In my opinion individual games don't elevate themselves to being Art and really the idea of capital A art is an inherently elitist one. Games, graphic novels, comic books, etc are all art the same way paintings and music are art. The only question is if it's good art or bad art. Some art elevates itself to being something truly special, but games don't need to justify themselves as to whether they're art or not, in my opinion.
Capital A Art is the attempted creative expression of an idea, principle, emotion, value or something else transcendental to human experience.
Low art is first and foremost a product. Both can be commercialized, and both can be either good or bad, but the latter is primarily a good to be sold.
Not the same at all.
I don’t know if I’d place any games as Art. Definitely not Elden Ring. Maybe Shadow of the Colossus, but I’m not even confident in that.
You know I was going to say that the Nebula award was an acknowledgement of Elden Ring being considered Art but then I saw a lot of the past winners were just some BS novels that were written by pseudo-game companies just to qualify for the award. I think only God of War, Stray and Elden Ring were actual games. So that is a credibility issue there.
However, for the game Planescape: Torment the NYT wrote an article about how it considered the game literature - so that could be considered elevation.
I still think that Elden Ring is the best game I have played in my entire life, but that is just my opinion and not everyone feels that way. It is at least objectively - culturally important as a game though.
As much as I absolutely love Planescape, I’m still not sure if I’d call it Art. Probably depends on my mood during any given day.
If I take something like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, van Gogh’s Starry Night, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or, to cite something more recent, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, I have difficulty reconciling these as fulfilling the same criteria and objectives as any of my favorite games, with again, the possible exception of SotC.
And there is nothing wrong with “low-art” or pop art or any of that. As silly as it is, Cloud Strife means just as much to me as a fictional character can. Even so, I do differentiate between him and Meursault (the main character from Albert Camus’s L'Étranger).
And now that I’m done alienating myself with stuffy pretense, I’m gonna go run around as Link and see if I can launch a Korok into space. Cheers.
