Innovative art forms
 

Wanted to get your opinions on this one. I was thinking the other day while I was playing a video game (Red Dead: Redemption) on how video games actually seem to be getting better and better as time goes on, for me at least. I think the increasingly large worlds and improved graphics are making for some of the best games to ever have come out and it's a far cry from the days of Nintendo. I, for one, consider it an improvement (although I know some people who beg to differ ;))

As for music, I think that for reasons I'm not quite sure of, has reached sort of a lapse in creativeness. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not some guy born 20 years after the Beatles broke up who clings to his copy of Sgt. Pepper, I do love tons of current music. However, I don't think many people will dispute me when I say the innovation in music has slowed down as of late.

So I just came up with this random question: currently, what form of art do you think is currently seeing the largest boom in creativity?

I say video games since they're still relatively new compared to the other options and they have a lot more to expand.

Great thread, though I don't think Video Games are an artform at all. For me there's nothing really arty about them, not very thought provoking, just damn entertaining. There's nothing better than running over a hoe on GTA.

Though, I thought music. But then the question was: what what form of art do you think is currently seeing the largest boom in creativity?

I'd have to say movies, I think movies have always been a brilliant art form and there are still visionary directors trying to do some good stuff today. Though some could argue the most creative days of film are over, it's just recycled ideas. But I think there's still a lot to come from film.

Video games are very innovative though if you look past games like GTA and sporting games and look more into maybe RPG's, MMO Strategy games and FPS.

even though i hate to say it, i do agree, Tuna, that creativity in music has slowed down a bit as of late. i'm sure in the near future things'll pick up, but right now it's a bit of a slump to me.

but yeah, i will say video games. i can understand if someone doesn't see it as an artform, but alot of the time people don't see past what was put into the game and how it came to be. really, there was a creative process behind every game, even if very small, and the creators had a certain vision that they wanted to achieve. whether it's through the story, the controls, or just the whole overall idea, there is creativity put into a game.

as for movies and books, movies come at a close 2nd for me. there's usually a film or two out there every once in a while that will make you go WOW and really take notice. and while i'm not very savvy with current literature, books don't seem to me as going very strong in the creative department.

For me art has to effect your mind and emotions, video games are mindless entertainment and in the case of GTA, they give me teh lulz.

music, because its the easiest thin to make, almost anyone can make a song for almost nothing out of the pocket. and people can do whatever they want with music.

i wouldn't consider books to be because they have strcit unofficial rules about grammer vocabulary and language musical lyrics don't have to make a lick of sense, and they don't need to follow any grammatical rules

not Movies, i would say is second to music, you can be very creative but the problems are that making a movie is harder there's limitations on what poeple are able to do

not video games they have to make enough sense that someone can understand the game, and plus video games are extremely hard to make only someone with absolutely no life could even make a cheap knock-off of pong

GO MUSIC!!!

You should try reading Cormac McCarthy. Not only is he a brilliant author, but he also does away with lots of the "unofficial grammar rules" :thumb:

Video games have the potential to be an artform and to think otherwise would be foolish.

Should it become an art form? Well if gamers become art snobs and start writing off the previous generations of games as useless kitsch then no. It's best that it remains a part of "low" culture.

Video games are NOT an art form, nor should they be.

I didn't say they were but they have the potential to be. I'm talking about the games as a whole and just their components like the graphics and music, of course THESE things can be art.

There is such a term as interactive art. Games have the potential to essentially be interactive movies and if movies can be art so can video games, if anything video games could have even more potential because there's a special relatiobship between the designer of the game and the person playing it.

How many people have seen a great painting or watched a great movie and wished they could be totally immersed into that world? Video games have the potential to be a form of art that immerses you and interacts with you in a way nothing else can. They can explore the same things and raise the same questions any piece of art can.

If more people started making artistic games I think that would be great, but I fear what would happen if the game community started being taken over by pretentious f*ckwads who forget that video games are first and foremost supposed to be fun and enjoyable. There's already this pretentious f*ckwad from IGN (Michael Thompson) who is trying to review video games in the same way you review works of art and it's just a stupid, obnoxious gimmick that I hope never becomes a new fad in video game journalism.

We were in agreement (I think.)

They currently are NOT a form of art, even though they COULD be... but they definitely shouldn't be.

As for the whole being immersed in that world, I disagree with. Unless I'm playing a sports game, then maybe. But that's more due to the fact I wanted to grow up to be a footballer. I don't want to play COD and wish I was in a warzone, I don't wanna play GTA and wish I was able to shoot hoes.

