General Chaos wrote:Duct, in response to your last point: I'm not challenging you here, but does entertaining equate to artful? Are professional athletes artists because they entertain? What about exotic dancers? Not only do they entertain, but they evoke sexuality among other things (plenty of artists try this). If the answer is yes (and it very well may be) I'm going to propose that perhaps there is art in everything, and the fun part is finding it, thus making this whole literature thing even better.
Obviously, this was addressed to lordofduct rather than myself, but I'd still like to give you my thoughts on this subject anyway. My personal belief is that any arrangement or re-arrangement of pre-existing commodities in a form which makes physical an idea or allows for distinct concepts to be enacted in a pre-determined way is art. No matter how simple your tools or intentions are, it will be art so long as it has intent and it is a set product. So the cave-painting of eons ago are art, even though all they communicate is "There were horses here" - the artist meant to convey the idea that there were horses in the area to whomever may have seen his painting, but how to show it? He couldn't very well just leave a horse there in the cave with an arrow pointing to it - he had to represent this idea using tools and resources. Would you believe that his work actually had what we would refer to as depth? The artist intended to convey to his audience the existence of horses in the area eons ago, his piece has a depth which he could not have possibly realized to us, however (simple as it is) - his piece goes beyond his intent to illustrate the presence of horses, it illustrates to the modern audience the presence of man, because man is the only animal that creates art.
To differentiate, though, I'll go with your example of the exotic dancer. The intent of the dancer is obviously to evoke the feeling of sexual arousal from her audience - whether or not her actions can be classified as "art", however, depends on how she goes about this. If she has a CHOREOGRAPHED dance routine, then it is art - she is arranging and re-arranging pre-existing commodities (her body parts) in a set manner with the intent of communicating her desire to arouse the audience. If the dance routine is not choreographed, however, then it is simply communication because it is not a definite piece - nothing is remotely permanent about the spontaneous, thus, by my definition, it is not intended to be, nor is it, art.
About Miyamoto's view of his work, I'd have to disagree with him. He means to evoke feelings of happiness, excitement, and general fun with his product, which he creates through decidedly un-fun tools (boxes of wires and computer chips) quite successfully, if the world-wide reknown for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are to be believed. I think Miyamoto is far from the pinnacle of artists who utilize the medium of video games effectively in order to provoke thought or meaning - personally, even though I love the Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid games, I think they use the medium rather poorly as well. The gameplay and stories of FF and MGS have almost no relevance to eachother whatsoever. Their gameplay consists of accomplishing set goals in order to view pieces of cinema or read snippets of literature to progress the story. The whole thing about video games is that you are manipulating video in order to simulate interaction with a virtual world - FF and MGS have that in their gameplay, but the impressive moments of higher levels of art are delivered through events that are not determined by how the gamer played or what decisions they made whatsoever - FF and MGS could be movies, and you'd lose none of the story's impact. Video games' biggest potential for art is offering real, complex moral choices and allowing the gamer to react accordingly because no other medium can do that in such a visceral manner (there are the pick-your-ending books, though... those are like video games in text-form. If the audience were allowed to vote on what ending they wanted to see for a movie, for instance, that would technically be the most simplistic video game in the world... like Night Trap, only simpler).
So what is art in video games, then? Well, if you're playing Black & White, and you're offered the choice of whether you'd like to selfishly sacrifice 20 of your worshippers in order to get a power-up, or altruistically keep your worshippers and put yourself at a disadvantage for the sake of others, and you choose the former, you might feel guilty when you see the worshipper's friends and family mourning. See, this will have a more profound effect on you because YOU are the one who did it - you didn't just watch some canned character go about some canned action to get a canned result; you made a REAL decision, and the effects of which were simulated by the video game in order to elicit the desired effect - guilt (if you allow your belief to be suspended enough to feel for virtual avatars). I one time felt incredible guilt when my Seaman (heh) asked me if I thought he was "real". I responded, "No", and he got very upset; he argued with me for a bit then said, "I think, therefore I am", and then swam off into the corner of the tank and didn't eat or speak to me for a couple of days before he finally forgave me. You COULD NOT do that in cinema.
