“The very idea that ‘art’ means something monolithic and certain is absurd”. This quote, taken from the article “How to do things with Videogames”, is something I agree with to a certain extent. Yet there is a part of me that still holds onto to some ideas of what art is because I’ve found myself questions it throughout this semester in this very technology class.
I also agree that for games to be art, they have to be made with that idea in mind. One of the games mentioned in this article that fit into the idea of an “artgame” was Rohrer’s Passage. I watched a walkthrough of this game on Youtube and after the walkthrough, I’m not sure what to think in terms of whether it’s hard or not. Certainly, the concept of the game is thought out and unlike any games I ever played growing up but I think because of the lack of discussion and language surrounding videogames as art, it’s hard for to contextualize this piece. After reading some of the comments on this walkthrough on Youtube, I think it’s hard for other people as well. The author comes up with terms using the artgames he has mentioned and knowing these will help people discuss games intended as art.
The first term is procedural rhetoric and he uses it to mean games that “characterize an idea” and are oriented toward introspection over both immediate gratification and external action. These games often don’t concentrate on graphics, but try and take the player through something that makes them think. By having a game be more simple and abstract, the player is left thinking about what the game actually means. This kind of thought process used when talking about a game is beneficial for more traditional art-makers because it’s relatable to mediums that have much more history attached to them and thus can be a jumping point for thinking about games as art.
What came out of those terms was the idea of a proceduralist game. Finally, a genre of videogame that is categorized in the same way art genres are! The author describes these games as being akin to expressionism in art due to poetic way of expressing ideas and the less definitive solutions to games’ questions. Other thins proceduralist games have are the metaphysical treatment of ideas, introspection, and a strong authorship. It’s interesting to me that all of these things go against traditional game design wisdom, as it feels like to break free from the typical non-art game, a creator must use everything unconventional to games in the first place.
The idea of empathy in videogames is a really interesting one to think about. Because there is always interactivity and the player is always playing someone else (even if it’s an avatar of the actual player) there is always an element of someone acting as someone else. What happens to the character on screen as the player controls it can cause empathetic reactions to the player. The author describes several skillful games that take advantage of this by having the games be about real-life situations or things that are happening in the world that the player would perhaps otherwise ignore or not be able to fully understand.
Back Home