Video games not art

Having once made up the investigation, have declined every opportunity to expand on it or defend it. That seems to be nonsense, especially given the volume of messages I receive calls me to play this game or to retract and the error of my ways. However, I remain convinced that, in principle, no video games can be art. Maybe it's silly of me to say never, because never, as Rick Wakeman tells us, is a long, long time. Let me say that no video player now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form. 

What drives me back on track? It was powered by a reader, Mark Johns, to review a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. So I did. I immediately warmed to Santiago. She is bright, safe, convincing. But he is wrong. 


I intend to take an unfair advantage. He spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after examination. If you want to go ahead, I urge you to see his talk, which is then inserted. Only 15 minutes long, and makes the time pass quickly. 

She begins by saying video games are already art. " However, she acknowledged that I was right when he wrote: "Nobody inside or outside the field has been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I might have added, painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear. 

Then he shows a slide of a prehistoric cave paintings, which he described as "sort of scratches on the walls of chicken", and contrasts with the ceiling of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. His point is that while video games may be closer to zero until the end of the spectrum chicken, I am foolish to assume that it will not evolve. 

She then says speech began as a way of warning, and writing as a form of accounting, but it became the story and song. In fact, the speech probably evolved into a form of storytelling and the songs long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and of course the creation of the beauty of chicken scratch Werner Herzog is even now in 3-D film. 

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the cave of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc in the south of France, should only be considered in the context of the shadows cast on the dark walls built by the fires behind artists, suggesting that the cave paintings, carbon materials and ocher and everything that went into them the fruit of a long gestation, not the beginning of something - and that artists were extremely talented. They were great artists in that time, the geniuses have nothing to build, and not in the process of becoming a Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with the economy and wit that evokes the animals that live among. 

James acknowledges that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong not art, yet elegant rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most eloquent definition of art that has found is that of Wikipedia. "Art is the deliberate process of organizing the elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions" This is an interesting definition, but as a chess player I could say that my game fits the definition.