Thursday 8 August 2013

.fuck up the world

I know it's boring but it is worth being boring about, games are an art form. What else could they be? They are expressions of human creative skill. Imagination applied to a practical effort. A display of technical skill combined with an appropriately emotive aesthetic. Once more, they seek to represent human experience, even the most abstract of games. They have done from the very start. What else could they be doing? Games have been art long before video games made them unarguably so; Fluxus artists testing the audience, performance artists creating personal challenges, John Zorn's Cobra, Marina Abramovic's Rhythm10, Surrealism's parlour games.  

Actually the real interesting thing is probably that the artists of today are misled and have no social function anymore. Why are there no games about child trafficking, incest fantasy games? Or conversely why are there no games about benevolent politics or the function of honesty? This is partly a rhetorical question but there is also an idea of "Is the world ready for such and such". Why is that? I guess analogously there are, Pickmin springs to mind. 

Just as George Bernard Shaw once claimed that if something is funny then search it for deeper meaning, if a game is enjoyable then I propose similarly that deeper meaning can be derived. 

But there is still a coyness about being explicitly an artistic endevour. This is due to a pandering to the masses and, of course, if you pander to the masses then you clearly have no social function. Thus the role of the artist seems to have become an interesting one, the artist is there to fuck things up. 
Why does something need to have a social function? Is it possible to have zero social function? 

2 comments:

  1. everything will eventually become stale and tiresome.all there is to live for is those experiences that are truly different - fucked.probably why i like sluggish morss so much.your music is great jack.reminds me of the circus devils:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQwNMHFlj5k
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XsHvkHCJSM&list=PL33D8EF8B506E3398

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  2. haha for more "great" arguments why games aren't art check this page, soon to become a series hopefully.
    http://mikmaes.nl/2013/08/critics-against-video-games-1-jonathan-jones/

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