Hello everyone!
Global Game Jam in Vancover (pic from http://www.facebook.com/GlobalGameJam)
So this weekend was the 5th annual Global Game Jam, a worldwide event where you have 48 hours to create a game, either by yourself or with a team, using a theme given at the start of the jam. This year’s theme was giving in the presentation of an audio clip, the simple sound of a heart beat. As abstract as it was, people found creative ways to put the theme in their games.
My group and I decided to go 2D this year, using Gamemaker and photoshop to create everything, even though none of us had any skill in it. What we created was “Follow “Your” Heart”, a game where you go around collecting dismembered body parts, using a heart in a jar to guide you around the level.
List of games from the Madison Wisconsin Jam site: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/2013/madison-game-jam-2013/games
My Groups Game:http://globalgamejam.org/2013/follow-your-heart-6
The whole event was spectacular! Every year the theme keeps getting more abstract, leading to more possibilities and more creative games. I can’t wait for next year!
In other news, I have recently finished the book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design”, a book about what a game is and how can we make it more entertaining. It goes in depth about how the mind clumps information together and why, by playing a game, you are sucking the literal “fun” out of it, making games boring and creating a low replay value. It also goes into depth of how games are not story, and about how learning patterns are hardwired into our survival.
Theory of Fun: http://www.theoryoffun.com/
Lot of learning this weekend, and more to come; also I plan to try and blog once a week (primarily Monday) so be on the lookout for them, but before I go I would like to ask you a question. What are Video games? Are they art? Could they be art? Can they be made to teach kids? Post your comments below, I would like to hear from all of you.
Have a good week!
Video games can be art or business. Art being honesty and business being lies. The closer you are to transparency and honesty in a video game, then the more creativity and art you can express in it. The business part of video games sucks the art out of the project. That is one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is if you meant art as in some sort of expressive form that allows people to take their view of your media and apply their own observations and interpretations to it. If so, yes. Video games can be art. They are interactive art pieces which allow the viewer to actually create their own experiences within the confines of the world that the developer has created.
They also are not art. Reason being that most games have rules, objectives and winning/losing conditions. If you remove the rules, objectives and conditions, then your game starts to form into a story, novel, dance, or what have you and it no longer takes on the form of a game.
Another argument centers around the inclusion of art and sound into the production of games. Those things in and of themselves can be forms of art, but overall when pieced together into a game confined by rule-sets, it loses it’s artistic role.
A very argumentative game that could be considered art would be Journey. It is meant to be experienced and observed. It blurs the line between interactive media and art.
There is no definitive answer. I am biased towards assuming that only a few games such as Journey can be considered comparable to other art forms. Games like Call of Duty simply don’t make the cut as an art piece. They are lacking the means to engross the viewer into a world or to allow interpretation and observations to make assumptions at what the creator of the game intended for the user to experience. There are too many rules to constitute it as a piece of art.
But the real question is: Is art subjective to the viewer? And does it have a well-defined definition?
That is a big question. Some are defined as art, such as Michelangelo’s David or the Mona Lisa (personally I don’t like the Mona Lisa, but it is still art). Games have potential to be art, and are getting closer, but have not reached that level. I don’t think they will reach the level of art any time soon, due to recent events and controversy’s.