
The legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.

The Law thinks alike too. When a game, website, brochure or another collective of individual work is born the copyright is divided. The images for a website, the MySQL database structure, the coded backend and the news posted are all separate copyrighted elements of a website. It is done this way to protect and respect each authors rights. We cant avoid being individuals and cant blame the Law or anyone else for treating individuals as individuals. Fact is individuals act like what they are and pursue their own artistic agendas or find it necessary to imitate industry standards so they can easily form a united vision. This is the reason for the lack of innovation, it is not an unready market and it is not greedy publishers.

High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.

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High quality execution of a work of beauty? That is definitely graphics and level design in a nutshell, but you know what else it is? Absolutely everything! The method in which one interacts with a game is art, the way two people interact is art and there are too many more things to write down. Art does not need to be a copy of code or a graphic. The word execution from that definition is key in the roll of defining uncharted areas of video games. Ill repeat that in a different manner: the way in which a video game is executed is art.

Art is not just graphics, story, game play, method in which you draw polygons or textures drawn on a wall. Its also the manner in which the controller rumbles to communicate with you (Ocarina of Times Stone of Agony or road traction in Project Gotham Racing 2), its hitting bongo drums in rhythm with music you probably dont enjoy and the learning curve of such an experience, its button mapping, its the challenge provided to the user, its the Tingle Tuner and its the careful use of the Zelda chime.

A level designer using real time shadows to cast an atmospheric and visually pleasing shadow across a floor is rightfully a self-proclaimed artist. However is this as close the hand of video games can get to art? No. How about video, audio, story and game play artistry? Again the answer is no, there are numerous additional avenues to explore. Video games are a much larger canvas than any previous artistic medium and it is about time people sat up and recognised that. Its time to execute games in ways they have never been before. We arent just sitting on an entertainment medium but an artistic one and we are blessed with the possibility of fusing the two. Why waste this potential?

You may think cell shading is our cubism and rightfully so, but we mustnt corner ourselves with preconceptions. Painters learned to paint without paintbrushes and its high time we learned we dont need buttons to interact with games. Gyroscopes, touch screens, microphones and bongo drums are a mere beginning succeeding and complementing the keyboard, joystick, game pad and mouse. I await the Revolution and beyond with the upmost of anticipation because the definition of video games is preparing for what it has been starved of, expansion.