PixlBit

I agree I never considered it art and used the term, but it meant far more to me than just a toy. I was around 10 so I didn't care about art, didn't know what I know now, but back then I knew that this wasn't equal to playing darts, baseball, monopoly, or even video games like mario or mortal kombat. Zelda did something else and I appreciated it like somebody would appreciate art they like. I began idolizing Miyamoto. He was the only designer I knew by name at that age, and I always wanted to know what he was going to do next or what he had to say. When I was a child Miyamoto might as well have been the only designer in the world lol, in my mind at least. I never outright called him an artist or defended him against anything, in fact I never dealt with "games as art" discussions at all back in those days, I just wanted to play games. However, I knew that he wasn't a mere toy maker. At my young age I did realize that Miyamoto was using his imagination to create a magical place in a game and I was a part of it. I had no idea how games were made, how Miyamoto was doing this, but it was magic to me and I felt like I was a part of it. I never looked for validation back in those days from other kids, my parents, or anybody else, I just wanted to play games and be like Miyamoto someday.

I've heard some great things about Fragile Dreams. A community member on here named Xayvong mentioned is one of his blogs that the game made him cry. I was fascinated by that and started asking him why so I could dig into his experience more. People have asked the question in the past "can a video game make you cry?" and there's proof all around us.

I agree with all your points Angelo. The definitions Webster has are pretty vauge for me, but the parts that make perfect sense are your explanations of art, appreciation, and reforming the question, that came after them etc. Great entry by the way, you articulated your points well and it was efficient and concise. In all my long, inefficient, comments I've mirrored some of your feelings in the way that I don't want somebody to tell me games and game design can't be something. I don't want any art teacher or patron of an art to tell me that games can't be experienced, discussed, and appreciated like other artforms. The art of virtual interactive game design is still in its infancy and I don't want it to ever be generalized or written off.

I thought it was great when you made the distinction that people usually try to make something qualify as art based on whether it moves them, and how the reaction doesn't qualify or disqualify it as art, but rather makes it appreciated. The appreciation of something is just a byproduct, not a part of the criteria. Art can still be art without being appreciated or felt by a person, let alone everybody. I posted a blog last night, when video games began mattering to me, and during it I explained both when and why I started believing that games can be art, and more than just a toy. I tried to explain what the art (for lack of a better term) of this particular game is to me and why it transcended being a simple toy. I didn't have any criteria or definition of art. The blog is more of the appreciation you were mentioning in this blog.

The part of your blog when you mentioned that artists deserve recognition when he or she creates something we appreciate meant a lot to me. I know that in the industry as it is today, especially with the AAA model, games have to kind of walk a balance between being commodities to make money selling, and being satisfying artistic outlets for artists. I think game design is an art and the people on the dev team should get their recognition always. I don't ever want to see games purely as commodities.

@Mike I too wondered if people were going to start bumping heads because of Jesse's stance but once Jesse got the opportunity to explain his ideas and put the statements in their context it all made sense. There was nothing to refute, and I came to the realization that when I say games are art and he says they are not, there's is truly no problem there. There aren't even necessarily sides to this argument. Hypothetically if you tried to organize gamers onto one of two sides (side A thinks games are art, side B thinks games are not art) you'd find out that those sides would tear themselves apart individually due to the blanket nature of the statements because every single person will feel different than the next. You could never reach consensus on which individual games qualify as art, what criteria needs to be met, etc. In the end both sides would find out they have no need to be organized. Each person will come to their own conclusions, making each person's own feelings sovereign and their point of view unique. Once you reach that realization, it reasons that the only thing left is to just get to know each other and explore your similarties and differences.

