[QUOTE="mjarantilla"][QUOTE="Bread_or_Decide"][QUOTE="mjarantilla"] Too many people here are focused on the stylized visuals and the melodramatic stories of games. The answer is no, video games aren't art. There is a difference between being "artistic" and being "art." Being artistic is simply being creative. To be art, however, means something else entirely.
Ask yourself this: Can a medium be art if everything created within that medium required millions of dollars of corporate sponsorship, as well as corporate hijacking of creativity? No, of course not. When something is manufactured for the sake of commercial profit, it can't be art.
Bread_or_Decide
You can always work within the system to create art. Even your average indie film costs millions of dollars to make. You're telling me David Lynch isn't an artist because his movies cost 25-30 million to make? The best way to make art is to convince the fat cats to give you all the money you need so you can fully realize your creation with their money.
Now art can be created in the confines of pressure from the fat cats as well. All depends on who is at the helm of the ship. As long as one mind is fighting to create his vision it can always be considered art.
No, you've got it backwards.
You're looking at the highest levels of a craft -- bestsellers, the highly acclaimed, the famous and infamous -- and defining the art forms by them. You should instead be looking at the LOWEST levels. What does it take for an aspiring artist to get started in a craft? Because that is what ultimately makes a medium an art form: freedom of expression, i.e. the ability for anyone to express himself to others through that medium and be appreciated for his efforts. Ultimately, art is about nothing else but expression.
Since the days of 3D gaming began, there have been no video games in existence that did not require corporate sponsorship to create. Well, other than the tiniest, simplest of games which are so rudimentary that they are practically high school class projects.
Compare this to any other established art form. Writing a book or composing a poem don't require anything more than a pencil and paper. Creating a piece of music doesn't even require anything more than the ability to produce musical notes, whether by whistling or whatnot. Even filming a movie technically does not require anything more than a handycam, as in the case of the Blair Witch Project. It may not be the most artistic film in the world, but it exemplifies how a filmmaker's talent at engrossing his audience is the ONLY concrete limiting factor to his success as an artist.
Video game developers have none of that freedom. They depend entirely on commercial entities to create their works, and those commercial entities will always, ALWAYS retain final creative control over the finished work. Only a few, like Kojima and Miyamoto, entered the game early enough to become dictators rather than the dictated.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If video games (or rather, video game development) are an art form, then it's the most hostile, most unfriendly, and most exclusionary art form to ever exist.
Very few games are made without so many hurdles. Killer 7 being one of them. No one on earth could possibly think that game could make money. Its abstract craziness at its best. Alot of small games like Flow and Space Giraffe are made with little intervention from the suites. I'll agree that its very rare but it does exist even if only in a few examples.
A company could invest in an unorthodox idea in the hopes that word-of-mouth would spread and their investment could pay off in a future project. An example would be Ico. Ico, like Killer7, financially flopped. But word of mouth about Fumito Ueda spread, and SCEI was able to recoup their investment into Ico when Ueda made SotC, which became a multi-million seller. And there have been wildly successful games that were successful specifically because they WERE unorthodox, like Katamari. Capcom's investment into Killer7 was definitely commercial, even if it didn't pan out.
As for Space Giraffe and flOw, you're right about them. But small games have yet to reach the penetration of big games, whereas small movies have already demonstrated the potential to compete critically with big movies. David Jaffe talks about this phenomenon in one of his interviews, where he says that small games haven't yet experienced a "Blair Witch" moment, when people hold them in the same regard as the big boys.
Ironically, I would say that the OLD video games industry was closer to being art than the current one, because in the old industry, all you needed was a computer and some programming knowledge, and many of the games from the early eras of video gaming were extremely complex from a gameplay and even from a narrative perspective compared to today's games. You certainly didn't need a team of a hundred nor did you need corporate investment just to make a game. The only problem was distribution.
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