RSS Gamescom 2012 – Gaming and Culture
by Sep 9, 2012 News
The Gamescom Congress 2012 offered various discussions, speeches and workshops about different disciplines that deal with the immense topic of gaming. This year representatives of politics, science, pedagogics, business and young gamers themselfes actively discussed the perception of gaming in our culture.
Not in all, but in many cultures we find a somehow ambivalent relationship between the society and the medium of games. That may be because the gaming culture is new to the majority of the society. Something they haven’t grown up with and also something that they refuse to adapt to. It took time until 2008 to officially make videogames a cultural asset in germany. Nonetheless, the reputation of games is still not at the same level as books, movies, paintings or theater are. Even though lot of gaming titles feature multiple directors, composers, writers and designers, but when does a game become art? Aren’t many games already something notably valuable and to be incontrovertible considered art in the meaning of high-culture? Some say that it might still take some time until gaming will finally have made its way into society as an integrated aspect of culture. Until then we keep the discussions clean from cultural conservatism and distribute a view on gaming that develops aside from old patterns.
September 9th, 2012 at 21:17
The possibly flaw I detect on your thoughts is that you assume there’s art and culture that is “incontrovertible considered art in the meaning of high-culture”, a position I disagree. If games can traditionally be described as interactive fiction, and since interactive fiction when serialized is typically considered as “just fiction”, and since nowadays fiction or no-fiction are – for many (but not all!) purposes as literature, thus art, then you can say that philosophically games are art (and I agree). But then, you can’t expect it to be always recognized as such, when more traditional forms of art since aren’t.
For instance: for the purpose of copyright laws, each artistic work piece (like game drawings or story) have copyright and are classified as the same kind of work of art than a painting or a novel. And yet, the whole game – unlike a music album or a movie – doesn’t have the same “copyright status”: a game is a computer program which, in many countries like Portugal, has it’s own set of copyright rules.
Worse, you have differences that take into consideration the media in whole works: take for instance (Portuguese, again) tax laws, and try to explain why the VAT in an Audio CD is more than the VAT in the concert that plays that CD (not to go into the detail that the CD has also an higher VAT tax than a book, for instance).
To sum up: yes, Games are Art. But you have two possible ways to act upon that realization: either you go to the practical approach and use that knowledge to actually think of art when you think of games (which will let you design better games, for instance), of you go to the theoretical approach and try to get the “games are art” sentence widely accepted – which will probably get you lost in other, older fights before you know it.