There's something about the position of claiming something is 'art' that has never sat easily with me. Perhaps it's the fact that the creative medium I feel most attached to (games) gets a fair amount of flak for being either dangerously violent drivel (Manhunt) at best, or self-consciously seeking that constant edge of 'new media' cool (Edge Magazine, The Escapist etc).
More specifically, I feel that attempting to portray games as art is just inviting our critics to laugh at us. Games are a medium. It is possible to create something considered to be 'art' in any medium, but that doesn't mean games are art. Television isn't art. Cinema isn't (usually) art. Newspapers are not art.
Moreover, I do not quite understand the need to be accepted as art. Who cares? For me, craft is important. Design is important, engineering is important. I'll look at a well engineered game and admire it in the same way I admire some feat of civil engineering - because I have some insight into the processes and work and effort that are required, I understand and appreciate the level of human ingenuity and thought that goes into making something that seems culturally vacuous to someone like my mother.
And games can exhibit great design, something that I appreciate when I look at an Ipod or a Dyson hoover or a Ferrari. There are other elements too - some games are well written, have exceptional storylines or feature incredibly artistic visual styles or worlds. I'm not desperate for everyone to recognise them as art, though.
I've been prompted into this, somewhat tangentially, by reading the latest and concluding novel in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, Confessor. I'll lay my cards on the table - I'm with a vocal minority on this one, in that I loved the series at the start, but increasingly grew tired of the incessant amateur philosophising of previously action-driven characters. It just gets worse and worse as the series goes on. And I think these two strands of thought (games as art / fantasy writing) are linked - I read fantasy novels not because the genre contains the cream of the world's writers - it doesn't. I read fantasy because I generally enjoy the settings, narrative and the action. There are exceptions - I can recognise Tolkien as art even if I never particularly warmed to LOTR.
Goodkind, I think, falls prey to the trap that some game commentators or developers do, namely that they feel they have to go out and prove the worth of the medium. They don't. Forget about proving your worth and remember there is as much to admire in a finely crafted and well honed story that brings enjoyment and escapism to millions as there is in writing something that gains recognition outside of your current fanbase.
In the end, I think Goodkind just doesn't want to be a fantasy writer, as his later novels just get further and further away from my definition of fantasy.
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