On Jesse's article I was even defending his point of view, in addition to explaining my own. At one point I was comparing CoD to the game of ball-in-a-cup, and it involved printing a picture of a Da Vinci painting off the net and supergluing it to stuff, It wasn't one of my finest moments lol. I didn't mention this in my original comment but I hate the Spike VGAs. Even developers don't feel comfortable being there, because the event is always full of useless showbiz celebs that often don't care about games and have nothing to do with the industry. It's not even a gaming event, the developers are like second rate guests, the celebrities are the first rate guests used for eye candy, and the audience is just a mob of loud kids. Plus who decided what wins and looses in the VGAs? It's probably the people who work at Spike and maybe fans who have accounts on their website. It's basically just a bunch of weirdos from Spike and the trolls on their site who are being represented as the "face of gaming". That's shenanigans if I've ever seen it. Real gaming award shows, like the GDC Awards actually mean something because developers vote amongst their peers and for their peers, those awards mean the most to me.

Thanks for all the support Mike, it inspires me and raises morale a great deal and means a lot to me. I spend the majority of each day thinking about games and everyday when I wake up I just want to know all about them whether it's just reading about the latest news, reviews, features, watching developer diaries, seeing articles about design, or just talking anything and everything about games with friends like all of us do here. Ever since I finished highschool I've been trying a couple of fields but I'm not passionate about either of them. When I was 17 I went to flight school in my spare time, passed tests with A's, was pretty good at it but I eventually saw it as a chore. Then I did a firefighting program for a couple years and learned a lot about hydrolic equations and plenty of other stuff, but I didn't care about that. Everyday day after class all I wanted was to come home, play games, learn about games, talk games, etc. Took me a while but eventually I connected the dots and decided I should try the fields of gaming out.

Lately I've been studying a brief GDC presentation from 2009 that experimental psychologist/analyst/designer Mike Ambinder over at Valve created called "Valve's approach to Playtesting: The application of Empiricism" and I'm fascinated by it and by his methods. It would seem the Portal song doesn't lie lol. When you listen to what Ambiner has to say it'll let you see how things go over at the company, and give you a clue as to why the science always gets done and why "we do what we must, because we can" lol. One of these days I want to be accomplished and proven enough to design levels and/or mechanics and be able to apply Valve's approach to playtesting when I'm watching playtest sessions and analyzing the results. I'd really prefer if I could do that work at Valve someday, but there's years of work and designing I need to do before I can send in that resume lol. Gabe Newell will get it someday though. I want to shoot high and have a history and portfolio good enough to send to Newell at Valve, Jason Jones at Bungie, O'Connor at 343i, and several other places.

I would love a sequel too. This was one of the best game I played in 2008. There were a lot of good ones that like I played like Turok, Condemned 2, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Gears 2, Left 4 Dead, and Mirror's Edge. PoP had some of my favorite visual presentations, level designs, mechanics, characters, and story. It's one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played, and it's equally as fun for me to play. I couldn't get enough of the acrobatics, wall scaling, jumping and swinging above huge abyss'. Being up in the sky practically and seeing all these clouds and land below you was incredible.

Hey-oh! I started writing a lengthy comment on my thoughts of games as art and people who say they can never be art. I also wrote out where I differ with you, how I'm similar, how I'd defend my point of view, and even how I'd defend your point of view Jesse. I ended up posting "the big one" on the Pixltalk discussion, but I still wanted to come by over here and talk about it too. Since I got the bulk of those thoughts all out in the Pixltalk thread I wanted to come over here with the more important questions and distilled thoughts. By the way, awesome article, you made some amazing points and I think it'll really get people thinking.

What is art to you Jesse? I would say "what is your definition of art" but it would be contrary to all the logic I attempted to construct in the bigger Pixltalk comment. I think game design is an art and some games I have can be considered art, but that isn't a universal truth, just a personal one. With that said I want to know all about what your personal truth is Jesse. The way you compared board games, tv, movies, and book to video games and saw them as entertainment and not art as a whole was fascinating. I interpretted your statements and came up with an explanation to help expand upon it, basically defending your point of view. So, look at any game that is based on the player gaining points. Like getting kills in CoD or coins in Mario. CoD is a game, now compare it to another game like ball-in-a-cup (ball attached to string attached to stick with a cup on top, point being to swing the ball around and catch it in the cup). One game takes very little time and money to develop, one takes millions of dollars and a team of a hundred. In CoD you kill for points, with ball-in-a-cup you put the ball in the cup and compete with friend to see who can catch the ball the most.