With me I don't really make much distinction between art and entertainment and "kitsch" things that simply have an aesthetic and/or emotional appeal. I think these distinctions are a waste of time and mostly a good excuse people use to brag about how much more sophisticated their interests are compared to us primitive lowlifes.

Well I'm going to be a massive bore here and harp on about the Baldur's Gate games because if they aren't art, then I don't know what is. They're quite obviously artistic in the visual sense with great attention to detail, and in the musical sense (screenshots + music below). But they're also artistic in a holistic sense... the storyline, humour and atmosphere overall are quite compelling.

A lot of video games are quite aesthetically pleasing to me, especially older ones when limited graphics meant that developers had to be more inspired in creating attention grabbing visuals. And a lot of video game music is fantastic.

I think in both departments a video game can be artistic without a doubt. I think what people think games lack in artistic credibility is the stories, even when games do have very detailed, well made stories they tend to be on par with an action film or a shonen anime. Something that can be considered groundbreaking art is very rare. But I think if you look hard enough you will find games that fall into that category.

Stories are not a vital component (though they can enhance the experience), at least not backstories or cinematic cutscenes. The real "story" of a game is the gameplay itself, the experiences from playing the game and the events that unfold while playing it. Video games truly are stories that unfold differently every time you play them. The beginning and the end is already written by people who worked on the game, but there are different endings to choose from, and what happens in between is up to you, the player. To an extent anyway, you still have to follow rules created by the designer, though you can break some of them through cheats, glitches and hacks, creating a shift in power so to speak.

When you think about it, every time you get a game over that is the end of the story technically, and thus more of these tales end in tragedy than in prosperity. Deep huh?

Just want to show that I can be as pretentious about video games as am about everything else. :D

It can only help that the Baldur's Gate storylines are entrenched in the Forgotten Realms D&D background which had been around for a decade or two beforehand. A serious attempt at doing justice to an existing wealth of fiction and lore probably yields better results than a ham-fisted attempt to inject some token fantasy elements and lore into an RPG a month before release.

Regarding your game over comment, you might be interested to read about an old CRPG called Planescape Torment which is more heavily story-driven than usual. The premise is that you're the immortal protagonist known as the "Nameless One" (with the catch that you suffer partial amnesia every time you die) and you're attempting to find and assemble the pieces of your past and reclaim your mortality. It's unconventional in that dying not only doesn't result in game over (it's quite hard to get game over actually) but it actually helps in some cases as it can spark various memories from your past. And it's fairly thought-provoking when you encounter past incarnations of yourself with completely different personas, as well as people and potential companions who have had dealings with them. Effectively, others hold you responsible for all actions of all your incarnations, even if you have no memory of them.

That sounds awesome. I do wish there were more innovative, groundbreaking games like that but that isn't what hardcore gamers want, but I hate hardcore gamers so what can ya do.

I loved the story element in Majora's Mask and wish more games did something similar. It's one thing to read a backstory about how someone plans to take over/destroy the world but you can goof around forever and nothing bad happens, and something entirely different to actually get a real sense of impending doom and having consequences for lack of time management, that's one of the great things about RTS games but I wish more games from other genres would employ this concept. Raise the stakes and consequences for not performing specific tasks and not doing things on time.

Just to name a few more:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LhGjhRJ01d...V+Oblivion.jpg

http://lifeofhealey.files.wordpress....t-3-poster.jpg

http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-cont...ntasy_xiii.jpg

http://www.freegamesystems.info/images/bioshock-ps3.jpg

I was thinking of a 'Favourite art form thread?'

But since this is a music forum, and music is the most popular art form. I think it would be a tired and pointless exercise. :(

so you came up with one author who goes against the grammer-rules compared to millions of musicians?

all i was saying is music can be the most free-spirited type of art well besides visual-art but it's usually easier for someone to make music then art (depends on quality comparison)

What the **** are you on about?

I was simply pointing out an author who did exactly what you're describing. That's it. Is english a second language for you by any chance? Or are you just feeble-minded?

Yeah another thing, programming video games is definitely more difficult than making music or writing. Not saying that makes it a superior media, but designers deserve a lot of respect for the effort they put into their work.

I think that applies to any creative mind who invests great knowledge, imagination, effort and detail into what they're designing even if it's a consumer product and not what people consider art. For example fancy cars, guitars, fashion items or other kinds of "applied art" or utility item that people use everyday. These things may all be mass produced and thus not art, but they all begin as creations just like everything else.

