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Thanks for reading, as always! I started the site with the intention of reviewing games that needed more attention. Five years later, I'm glad to do other stuff too, even if that means less interest in the site overall. Maybe I just want to explore the connection between video games and art without being a pretentious snob. Feelings and emotions don't make something artistic.
Feelings and emotions are boring, and boring isn't good art. Art is strange and prompts the individual to think in new ways.
But generally, I think, people are too closed-minded to really think about art and adding video games to the equation only further complicates the problem. Your typical "art game" looks like a painting no matter how you move the camera, and while that's fine, that's not all art can be. Games like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft prompt real problem solving and creativity in the mind of the user. That's infinitely more interesting than a pretty commercial and orchestral soundtrack.
Yet the same individual who will appreciate say, the beauty of a Skyrim field, will probably be quick to denounce a De Kooning painting as trash.
So my real argument here is that the cultural difficulty facing video games is not about video games at all, but about all art in general. Humans prefer easy art that is quick to process and that which does not upset our understanding of the world (including our definition of what art is and can be). Humans, in this aspect, are much like apes for whom any change is always met with frustration and anger.
It's been years since critics could accept "pretty"/"beautiful"/"moving"/"serious"/"emotional" games as art. Society still needs to confront the artistic illiteracy enshrined at its core, and shed its limited capabilities based upon highly conservative definitions of art. How to do this? It'll probably have something to do with the internet.
100 years later, people still don't understand or/and hate abstract art, because "it's make no sense, it's non-figurative, etc.".
ReplyDeletePeople.
Because they are not educated enough? Wrongly educated? They refuse new artistic ideas?
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