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

[Daniel Cook]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:14 PM, micha cárdenas <azdelslade at gmail.com>wrote:

> I hope that other people didn't reply to this either because you found it
> as oversimplified, shallow and ridiculous as I did.


First and foremost, I am a barbarian.  I don't speak your language.  I don't
hold your values. I do apologize for any examples too broadly painted to
make their point. :-)  This is a risk of cross discipline communication.
Imagine, for a brief moment, I was an expert in my own field and that I was
saying something meaningful, albeit with different terminology and with a
different emphasis on what matters.  What could you take away that might
give you a new perspective on your world?


> Art doesn't come with "baggage". The history of art, as I understand it, is
> a very long theoretical exchange. Saying a painting comes with baggage is
> like saying philosophy comes with baggage. Art has to be in dialog with
> pervious art that has come before it, just as contemporary theory has to
> respond to earlier thinkers. What you're saying is like saying that
> Deleuze's writing about Spinoza is "baggage".
>

Within a very specific community of educated viewers, I completely agree
with you.  Outside of that community, a picture is just a picture. The
discussion was on value structures and how games explicitly create them
while what is typically referred to as 'art' relies heavily on the value
structures that exist externally to the medium.

To go back to another theme, we live in a fragmented time.  The continuity
of the 'long theoretical exchange' that you breathe on a daily basis does
not exist for 99.99 percent of people consuming new experiences.  For this
audience, the ability to teach an understanding of a system in a
pleasurable, delightful manner is worth exploring and celebrating.
Pictures certainly have this ability (when they tend towards illustration
and diagrams). Games have it more so in that they can provide the wisdom of
failure.  They can also organize systems of people.  And due to the
automation provided by code, they scale.  In this fragmented media market,
these attributes of games are meaningful and useful since they give a
creator a reach and the audience a depth of experience that few other
techniques can manage.

You want to determine the "inherent value" in something by choosing 1,000
> websites and a US audience. Well, that's an extremely limited set of
> "humanity", what does that have to do at all with "inherent value"? What
> about the rest of the world? What about the majority of the world, who don't
> have access to the internet?
>

Actually, this is an experiment I run on a daily basis across the world in
dozens of countries.   Yes, it is limited to people with access to the
internet, but then again that is the sort of games I'm making.  Over time
this population will only grow and we'll be able to tune our functional
creations to a wider and wider percentage of the world.   As for my
empirical definition of inherent value, I use money, time and the player's
intrinsic motivation to continue.  I realize there are other scales, but
these are one that I can measure and I'm constantly improving on them.

In the end, the process I described is what matters.  We create, we measure,
we adjust until the correct results occur.  If the process works on 500
million today (and it does), it will work on several billion tomorrow.
 Servers are cheap and code scales.  People, if not predictable, are at
least reliable in how they follow known paths in large numbers.

When stated this way, comparing modern art and games was indeed ludicrous.
 They are different beasts.  There is inherently a huge challenge facing the
older arts in their ongoing quest gain eyeballs and mindshare when they are
saddled with mediums and communities not built for modern distribution or
monetization.  Perhaps we could turn them into a game. :-)

All the best,
Danc.
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