Good shop…

I think the difference is a matter of perceptions. A major part of how humans perceive the world is dependent on what we considered important and what is everything else. Art is recognized as important, as having meaning, and entertainment is stuck with “everything else.” But then we start looking at sitcoms and cartoons and recognizing meaning, appreciating genius and eventually artistry. Then we see art and realize how often it mimics “entertainment” to take or hold our attention, and the more we look, the harder it is to tell which is which.

I think the separate words are fine as shorthand, to express whether or not you take something seriously, but dangerous because they are so inexact and ill-defined. In the context of any educated discussion, it must be recognized that there is no separation between art and entertainment.

Meanwhile, tho’ we tend to make vague distinctions between “necessities” and “luxuries”, (all relative to state of the art/standard of living), the stuff of entertainment is perfectly “useful”, exists in finite, expendable quantities, and therefore has a definite economic value. Even obsessive fans, by delving into minutia and trivia, tacitly acknowledge an object’s entertainment value is exhausted through repetitive consumption.

This isn’t entirely new, but the entertainment industry has discovered that heretofore persistent works of art can also be “used up” by recycling and “reimagining” with superior technology, (a conspicuous trend in the movie industry). It may be argued that the newer work enters into a dialog with the older work, but it isn’t common for the newer work to be in any position to converse with the older work on its own terms. Instead, the newer work is often said to “pay homage”, either by idolizing or caricaturing the original. “Special” and “enhanced” editions may have an even more subtle and insidious effect, by replacing previous versions outright as a superior product and better value.

Everyone know most any object possesses at least some entertainment value. In art, one of the big questions is whether an object may be primarily valued for intrinsic, aesthetic qualities, or for its applicability to some end, (such as propaganda or entertainment). The question of video games as art is complicated by the rate at which the industry recycles mechanics and imagery, but there is at least some evidence for the persistence of game code as objets d’art, (if not entirely divorced from entertainment/sentimental value). Furthermore, the player’s participation in completing a storyline is probably immaterial, (and the gamer takes a much less active role in most games than the reader does in a good book). The basest, most unreflective artwork is full of “meaning” as such, and no one can seriously argue that a lot of thought and artistry hasn’t gone into the production of video games.

What remains is the question of the criteria by which video games should be evaluated as art. Aesthetic judgment in its totality is beyond the scope of this blog comment, but I just want to respond to the concept of art in the Curtis Johnson essay, and use of Le Guin’s comments about our “Puritan culture”. The New Critics of the 1930’s proposed a doctrine called “The Affective Fallacy”, which discounts the magnitude of affect or sensation, (cf. catharsis), as a valid measure of the significance of (specifically, literary) art. Kant expressed this also in his attempt to define aesthetic judgment as based on pleasure without interest or desire, and without extrinsic concept or purpose, universal and inevitable. This is perhaps where art and entertainment part ways most clearly, and not a point in which any video games I know have really excelled….

FWIW!

Nothing Gates says should be taken as anything other than promotional text for Microsoft.

They also released an explicitly Christian edition of the Ungame some time back. Some heavily-Christian family friends had a copy, unsure I ever saw ‘em play it though.