CoD isn't considered as art by many people, but there is plenty of artwork behind it (enironment artists and character artists are called artists for nothing). Now, just because there is beautiful and legitimate artwork making up the game, does that make the game as a whole, art? I don't think so, the artwork is great and deserves love, the game is a ton of fun for me, but the game as a whole isn't art to me. It's a fun game, not unlike ball-in-a-cup.

Ball-in-a-cup has me doing some task and I can count points and just play the game for what it is, not unlike CoD. If I go on the internet and print out a picture of a beautiful Da Vinci painting, take the piece of paper with the artistic picture on it, and super glue it to the ball-in-cup toy, does that make ball-in-a-cup art? I don't think so, it would feel silly to do so. The toy would have art as a part of it, but alltogether it's not a piece of art to me personally.

That was ridiculous, leave it to me to compare CoD and ball-in-a-cup, and involve super gluing shit together. I asked you what is art to you, but if you asked me the same question I wouldn't be able to answer it. I can tell you what comes to mind when I try to associate games with art.

Remember back on 1UP when you did the article My Journey Through Hyrule? About your experience with Zelda and how the gaming experience was tied to your sister and her Leukemia? That was the single most beautiful and heartwrenching thing I've ever read in my entire life and I'm not just trying to kiss your ass because I like you so much. The article by itself was art, it transcended everything I thought I knew about Zelda, it engaged me emotionally in ways that the vast majority of movies, games, books, or just other blogs and articles don't. I'm a huge Zelda fan and sometime after your Journey to Hyrule article I did a blog called 'when video games began mattering to me' (by the time I joined Pixlbit I had written just a couple blogs on 1UP and I've been wondering if I should post them up here as well because they were important to me, I think I'm going to put it up here after this) and it involved my first experiences with Zelda, how it became art to me, and how it affected my view of games. I went from seeing all my games as just toys to pass time, to seeing some of my games as art.

One of the reasons Zelda became art to me and therefore opened up my mind to games being capable of art was because I felt like I was the one saving Hyrule. The character and world mattered to me. I wasn't just Sub-Zero beating the shit out of Scorpion, or Donkey Kong running around Donkey Kong Country collecting junk. Link was a child just like me and I looked over at him as a kind of stoic, selfless hero. I think the story and characters of Zelda had a postive impact on me back in those early years of my life. I saw myself in Link, I saw Link in me, and created an entire set of values and emotions for us both to act upon. We never boasted, cheated, commited crimes, or demanded payment or praise, never even got the girl, we just did the right thing because it was the right thing to do. When I finally drove the Master Sword through Ganon's skull at the end of Ocarina of Time and saw the credits roll as Link rides away alone on his horse with no need for riches or worship I cried and felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment because I felt like I had really been a part of that world and saved it, and did it the most virtuous way.

Real life can rarely make me feel that important, emotional, and accomplished but somehow this software on a cartridge did. The experience of OoT transcended all the life experience and intellect I had at that young age and gave me something...different, new, something that was just somehow art, for lack of a better term. It stretched my emotional intelligence and engaged me in ways that different types of "art" seem to for other people.

In the thread for Jesse's AAA Problem article I was declaring about how games are art to me, and Esteban was telling me to keep my eyes open for this coming "games as art" themed Pixltalk. You'd figure I'd have something solid to say but I can't think of much that makes sense. I don't know if I'll get anywhere with this but I'm really going to try.

I consider some of my games as art. There are definitely individual artistic skills behind any game, but some are felt as art to me, some aren't. Most importantly I consider game design and many of its different artistic components to be art, but I don't know what art is. I have no definition for art and I feel no inherent urge to define it. I've literally spent next to no brain power trying to make my own definition and it's because a single definition can't exist and doesn't matter. When Jesse points out the similarities between experiencing a video game, a board game, a sports event, and none of it is art but rather entertainment, the argument is logical and understandable. It's not right or wrong, there will never be a right and wrong. It's not solvable or observable in quite the same way an equation would be, but it does make sense in that it is right simply because of the fact that it can't be wrong. There's no quantity, no consistency, it's abstract, chaotic, and purely intellectual and personal. People trying to debate Jesse's view as right or wrong, or trying to get you to change views, would be irrational and wasteful of time. They would spend the entire time finding paradoxes, contradictions, be forced to reform a new definition for art every minute, and chasing a consistency and uniformity that they could never find.

