Games: Art or science?

Posted by Kevin in Articles | 7 comments

Jul 18, 10

The debate has raged on for many years about whether or not games can be considered art. When you look at titles like fl0wer or Okami there is a certain amount of truth in the notion that as the technology powering games improves and gets more powerful, more artistic creativity will evolve. Even more traditional games like Geometry Wars have a certain sheen and beauty about them that, when captured, is beautifully artistic.

Okami is always looked at as a beautifully artistic game

When we look at titles like FIFA or Madden, though, it’s purely a piece of objective software, rather then a piece of art. Even if hundreds of man-hours are lovingly poured into the rendering of every thinly-layered hairline in Wayne Rooney’s head, you would still be pushed quite hard to argue that FIFA is an artistic piece of work. Take a snapshot of it, though, and maybe you’re onto something.

The argument changes, that perhaps only artistic software creation, like upcoming Disney title “Epic Mickey” can make a game artistic – and that everything else is just software. Even Crysis, which is by far one of the most beautiful looking games we’ll lay our eyes on is just a huge piece of software rather then an artistic piece. Killzone 3 will always be looked at as a big dirty shooter game, rather then a piece of art.

As a computer scientist by trade, I find a lot of poetic justice to be found in wonderfully written code. Sure, that’s all a bit metrosexual but I do think future generations will get a lot of pleasure from reading lines of well written code. The seeds of that are being laid down with sites like Stack Overflow and Github. So, something like Killzone which has a wonderfully rendered art style – with millions of polygons going into creating a very easy-on-the-eye world can become artistic, not only because of that, but also because it does this so smoothly and elegantly with well written code. Sure we can’t see it – but we’re gamers. We can feel it working in the background. You know something’s written well because it just works.

As we move into an era where programmers can more elegantly express themselves because hardware can catch up to our over-active imaginations and artists can actually stop holding back their talent to allow rendering engines to work we might see art spill out from games, rather then the other way around. Rather then books, paintings or films inspiring game developers, game developers can inspire authors, painters and film makers.

Let’s be honest, games can be wonderful things. It takes years to make one game. A lot of hard work goes into the development of a good game, but it can be forgotten so quickly. Only the best survive to make more iterations of their title. And most often, those are the prettiest in terms of software and artwork. Can we stop trying to compare games to paintings, and define our own version of “art” now?

Surely playing any random level of New Super Mario Bros on the Wii is as artistic and immersive an experience as seeing a Van Gogh in Amsterdam? Not only that, considering games as art opens the world of art up to millions more people then ‘art’ today is opening itself up to. By no means am I saying all games are art, but if we analyse games like Halo like we analyse a new piece of classical music then maybe the world of gaming will attract more and more talent, keeping both the software and artwork side of things in perfect harmonic orchestral sync.