Essay on the Never-ending Debate

I decided to upload the essay I wrote for our first master course in hypermedia (or interactive media). It’s basically another (more thought-out) attempt in trying to situate myself in the “games as art” -discussion. Loads of the articles and books I’ve read on games and art didn’t make it to this paper, and loads more are still waiting for my eager eyes. Nevertheless, this course and essay were a nice, soft landing to the field.

The essay is a short and easy read. Please leave a comment/send email if the essay provokes any thoughts, you have some good ideas to share, or you think a certain researcher, book or article is a must for me.

(As a sidenote: I’m actually planning on gathering up a list of publications I should read, and publishing it here.)

Games as Art (manSEDANse09 -style)

First of all, let me point out that old jazz is so good I’m at a loss of words. Yes, I do realize this doesn’t seem to have any connection to games as art whatsoever. But it does, oh yes it does.

I’ll get back to that claim later. Now, back to the actual business. I had a fair share of “games meet arts” -debating today, starting with a some theorizing with Annakaisa Kultima at the soon-to-be-renamed Hypermedialab at University of Tampere, and continuing with a panel discussion at an event called manSEDANse09. As if that wouldn’t have been enough, the discussion continued after the actual panel was over, with Jaakko Stenroos (one of the panelists) and a fellow master student. After Jaakko left, we still continued the debating for an hour or two (or three) in a coffee house nearby.

The value of the “Games as Art” -panel discussion wasn’t so much in it offering me new information, nor in the panelists surprising me with their stance in the Holy War of Art and Non-Art. The value was in me obtaining good questions that didn’t get answered satisfyingly enough. For example, the classical question “are games art?” was flipped upside down by Jaakko Stenroos, resulting in “can art take the form of a game?”. Continuing from this question, and assuming the answer is yes, the next question would be “are games good art?” and “is there any artistic value in games?”. The original question Jaakko came up with was shot down by Jussi Holopainen with a counter-question: why couldn’t we just take games as art the way they are, in stead of using them as a material for making art?

Some excellent points were also made, about the true nature of art, and about the topic of the panel:

Art reveals something unexpected of the human nature and the society, something that makes you stop and think about the big questions in life, like “why are we here?”,  ”where will we go?” and “what the fuck?” (Holopainen)

The artistic aspirations don’t match with the current trends in the gaming industry. — An art game has to be unique, but when you make something unique, it’s hard to make people understand what it’s all about. This gets us back to the Dinosaurs versus Small Hairy Animals -notion in my previous post.

The division between art and games isn’t as steep as it seems. (Stenroos)

We don’t have game criticism, it just doesn’t exist. What we do have is game reviews. (Stenroos)

The panel ended with the panelists happily disagreeing on what kind of art games are, and me wondering about the question one listener posed: would someone play a game for the art-experience? I know I would, but what about the rest of the world? The Average Joes for example, would they do it?

MindTrek Post-pondering

Thanks to our great faculty, we (hypermedia master students) were able to participate in MindTrek 2009 -conference. The conference was held in Hotel Rosendahl in Tampere during the past three days.

Since games are my intrest and academic is my way of looking at them, I decided to take part in the games track on wednesdays’ Academic MindTrek. Due to starting a new hobby, yoga, I missed the first part of it, so I might’ve missed something worthwhile. Unfortunately the part I did get to hear didn’t really have anything to offer to me. “Social aspects of gaming” and “”Games with an agenda” did originally sound like they might have some interesting views and theories presented, but turned out to be wasted potential from my perspective. Online-gaming, social networking and using games for serious purposes just don’t interest me, especially not from the point of view they seem to be perceived everywhere right now. MORPGs, online gaming and online socializing seem to be The Thing right now, and no matter where I go, researchers seem ridiculously thrilled about them. Ridiculously because I haven’t managed to grasp any other reason for the excitement except them being fresh, hip and new in the research world. Sigh. Trends and me just don’t go together.  Serious games, on the other hand, are definitely interesting, but there are some buts that I will discuss later on.

After such an uninspiring start, I started to get anxious about the rest of the conference. Will there be any lectures or people with interesting theories, or am I just going to stroll around the hallways, not knowing where to go and feeling very out of place? Well. The thursday lectures before lunch seemed to affirm my concerns, even if Chris Messinas’ lecture on OpenID titled “Identity is the Platform” was a very interesting one. Luckily, thursdays’ academic session started with an excellent keynote by Miguel Sicart, titled “Not to Choose – Designing Ethical Gameplay”. Damned was I thrilled! First of all, it was an excellent presentation, but it also happened to strike right at the core of my research interests. Unfortunately, that’s as far as my luck carried on thursday, because right after the presentation it turned out Sicart was heading back to Denmark in a blink of an eye.

In the end, friday turned out to be the most fruitful one, even though I arrived at the hotel very late, missing all the morning sessions. The first lecture I got to hear completely was Adam Greenfield on “Elements of a Networked Urbanism”, and boy it was definitely something. I have no idea why, but I never even thought about actually doing research on urbanism. One very thought provoking thought was the concept of ownership. According to Greenfield, owning things (ie. a car) is inefficient and unecological. What a brilliant realisation! As an (good) example he used was Spotify.

