Funny, its that sort of shit that makes me want to play the game.
Anyways Frocto made the point I was going to say to Det in a more colorful and silly way than I would of (saying everything expressing human ingenuity is art is, while somewhat accurate to a degree, a rather useless definition). I tend to say 'high art' around definition picky people. It sounds pretentious, but honestly high art tends to be anyways, even when it's good. Anyways Art Games. Best definition I can think of is simply "any game that places great stress on its artistic expression". Its easy to think of an art game as shit like Passage, but Braid and Limbo aren't much different, outside of actually being good. Ironically all these games are rather shallow art, while something like SoTC is a much more sophisticated example of artistic expression.
Now, I'm going to go down on this art tangent because I feel like, over time, I've come to really understand the issue. This sort of conflicts with what I said above, but who cares. We all know what people mean by 'art game', but heres something I think is a fuller description of 'games as art'. First of all, the whole 'are games art' or not argument is obviously silly, but I don't think people get what (significant) art in that context actually is. It is any media that is popular enough and expressive enough for people to really really get into it. If the public perception says something is art, it is art. Like, seriously thats it. Every major form of media, every genre of music and panting that people have claimed will be insignificant despite popular approval has become art. Like, seriously thats it.
So then the next thing is 'what makes something artistic in one genre is not necessarily what makes things artistic in another genre'. People ask 'what is the Citizen Kane of Video Games?" ... What is the Citizen Kane of music? Fuck if I know. Or art. Or anything. It is what ever is sophisticated and good -- and not necessarily sophisticated in the way you think. Braid dresses it's self up like art. It goes "I have soft classical music and painterly art! of course I'm art!", no Braid, you're not art. Well, maybe you are, but not for that reason. I'm going to quote something Patito said in person a few months back as one of the most secretly insightful things I've ever heard on the subject.
"La-Mulana is art... but Braid isn't"
La-Mulana is almost the Watchmen of Videogames. Not so much so because Videogames never fell into the ghetto the same way Comics did and also that La-Mulana doesn't stand as a pinnacle of gaming, but it is a solid game that is about games and the media. It represents a level of sophistication in presentation and gameplay. It is an artful homage, without being like I Wanna Be the Guy and just stealing shit. The whole retro movement is not so different from many art movements. So what else is art? Fucking Super Metroid. High art is the greatest works in a genre. People are looking at games to be art in the same way movies are -- story telling and narrative, and while it can do that, it can do it through general game design and goodness, much like how music seems to go. Art through excellence. So Braid might still be art by being really damned good, it's trappings of classical art are merely shallow. Stuff like SoTC mix game design in with the narrative to hopefully craft a compelling experience in ways a movie can't. That's cool as hell too, and I think we'll eventually see more things in that direction, but again, thats not the only way to be art. We have significant art in Eraserhead, Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction and none of them are good for nearly the same reasons.
