BF2S Forums [Minecraft]

i think you're getting at the wrong point, entirely. please look up the meaning of symbolism. my problem with minecraft isn't the voxel unit-- as your tile-mosaic comment would imply. my problem with minecraft is that it is an idle amusement, not a serious artistic endeavour. you can make impressive things, yes, but they mean nothing beyond themselves. it's amusing but art is more than amusement. i'm relying upon classical definitions of 'art' here, not the vague term applied loosely to mean "something pretty and creative".

The argument of what is art or not is NEVER going to end.  That's kinda the point isn't it?

But just to lay this one to rest...minecraft does not equal art...no exceptions tbh. 




There...settled.











right?

Brilliant, you respond once again by talking down about someone's intelligence, and then wonder why people think you're a snob. I think you're missing my point. Minecraft is both a game and a medium. It is no more art than a blank canvas. Give it some bloody time. But tucker's right, whatever started all this should be put to rest, at least in this thread.

Poseidon wrote:

so what's this game we're all talking about

tazz. wrote:

tazz. wrote:

Notch wrote:

Some pics of the sky dimension thing I was working on last night: http://imgur.com/a/cvsYW

http://i.imgur.com/bpHybh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/22HiD.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ck5sYh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/fBZ4nh.png
http://i.imgur.com/0bbKbh.png

Discuss god dammit.

I wonder what happens if you fall off...

You're fucked up?

art/ärt/Noun
1. The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
2. Works produced by such skill and imagination.

i'm still of the opinion that no video-game is art, so a sandbox game isn't going to be the first to break through into the category...

Its the same as with movies.
Its still too young. We need to give it time and then maybe it wil be art, or maybe it wont. Who knows...

movies have been considered art since the 1950's, at least... don't judge the current state of hollywood cinema as the absolute expression of contemporary cinema. film has been used as art (and discussed as such academically and critically) since at least the new wave. there's a lot of literature and philosophy on the subject. video-games... not so much. a few books about hyper-reality and virtual reality, but no games have really harnessed that yet. i suspect much the same reasons as you forward: it's still an industry driven by profits and intent only on matching business needs, not artistic goals.

Last edited by Uzique (2011-05-20 03:18:25)

@zique:
True, videogames have no further meaning behind them.
Its a clear case of: What you see is what you get.
So you cant really write books about it yet that discuss the meaning of certain videogame elements. But only time will tell.

even the most compelling and richly detailed single-player narrative experiences, such as Half Life or even something like Deus Ex... rarely leaves anything to the imagination, afterwards. game worlds that are immersive such as MMO universes - Warcraft's Azeroth, for for example - still don't really succeed in creating a 'mythos' behind them that is all that captivating; it's functional (i.e. creates a lot of space and variation) rather than artistic (i.e. weaves a genuinely convincing lore). that's why you get loads of lazy stuff in game design like retcon story-telling and identikit plots.

sandboxes... well, i'm still skeptical. though they create a blank canvas for the user-generated content, it mostly always lacks any form of imagination, originality or (true) creativity. it's all imitation and literal representation of already-existing objects. rarely do you see a youtube video or a screenshot of something in minecraft that you think "oh, wow, that's different". it's just people taking up a new medium - the 'voxel', if you like - to recreate things already existing with no other meaning or idea behiind them. that's not art... if anything, it's approaching what philosophers would categorise as a 'craft', i.e. the mechanical reproduction of already existing things, for a lower-entertainment value than 'fine art' (which is, as i've said, transcendent and symbolic).

this is mostly always down to the video-game industry and market. so long as production is based on the rules and mechanisms of the market, an artistic video-game project will seldom be launched. it's a luxury and an indulgence that game design companies, in their current business format, rarely have. that sort of thing only tends to come when you have a lot of spare-cash and oodles of spare time lying around; it's the very same with the renaissance art revolution, coinciding with the rise of the mercantile class with much disposable wealth and time for rather un-utilitarian expressions of art. the video-games industry is currently underpinned by the profit-factor, which is, of course, strictly utilitarian.

Not that I care much for the debate either way but:

http://www.businessinsider.com/video-ga … ent-2011-5

i can't possibly think of a more foolish way to classify art than to hand it over to some arbitrary form of legal or political argument.

again, the motivations for such a thing are all financial... nothing to do with aesthetics or the philosophical categorisation of 'art'.