This whole conversation is right up my alley because I love exploring the psychology and habits of gamers, game designs, how games affect gamers, and how gamers affect their games. How we play, why we play, and why these pieces of software written on discs matter at all to us. Is it just some software on a disc, or is it more? Everybody should have their own view on it, and everybody should voice that view, that's what I like to see because I have the inherent urge to listen, analyze, and disect whatever is said so that I might be able to use it to come up with better ideas for designs.

I'm in the group of people Jesse mentioned in his article who are very self-concious of my gaming passion. I don't care about seeing a game disc in a museum, but I do care when somebody tells me that game developers don't create art and can never be capable of creating art. Everybody can describe what something is, but it seems wrong to try and define what something can't be. There is no definition to art like I was saying earlier, but that might be part of the problem. When somebody says, "Games aren't art, they never could be" I take that as a very derrogatory statement and I get really mad. However, when they make that statement it doesn't really have to mean anything to me, and it doesn't change my mind. The reason why it doesn't mean anything is because the person making the statement has a completely different feel for what art is to them, and so trying to debate the validity of his statement is a dead end because we can't argue preferences. We can explore and attempt to understand our preferences, similarities, and differences, but there's no right and wrong so in the end when I get angry at somebody who says games aren't art, my anger in itself is illogical and a dead end. When somebody says either "Games are art, games can be capable of art" or "Games are not art, games can never be capable of art" or any mixing of the two, the proper response isn't to be angry, the proper response is to ask, "Why? What is art to you?"

I figured out last year that I want to design levels, create mechanics, and analyze playtest sessions for a development team one day. Even with all this time passed, I've never told my family about my aspirations and dreams. The only people who know I care so deeply for video games are all my friends here at Pixlbit and over at 1UP. I'm scared to know what people will think of it, and I expect people to think I'm chasing an immature brain-dead career that doesn't contribute to society. Those assumptions and feelings kill me, and it's the same kind of demoralizing feeling I get when people say that video games in general aren't art and could never be art.

I think games are art and can be art, but in reality I'm not trying to create art. I'm not a writer, musician, character or environment artist. The contributions I want make aren't about narrative, music, character development, drawing and color skill. I want to use my imagination to plan out and build amazing environments for people to play in, create mechanics for characters to use in those environments, and study how people play things we create. "Art" is just some kind of emotional trigger word in my brain it would seem and it has various emotions, memories, thoughts, etc associated with it all while being completely abstract and without form. I don't define art, I don't fully understand what art is to me, but when somebody tells me that games aren't art or could never be art it hurts a lot and triggers a flood of emotions and most it has very little to do with comparing a piece of software to a painting on a wall. I don't want my work to be looked down on, my passion to be laughed at, or be seen as making something that isn't worth experiencing, interpreting, or discussing like how other art forms are.

I don't care much about what Roger Ebert thinks, but I do care immensely what my gaming peers think, and what my friends and family think. Other art forms have patrons and connoisseurs who all take wildly varying interest in the art. Some people look at a painting and say meh, some would cry over it, some would move on after viewing it for 6 seconds, some could analyze it all day long. Video games have a similar diversity and variety of patrons. I believe we will eventually have much more diversity and variety in our games themselves. You can already see it happening. Low sophistication, higher sophistication, mature, child-friendly, story heavy, no stories, drama, comedy, romances, plenty of mechanics and features being blended and evolved. This art is still in its infancy and shouldn't be generalized, written off, or have the book closed on it.

