Shorter Games and Art

[tablesaw]

I wrote something about games and art, inspired by (lashing back at) Brian Moriarty's "An Apology for Roger Ebert," presented at last month's Game Developers' Conference. And then it got eaten. So instead of an argument, you get the bullet-point takeaway:

• Scopenhauer's artistic aesthetics were dumb, and Moriarty and Ebert are dumb for adopting them.
• The player of a game is not the audience of a game, just as an actor is not the audience of a playscript, and a musician is not the audience of a score.
• The player of a game is an artistic collaborator, who works with the intermediate product provided by the game's "creators," to produce art which has no audience.
• Games lack an audience not in the traditionally understood manner (nobody is desires to or is able to observe the art), but in a profound and fundamental way, in that they cannot be understood except through entering collaboration. Any product produced by the
• The traditional definition of art requires an audience, and that is a flaw in the current conception of art.
• It is possible that the role of the player is not as a collaborator, but as a medium for the creators (albeit a medium that leads to oblivion, rather than an audience, as a destination).

There. Now you figure it out.

This journal has moved to Dreamwidth. Entry originally posted at http://tablesaw.dreamwidth.org/477921.html.


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