[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?

[Daniel Cook]

I find this all quite fascinating, especially coming from a background
focused on making games.

The railroad baron in me looks at all art institutions as a system to be
used for personal gain and profit. As such I see the designation of 'art'
strongly driven by economic processes.  What is the economic function of art
institutes in the creation of games and do we need them?  Historically, it
seems that the modern art world acts as a certification process to ensure
quality combined with a marketing / distribution network for promoting and
selling certified works.  In emerging markets like social and mobile games,
where I primarily focus, these functions appear to be extraneous.   The
distribution is weak compared to the digitally facilitated word of mouth
that drives social networks.  The certification is not meaningful to the
target audience.  There is no educated niche of consumers whose refined
tastes fund out sized returns.  Why is this?  It is not age alone.

This thought leads to something intriguing about games.  I recently viewed
the Pablo Picasso traveling exhibit here in Seattle and was struck by how
much of the value of the art was external to the work itself.  The art is
very much a reflection of the time, the place and the cultural trends
unfolding across his lifetime.  Without a viewer possessing an educated
context, each piece is almost entirely meaningless.  In this respect, the
existing art institutions are essential.  From an economics perspective,
they drive the majority of the value in the work.  It is not surprising that
every few years there is some new cache of art discovered an an attic that
upon authentication goes from being worthless junk to precious cultural
treasure.

Games have repeatedly shied away from tying their dominant value to external
systems.

Two factors

   - As soon as the entrance into a game becomes complex enough that people
   cannot pick it up independent of extensive training or cultural
   indoctrination, two things occurs:  A) That audience shrinks...the friction
   of distribution increases due to increased learning costs. We see this
   regularly with the growth, maturation and nichification of game genres.
    1990's adventure games are the classic example, but we see the same occur
   with PC RPGs and PC FPS. B) New forms of gaming appear that have
   dramatically lower entry barriers.  Casual games, handheld games, mobile
   games and social games early on had the defining characteristics of being
   dramatically easier to pick up and play when compared to more mature genres
   and markets.
   - Once a player has made an entrance into a game, they don't need
   external value structures to validate their enjoyment.  Games contain a
   scaffolding that gently trains players to acquire the skills necessary to
   understand the game.  In doing so, all good games create a self coherent
   internal value structure.  If you can get players past the initial graphics,
   setting and unfamiliar controls, many games are enjoyable across
   generations.

And this strikes me as a major difference between games and much of what
goes as art.  Games work.  They are utilitarian tools.  You can have a
functioning game or a broken game and it is not merely a matter of taste or
education or external validation.  Games either create the internal value
structure in the player or they do not.  They are exactingly engineered to
drive a particular emotion and we can sample a large enough population to
determine if they are success or not in their stated functional purpose.  A
functioning game has inherent value.  It does not need to be certified or
discovered or framed.

When I see developer behind a particular game genre pining for official
artistic recognition, I take that as a sign that the particular genre at
hand is about to die.  What it means is the functional value and self
distribution capabilities of the game have been diluted (through the
machinations of the marketplace) to the point that they are desperately
(likely subconsciously) looking for some external system to help prop up
their value.

That statement likely puts me in the camp of not wanting the designation of
'art', at least not from those offering official certification.   We aren't
dead yet!  :-)

take care
Danc.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1453/the_circle_of_life_an_analysis_of_.php
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