Gaming can be whatever gaming wants to be, there are no permanant limits, technical or intellectual. Intellectually you can try to tell whatever story you want, or let players tell their own story, or tell no story at all. You can continue to try whatever it takes to elicit emotional responses from players, or you can put players in situations that encourage them to examine their own ethics, logic, and behavior. Or you can just make some platforms for them to hop between till they collect a coin. Technically there are no permanant limits because you can play with controllers, or you can use something like Kinect to play with just your body and voice. You can always increase computing power, make anything bigger, more sophisticated, add variables, think up any art style, create any water or lighting simulation you want and make it happen. You can take a group of people with various artistic and technical skills and get them to create an entire universe from scratch that you can interact with and maybe even experience epiphanies in. You can put the player in the middle of nowhere with no end goal or objective and leave them to their own devices (maybe they'll go stare at some rocks for a half hour), or you can give them something to do like collect a box of gold, romance somebody, kill something, harvest crops, anything. The game disc itself isn't art, but the experiences and data on the disc are art.

Gaming can be whatever it wants to be, and I don't like when people tell me it can't be something.

Whoa wait a minute, this just snuck up on me because I recognized the name Tribes when I heard it, but I had no idea that this is what it is. This looks gorgeous, and it looks like it's built on the Halo Reach engine, but it can't be. That environment art in the areas they showed look just like Forge World, it's amazing. Most importantly it looks like a lot of fun. The movement looks great, fights look frantic, levels look huge, guns look like fun to shoot, looks just like the Reach engine, and it's free-to-play? How the hell didn't I know about this sooner lol?

Well I wouldn't pay $60 for it Patrick and I wasn't trying to speak for the millions of people that buy CoD. The kind of sales CoD gets aren't indicative of how things go in the rest of the industry. It's been the hot thing for a while now, and it just happens, like Twilight movies. CoD is a phenomenon and I can't find many ways to explain it other than it's giving a large amount of people what they want, doing it pretty well, and it's one of those few franchises that is absolutely banking in successfully on the ridiculous AAA model. Not only banking in on the model, but it's the most lucrative in entertainment history.

It just exploded like World of Warcraft and before you knew it everybody and their family was playing it and it was gathering millions of consumers to it. Twisted Metal isn't even in the same ball park. TM uses the AAA model but it doesn't have whatever it takes to make a game a phenomenon. I wouldn't pay $60 for CoD multiplayer, Halo Multiplayer, Starcraft II multiplayer, Team Fortress 2, or any other popular multiplayer component. People pay full price basically just for CoD multiplayer only, and they can get near unlimited replayability out of it. Fans come back to buy every new Zelda when it comes out, and even though I love Zelda and buy them those games are hardly diverse, and the experience lasts around 25 hours.

These are just random facts and I'm not trying to connect any dots or make any point, it just is what it is. I would be a terrible businessman, I can't make sense of sales and marketing and everything else.

I agree. They were trying to be "true" to the older games and capture that feel and nostalgia, but, if I wanted to play a game exactly like the old TM games I could just go play the old TM games. It's 2012, times have changed wildly and there were a lot of different routes they could've taken to try and give a 2012 audience a contemporary take on the franchise. They could've just done an HD remaster of one or some of the older TM games and put that out at a lower price. Or they could've done as you said, and make this new TM a downloadable online mutliplayer game that would've made sense, but instead they went for an entirely "new" full $60 release.

I played TF2 in the Orange Box which was $60 for a bundle of 5 full games on one disc back when it hit shelves, and right now TF2 is free-to-play on Steam. I love Team Fortress 2, it's my favorite online multiplayer game ever, but I wouldn't pay $60 for it. Same goes for Twisted Metal. I don't think a good multiplayer mode cuts the mustard, not for $60. It's yet another time where the AAA model has reared its ugly head.

There's obviously quite a number of downsides to the game, but it seems to be really strong in the aspects where it needs to be, multiplayer and level design. I love that the maps are huge and so destructible, I bet those parts are a load of fun. I played quite a bit of TM back in the day but to be honest I had much more fun playing Battletanx and Battletanx Global Assault for N64. Battletanx wasn't nearly as fast paced, diverse, or popular, but I had the most fun with that series and the most nostalgia for it by far. Nuking entire maps never got old, and I loved setting up sentries and defending stuff. Plus there were awesome missles in Battletanx that you could fire, watch them fly, and control where they went. There were a lot of great weapons, levels, and strategies you could play in those games.