Expressive Evolution of Video Games

Videogames are beginning to share the forms and concerns of art. During the current era, calling videogames an artistic medium is controversial. However, defining videogames as an artistic medium is important as the medium offers infinite possibilities for artistic expression. This essay attempts to establish the possibilities of videogames as an artistic medium, explore their place in the contemporary art world that simultaneously rejects and embraces the new cultural form, critically analyse certain examples of popular videogames that share the forms and concerns of art and discuss artists that have embraced videogames as an artistic medium. Undoubtedly, there is a genuine artistic richness in this new cultural form, even if it is in its infancy.

ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation: 12th EAI International Conference, ArtsIT 2023, São Paulo, Brazil, November 27-29, 2023, Proceedings, Part II. Vol. 565., 2023

Starting from consensual definitions about video games and arts, this article discusses the artistic potentialities of video games and their relationship with the gaming industry. Highlighting the importance of games for humanity in its cognitive aspect, power of socialization and the representation of society itself, this article discusses the possible artistic potential of video games, as well as the hypothesis that these potentialitiesmay be totally or partially overshadowed by the emphasis on economic success that is given by the video game industry, mainly because it is a less established form of expression compared to cinema, music, literature and the visual arts, which do not need to prove anything as an artistic language, but which also experience dilemmas and counterpointswith their manifestations more focused on pop and media consumption, having as their first instance massive popularity and economic success, and not creativity and the full expression of human experience, subjectivity and sensibility.

This dissertation studies video games as a medium of artistic expression by engaging three key elements of Marcel Duchamp's 1957 essay The Creative Act: Institution, Intention and Artefact. By first studying how Academia and the Artworld in general have engaged historically with video games. Afterwards, the formal and structural qualities of video games are engaged with, bridging the gap between this new medium and art history through aesthetic theories. Finally, medium specific qualities that complicate their study have been addressed by comparing video games with film and Marcel Duchamp’s ideas on the creative process. It is then concluded that while the field of video games-as-art is still in its infancy and that a majority of video games are not art, it is possible for specific video games to be accepted as artworks.

2007

The Videogames and Art Reader is one of the first books to provide a complete overview of the field of videogame art -that is to say art produced with or influenced by videogames. In selecting the essays and interviews to be included in this book, we have sought not only to give an indication of the current state of videogame art -and its major practitioners and genres -but also to place this work in a broader critical context. Its intention is to show that even though this area of digital art is comparatively young and exhibits a wide variety of different styles and techniques, it none the less forms a distinct and coherent artistic movement -united by shared aesthetic concerns -and is therefore worthy of being taken seriously as an art form.

Radical Gaming, 2021

Once considered a niche or adolescent entertainment product, video games are now an integral, if not dominant, part of the world's cultural production that touches all sections of the population and all ways of life. With an estimated global revenue of $180 billion in 2020, the video game industry now has a larger share of the entertainment market than the film and music industries.¹ Video games have changed the entertainment industry and consumer habits, and their influence has also had an impact on other cultural products, both in terms of technological innovations and in terms of collaborations and adaptations between video games and various other entertainment forms such as cinema, literature, and music. Also, on a theoretical and academic level, video games are increasingly the subject of studies by researchers analysing their social dynamics, psychological impacts, or aesthetic forms. Some of the main topics of these studies include the commercial strategies of the video game industry, the Boris Magrini Radical Gaming-The Language of Video Games in Media Art 1 Wallace Witkowski, "Videogames are a bigger industry than movies and North American sports combined, thanks to the pandemic". https:// www.marketwatch.com/ story/videogames-area-bigger-industry-thansports-and-moviescombined-thanks-to-thepandemic-11608654990 (first published 22.12.2021).

This paper is partly a response to the ongoing debate in the game world about whether games can be art, and partly an excerpt from my Ph.D. research. I aim to offer some insights in the cognitive experiences gamers have while playing - hopefully useful to both designers and scholars. I will argue that an art experience is a particular kind of cognitive experience, namely a distinctive type of imagination. The essence of an art experience is the mental representation of a signification process, a sort of mirrored representation that is also known as mimesis. I hope to demonstrate that it is a universal feature of art to mirror life, or more accurately, a deliberate view on it. And that what constitutes art is not defined by the properties of an artefact, but by our experience of it, by our mental actions. Along the same line I maintain that the boundaries between what we usually label entertainment and what art can not be as sharply defined as we generally assume. The main arguments in the aforementioned debate concern affective features, perceivable aesthetic qualities (as opposed to artistic properties), and the uniqueness of a game. I will set out explaining why most expert assumptions seem not discriminating enough to distinguish an art experience from an entertainment experience. Next I present some theoretical perspectives on both kinds of experiences, after which I will explain how they are being mixed and intertwined in everyday practice. Some gameplay examples should finally illustrate this inevitably condensed theoretical framework, drawn from my more detailed and elaborated dissertation on signification, imagination and mimesis in games .

2012

This chapter aims to answer the question: Can computer games be regarded as works of art? To answer this question, one has to analyse the notion of art and also the term computer games. Art can be conceptually analysed within a dialogue of continental and analytical philosophy: with different authors of philosophical aesthetics such as Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno and Danto it can be systematically said that works of art have to be understood as a source for our historical self-understanding. Concerning computer games, despite their young existence they have already developed a significant heterogeneous tradition: an essentialistic concept of computer games is -in the same way as an essentialistic concept of any medium -inappropriate. Thus the answer to the initial question can only be that some computer games are candidates for being regarded as works of art, while by no means can all computer games be regarded as art. Computer games do not differ from other media and arts in this respect: the fact that something is a movie or something is a song does not make it a work of art necessarily.

Unfolding Media Studies, 2011

This text is an attempt to start thinking about audio-visual media from the viewpoint of aesthetic concepts and conceptualised aesthetics. "The philosopher is the concept's friend" as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994, 5) put it; "philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts." As always with intellectual activity the conceptual process requires mediators, those who bring elements into the discussion and help to carry the process maybe a bit further. 1 In this text my mediators are the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the Scottish rally car driver Colin McRae (together with other similar "avatars"). At the end of the text various threads will be tied together with the help of another German, Walter Benjamin and his ideas about playing. There are two conceptual starting points: the first one concerns the interests of art, and the second one the relationship between a work of art and the spectator. These two, then, are the vantage points that supposedly merge in the third area of discussion, the environment of the game console. I am following here the practice of Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce , among others, in referring to video-, console-, computer-, television-(etc.) games with a single term digital game. Much of what has been written on digital games refers to but a limited group of game genres. On the one hand there are the fantasy genres: adventure, horror, and violence seem to be the themes that clearly dominate the field of various research inclined perspectives. On the other hand there are the "closer to reality" genres such as the entire Sims family of games, or various sports simulations. 2 However -at least from the viewpoint of digital car-games that interest me here -not much has been written about the digital games in relation to traditional 1 "Whether they're real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It's a series. If you're not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you're lost.