I also liked Greenfields’ realistic and anti-hype approach to technology and applications. He posed a very good question that reveals, on my opinion, his attitude quite nicely. I didn’t manage to write it down word to word, so I’ll just try to jot down the point: assuming that applications become so easy to use and comprehensive that no-one has to, say, actually find their way to meeting point X. In stead, they can just follow their navigator and find the place without using their own navigation skills. People begin to live in a kind of a fog, dulling their natural skills and senses. Well then, imagine a generation that has grown up with using such applications. What happens when (notice, not “if”) the network collapses?

On top of those, some quotes that I found interesting: 

“Nothing is more interesting than information about the place you are in or are going to be in a moment.”

“The city is for having the biggest possible number of different interfaces.”

“It’s not the advertising that’s the problem per se, the problem is the way it’s done.”

“If we’re not careful, we will end up being treated like objects”

The point of the lecture was that devices and applications should not be taken too far, because that would result in changing the urban life in a huge city completely, by destroying the element of surprise, chance and having to challenge yourself every now and then.

Well, it’s getting late and I’m feeling drained, so I’ll save the post-MindTrek fruitfulness for another time. Coming soon though, so remember to check my blog every now and then.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Defining a Research Question

Incredible but true, I’m still not feeling sleepy one bit, although it’s already 4:30am (GT +3 due to DST). This obviously a perfect time for some Intellectual Scientific Theorizing (from now on simply IST). On the other hand, I already had issues when trying to figure out the spelling for ‘theorizing’, so this might turn out to be either interesting, embarrassing, or both. Personally, I’m trying to keep up the flickering hope of something useful turning up, so here goes, for your entertainment if nothing else.

The heading is unusually long and heavy of me (I tend to do the long and heavy -part in the actual text), but I could not imagine affiliating anything lighter with this topic. Judging from what I’ve done and learned this far, defining the research question is the Ultimate Trial. Once one has overcome the Challenge of Challenges, coming up with a new, well-defined, shiny and bright Research Question, everything else falls into place by itself. Yes, yes, of course I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, once figuring out a good research question, the rest of the work gets a heck of a lot easier, starting from source-hunting and ending up all the way in the actual thesis writing.

Although the almost-mythical Research Question seems elusive as ever (not only judged on the hearsay of graduate students, but also on my personal experiences), certain general ideas, topics and words keep catching my eye and ear time and time again. First and foremost, game studies. Mostly from a humanistic or a sociological point of view, although I’m also trying to understand the technological side of it. Narrowing down, I used to end up with game cultures, but recently the words have changed places or even form, and I’m sitting there with topics like “Games as Culture”, “Games and Culture”, “Games as Art” and “Games as High Culture”. Why? Let me open it up for you a bit.

Art as a whole is a phenomenon that has always intrigued me. Especially visual arts, like painting, sculpting and architecture never seem to lose their grip on me, and once I realized digital games is the area I want to specialize in, this art-fixation of mine started to hunt me more than ever. After my realization, some other topics have of course come up, some of them forgotten immediately, some still lurking in the back of my mind. Take Japan, for example. Some heavy lurking going on with this topic, since it even made me travel all the way to the other side of the globe for a year. While spending most of my time studying the language, I did also manage to wade some room in my schedule for getting to know the thing I went to Japan for: games. Especially people who play games, or even better, make them. Getting to know a number of people who work in the business was the final factor convincing me on the essentialness of including their views in my thesis, maybe even making it the focus of the research.

This brought up another thing that had been circling in my mind: finding out what people think about games. Game developers’, indie or commercial, but also gamers’ opinions. Very soon after coming up with this, I realized I also want and need the views of Average Joe and those of people who don’t work in development, but could otherwise be considered experts in the fields of digital games, art, Japanese gaming culture, and all these combined. The last group of people is quite a mixed bag of course. So, I’ve got both the question and the people to pose the question to, why am I still saying it’s heavy business?

First of all, I’m doing a master thesis, not a doctoral one. There is no way on earth I could even dream of including all that in a hundred-or-so -pages and ending up with a good thesis. An easy problem, granted, and solved, for example, by simply narrowing down and focusing on one group of people. That’s what I did, and ended up with this: “Are games art?”. This is the oldest version, and very, very intimidating. Defining the research question like that, I’d be forced to define not only what digital games are, but also take part in the dreaded What Is True Art -conversation.

Most of my antipathy for this debate actually results from something quite different from fear: it seems to me a very pointless and endless fight, sometimes inducing eerie similarities with that of different religious groups, and at others sinking to the level that makes a fight over which are tastier, strawberries or blueberries, seem sound. Come on people, face it: there is no absolute definition for art! I know it’s hard for a human mind to accept some things can’t be defined the same way as the tectonic structure of our planet, but that’s just how it is, so live with it. Art is something that has a different meaning and manifestation to each and every individual on this planet, and that’s the closest we’ll ever get of having an absolute definition for art. Take it or leave it, get all emotional or don’t give a shit, it doesn’t change the fact one bit.

Not wanting to take part in this Holy War of Art and Non-Art, I tried my best to find a more eloquent research question, and maybe did. Unfortunately that has to wait for another time (maybe tomorrow?), since I’ve stayed up ridiculously long and should go to bed. Stay put for another episode of some hard ISTing and exemplary Holy War -avoidance, it might be coming up sooner than you expect!

As a side-note: Damn I wish this thing had a footnoting-system. Another side-note: No laughing at typos and aberrations, it’s frigging 6:43 am here.