Session Information
| Title | Chasing Art: The History and Promise of a Word |
| Presenter(s) | Neils Clark is the founder and Director of Studio Quixotic, a lecturer at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, and the co-author of Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects (2009). Clark is both a critic and proponent of the games industry, writing and speaking on the nature and promise of the medium, the ethical responsibilities of developers, and the physiological and psychological effects of interactive media. |
| Time | Saturday, October 23, 10:15a-11:15a |
| Location | Ballroom |
| Format | Speaker |
| Description | Games may meet the aims of Art, even on the objective terms of older mediums (though critics are often quick to dismiss them). In each older medium there are a range of 'high aims' suggested by scholars and practitioners. For example poetry, from the standpoint of Aesthetics, sees four major areas served by Art: expression, social comment, beauty, and representation. Roger Ebert specifically damns games for their inability to include an auteur; he suggests that film directors at times execute a cohesive vision, making film a superior medium.
And yet, do the vast majority of gamers really want Art muddying their entertainment? Is Art high on the list for marketers or investors? Commercial games face unique constraints to providing social comment, editorial voice, and new forms of expression. They may also possess unique advantages. Developers, regardless of size, may be able to both please crowds and challenge audiences. They may even overcome traditional media institutions' history of insisting on certain messages, censoring others, all while sowing the seeds for self-censorship. And yet overcoming the barriers to generating Art requires more than just the will to chase it (though that's not a bad place to start). Those working to create Art with these new tools need to see existing institutional and cultural hurdles before they sprint headlong into them. More importantly, there may be room for altogether new (and for games more welcoming) objective qualifications for Art. Games gift representation with agency, allow for experience itself, and reward these digital experiences in such ways as to make them uniquely persuasive. Such frontiers grow clearer as we better understand what's possible with the technologies underlying contemporary games. It would be entirely easy to brush off the word as too contentious or loaded. It bursts at the seams with a history of fanatics, bogeys and arguments used to foment prejudices against its own legitimacy. In its history we also find a legacy of conversations and scholarship which can be of direct benefit to a generation of practitioners who, working in new and dynamic mediums, deserve the title of Artist. |