This document discusses different perspectives on games as an art form. It explores the relationship between games, art, and the avant-garde. Key topics covered include defining artgames, the role of abstraction and metaphor in artgames, and examining exemplars that push graphical styles and player interactions. Different views are presented on where art exists in video games and how interactivity challenges traditional notions of a work of art.

1. An Introduction

2. France's Chauvet Cave

3. Where is art? What constitutes art?
How and where do we experience art?

6. • Elitism – class and education bias
• Taste and judgment (aesthetic discrimination)
• He admits that he tends to think of art “as usually the
creation of one artist”
• Definition of art indebted to Plato (art imitates nature)
• Not a player of games
Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never be Art”
Ebert’s Assumptions and Biases

7. ART &THE AVANT-GARDE
• Bogost:Art is not a stable category; changes with
cultural and historical context
• Bogost: History of art is one of disruption and
reinvention
• Bogost:Avant-garde disrupted traditional notions
of art’s role and context

12. • Videogame Art - the art of a game (i.e., art within
videogames; art made by graphic artists). Games as
beautiful representational artifacts.
• Artgame (“games as art”) – games construed natively
as art within industry. Game with artistic intentions.
• Game art – artwork prepared for exhibition in
galleries or museums
Videogame Art
Artgames
Game Art

14. Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds

16. ➤ Use “the innate properties of games” to
create expressive play experiences
➤ Artgames require an understanding of the
systematic nature of game
➤ Games as systems set in motion and
experienced through play
➤ In artgames, the game system is more
likely to model “ideas and concepts”
➤ In artgames, a particular “rhetorical idea
space” is open for exploration
➤ “Artgames are usually highly stylized
systems, using abstraction, allegory, and
metaphor to create an idea space that the
player can explore by engaging with the
system through its game mechanics.”
ARTGAMES

17. • For Bogost, games like Braid, Passage, and The Marriage
are best described as “artgames”
• They share several common properties:
• Procedural rhetoric
• Introspection
• Abstraction
• Subjective Representation
• Strong Authorship
Bogost on Artgames

18. ABSTRACTION IN GAMES
• Artgames often abstract real experiences or
situations
• Artgames combine identifiable situations or
experiences with abstract tokens, objects, goals,
actions, etc.
• Artgames often rely on metaphor; turning
parts of game or gameplay into metaphors of
some sort of situation or experience

20. • Offers a more philosophical approach to games and art that is concerned with…
• the ontology of video game art
• where and how to locate the “work of art” in video games
• how video games constitute an art form
• how games are distinguished as works of art
• Important features when considering video games as an art form:
• Interactivity - role of player choice on the ontology of video games as an art form
• Games are multiple instance works (type/token distinction)
• An video game token is an individual playing
• But what is a video game type? Where is the art object of a video game that
only exists through various playings?
Grant Tavinor, Art and Aesthetics

21. • The art in a game: game artists; look and feel of a game; a game’s visual and
sonic sense
• Games as a genre of cultural expression: games now see as part of the
creative arts
• Game Art: studio artists who use language of games and invoke elements
of game to make conceptual art
• Art Games: games with artistic intentions; games that express ideas within
the form (Papers, Please)
• Exemplars of the form: games that are exemplary and excel in new
graphical style, novel interactions, or in-depth player choice (e.g., Myst,
Journey, Last of Us, Elder Scrolls, Legend of Zelda, etc.)
Mary Flanagan, Game Art
Five Ways of Looking at Games & Art

22. COMMON FEATURES OF ART GAMES
• Art games
• have artistic intentions; meaning is often ambiguous
• express ideas within the form of a game; explore a question,
theme, or issue through game & gameplay
• often abstract real experiences or situations
• combine identifiable situations or experiences with abstract
tokens, objects, goals, actions, etc.
• often rely on metaphor; turn parts of game or gameplay into
metaphors of some sort of situation or experience

24. a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of
something else, especially something abstract.
Metaphor