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wow you're a sensitive one aren't you... ;)

also i checked him out on amazon, the first three pages of his novel shuttree was all details nothing really happened it was just meaningless details which got boring after the 1st page. i understand what you meant i don't think he's my kind of author but thanks for suggesting him. :yeah:

also "feeble-minded" that's kind of a stuck-up thing to say, but whatever. :rolleyes:

oh and my favorite book that i've actually read cover to cover is "The Tiger Rising"

I honestly don't know how ANYONE could think video games aren't art

Because they aren't thought provoking, they don't touch you on any other level than the surface. A hell of a lot of them don't have any real substance to them, despite sometimes being visually a treat.

More tedious? Yes. More of an art form? No. Where's the individual personal expression in pushing out batches of code? How many variations of the same banal fantasy concept can you churn out before it gets old? And is programming a video game really that much more difficult when you're comparing a production team of 50-100 programmers to one person sitting at a word processor pushing out 300+ pages of original content that will keep a reader captivated without the need for graphics or a six pack of Mountain Dew?

The thing is though a lot of games with actual real storylines will have characters that you will easily fall in love with and draw you into it emotionally, much like movies. It obviously depends on which game you're playing. I don't think you'd expect Tekken to change your outlook on life.

wtf? couldn't that be said about any art form? somethings are deeper then others. saying they don't touch you on any other level than the surface is total bull, as lots of stories from video games have affected me in my day to day life.

aaaah, this could explain the ignorance

It's not ignorance at all, video games aren't that f*cking pretentious to touch your life in deeper ways. And that's what's good about them. It doesn't matter if you're stabbing hoes on GTA, or playing Final Fantasy, or Halo, or Call of Duty. They're just there for entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't know how they can touch your life in a way like great music or great literature or great cinema. Every video game I've played, the story line always feels underdeveloped, I can't relate to the character like I can with someone like Travis in Taxi Driver, or a person telling a story through song like Ian Curtis.

I know I'm the minority but if a video game can touch your life in deep ways then Jesus Christ. I'm not THAT into games as you can tell, so if anyone tries to go into great detail about how amazing games are it won't mean a lot.. But out of interest, what games have touched your life in a thought provoking manner?

Ok you have a point, it's more of a team effort than an individual one (so is music production) but I don't think that should take away from the creative effort that goes into designing a game and the technical effort that goes into programming it, and the amount of cooperation involved.

I'm definitely not trying to belittle video games as a form of art. It definitely is, but all things considered it is an art form that is making advances in the area of improved graphics and engine physics while still riding a lot of the same worn out themes and concepts. You're talking about a mixed media art form that relies heavily on a combination of so many artistic elements: visual & graphic art, writing, cinematography, music production, et al. To be able to bring all of those elements together synergistically is an incredible challenge that many who are deeply exposed to the medium even take for granted.

I'd have to disagree! But I only speak for the genres I listen to.

I don't think video games are an art form either. It's possible that a few pieces of interactive art follow the rules of video games, but a chair can be an art piece without chairs having to be an art form.

I've been into video games for years and have seen both the mainstream and the small indie stuff and I don't consider either of it art. But even if we see it as an art form I would never say it's the currently most innovative one as I haven't really seen anything innovative in gaming at all for the last couple of years. It's all same-old, same-old, possibly spiced up with a new twist or mechanic but the same ancient concepts are reworked over and over again.

Yet I'm still a follower of many gaming blogs etc. without really having any hope of finding anything worthwhile. Why? Simply because I feel that procedurality (of which interactivity is a part) has an incredible potential but it's never used, most likely since the vast majority of gamers don't really seem to give a **** about art.

Or to quote Roger Ebert:

I saw the name of the thread and immediately thought of Butoh. I'll just post this and then leave

NSFW!



Also:

http://i.imgur.com/A6XnTc3.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wUs4ygE.jpg?1

I don't believe that cheek gauge.

The pic has made so many rounds but I bet it's 'shopped.

I don't think you could really do that... not for long anyways...

I mean, wouldn't you be prone to some kind of infection?


Even if it was real it's way too much for me.

Tell me that guy is a judge, lawyer, doctor or something.
Anything where he isn't serving me food...

Idk, I think it's legit.

This guys are way bigger and I know that this is real.

http://www.piercingtime.com/images/3...k-piercing.jpg

^ why, just.. why?

i don't see the art in this i just see a guy i would avoid on the subway.

Are 'Awfulogrammes' better than selfies? | Metro UK

Camera shots from inside the mouth:
http://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/....jpg?w=1000&h=