The Atari 2600 is weeping right now. Nary a Combat or Yars Revenge.... In all seriousness I think this is a cool idea. While Pacman may not have the emotional collateral as a painting, it is the beginning. Pacman is to video games as cave paintings are to art. Not necessarily the most complex, but it is beautiful in its own way.
Are they going to have stations where people can actually play the games, like the Smithsonian did? If so, this will be a success solely if I can actually get the chance to play vib-ribbon.
@Gordo789: I've played it before. It's nothing special, visual style aside. It contains literally nothing that hasn't been done on phones or flash games before it (and better).
But that's just my opinion. To me, even considering it for an honour such as this is ludicrous praise.
Would love to walk through this installation, sounds great, and I hope it introduces new people to the craft of video games.
But as for "is video games art?". I used to think this was an important question but now I can't even remember why. I guess I figured out that the answer to the question, whatever it is, is completely irrelevant to me. Does it change anything?
Is furniture crafting art? Sometimes, sometimes not. Parts of it, parts of it not. Don't care.
Dude fucking Vib-Ribbon, Chrono Trigger, and The Legend of Zelda? Thank you Based God I swear to god.
And Passage is pretty awesome, though I understand why someone would think it is lame. Also I bought it on iOS because it was kind of a cool thing to have and on a whim on 3DS because it is part of that Alt-Play compilation.
Only questionable game is Passage. I don't know how you can include Passage in a video game design interaction exhibit when games like DOOM and GTA3 are absent. It's the token indie darling. It feels like pandering, which undermines the rest of the exhibit.
As an artist I completely understand the response about Passage. I don't necessarily agree with it because I know how experimental a game evoking those feelings really is, but you have to understand that sentimentality and similar feelings (like nostalgia) that easily get a pass in games are seriously dangerous territory in the visual arts. It's why artists like William-Adolphe Bouguereau are so roundly despised by most serious artists. In painting you can be an absolute technical master and be hated for having any trace of sentimentality. The only painter I can think of that really ever got away with it was Marc Chagall.
You know, I was just going to post that I thought that Jason Rohrer is a hack and Passage is lame, but you summed it up quite maturely here.
I'm not quite sure how people not only let Rohrer get away with it, but actually applaud him for his style of games.
I'm going to try and not offend people here, but Passage really does strike me as 'high art for idiots'. It tells an 'emotional' message through the gameplay, so let's just avoid the fact that the message is incredibly generic and maudlin. I'll give him some credit for actually using the gameplay to tell a story, unlike the vast majority of games, and maybe I'm jealous of his 'success' (as a amateur (but improving)) writer, but Passage borderline offends me.
@biggiedubs: While I will agree with you on the shallowness of Rohrer's message, I still like his work because his approach has been pretty unique. I think the idea of using movement through space and other basic game mechanics mostly taken for granted by other game designers as metaphors is a fairly big step. The only other game that comes to mind that has done it better is in the final level of Braid.
Remember that there was a time that closeups were groundbreaking in film. Birth of A Nation has a pretty reprehensible message, even worse than sentimentality, and it still belongs in a museum for growing the set of tools available to directors.
I don't really consider Video games art. I also don't consider Music,Film or literature to be art either. They are forms of media whose primary function is to entertain. Art is a little deeper than that.
@biggiedubs: While I will agree with you on the shallowness of Rohrer's message, I still like his work because his approach has been pretty unique. I think the idea of using movement through space and other basic game mechanics mostly taken for granted by other game designers as metaphors is a fairly big step. The only other game that comes to mind that has done it better is in the final level of Braid.
Remember that there was a time that closeups were groundbreaking in film. Birth of A Nation has a pretty reprehensible message, even worse than sentimentality, and it still belongs in a museum for growing the set of tools available to directors.
Just to chime in. I'm not one to be grossly offended by tactful sentimentality; which I think both Passage & Gravitation pull off in a decent way through a distilled message conveyed without too much ceremony or ham-fisted pathos. I think the point about using allegory and metaphor in mechanics of a game is the key factor here. It would seem poignant to address the disconnect between conveyed meaning and gameplay systems employed in the majority of games we see released (GTA IV and Limbo are two examples and ones that shouldn't touch the MoMA exhibit') and how important Rohrer (and others) are in progressing the use of this dynamical meaning for future game makers.
I totally agree about the point you make on film too.
This would be a decent pick. So would MGS2 but more for its post post-modern narrative than the gameplay or interaction necessarily.
@JHavoc said:
I don't really consider Video games art. I also don't consider Music,Film or literature to be art either. They are forms of media whose primary function is to entertain. Art is a little deeper than that.
Watch, read and listen more. Media such as films, music or literature can be deep too. The rabbit hole is vast.
When you look at the way MoMA presents each game, they are well chosen. I don't think they represent the games as being art in and of themselves, but the games have had some sort of culturual profoundness and effect attached to them, and many of them will make for interesting sights. World maps in Dwarf Fortress, for instance.
I think it's the presentation and context that justifies them, not the games themselves.
@Incapability: Well, Duchamp put a urinal in a museum and that context alone made it a major art piece of the 20th century--though it's the change of context that's important, not the urinal itself.
Log in to comment