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[Nodaisho]

If you consider video games to have any artistic merit at all, then it's easy to make the mistake to assume that the judges will arbitrarily slam down on all kinds of art - but that's rather the point: they don't.

Defend this. I dare you. Video games can have amazing visual design, visual design is art. They can have beautiful musical scoring, music is art. They can have great plots (almost all don't, but there is nothing inherent in their design that presents it), stories are art. Explain to me how something containing three kinds of art loses the status of art when you get the chance to control it. Roger Ebert is Frank Sinatra insisting that Rock and Roll isn't art because it has the spirit of meanness in it.

[Ozymandias]

I also misinterpreted that pronoun at first. The subject "they" is referring to is not "video games" but "the judges" or even just a nebulous "them" referring to supports of this law. Jens is not saying video games are not art, he is saying the judges do not consider them to have that merit.

Highly ambiguous and he should be shamed anyhow.

[Jimor]

I don't think he is defending it as logical, he's just saying that for practical purposes, judges very rarely understand artistic merit outside of the standard boxes society has defined, and so it takes extra convincing to even get them to consider that aspect of the case.

Comic books are an example of a medium with a much longer history, both socially and legally, and yet their status as a clearly protected form of artistic expression has not yet been fully established. (Note that this case was of a comic book seller selling an adult comic book to an ADULT.)

So yes, this is an important case, and the ruling is very likely to be wrong, which will muddy the waters on this issue for years to come.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

I'm just hoping that someone will give an awesome Edward-Norton-in-Larry-Flynt-esque monolog that will sway the hearts and minds of the somewhat misguided, misinformed, law-maker-types, winning the case for the side of all that is good and right as the audience roars with applause and hats fly into the air. Then, camera pans over to the judge and just when you think he's going to bang the gavel and say "order order!" you see a little sparkle in the corner of his eye. Fade to black. Credits.


or something

[Jace]

video games as art, that's pretty laughable. I mean, if a video game is art, then anything can be art, even shit like this

[jhocking]

I don't know if it's really necessary to turn this thread into a whole "are games art?" discussion. I mean, what exactly is the definition of "art" anyway?* You can't productively argue for or against something unless you have even defined the question. The way some "games are art" people throw the term around, "art" can be literally anything, at which point of course the term is useless because it is meaningless. Without knowing precisely why, most people grasp that art does in fact have certain boundaries, that, say, a contractor painting a wall red isn't making art while a muralist painting a wall red can be.

For the record my feeling on the issue is that some games are art but the majority are not. However, I don't really feel like this is a discussion this thread should turn into, because something doesn't have to be art before it's protected speech.


*This is a rhetorical question.