With this being my 101st post, I figured it was time for a longie...
There's been some talk on the forum about board games as "art." I never replied to them because I really wasn't sure how to reply... but I think I've gathered enough for a rebuttal.
A couple of definitions are in order...
I'm going to talk about the difference between craft and art in this post. Big disclaimer: even though I will take pains to distinguish the two, I don't want to sound like I'm making the case for a qualitative difference between the two. I don't feel that "craft" is inferior to "art." But there is a difference in ambition, scope, and ultimately, the experience of those on the receiving end.
Also, while I am defining two discrete concepts, we should acknowledge some gray area between the two. There are some areas (architecture, fashion, etc.) that one can validly argue is or isn't art.
Also, while all art is craft, not all craft is art. Again, I mean nothing pejorative about this. Both take dedication and skill to master.
First... a craft is any creative skill that takes significant time, effort, and/or talent to become proficient at. My wife sews teddy bears, which is a craft. I used to edit sound for film, which is also a craft. The creation of musical instruments is a craft. Surgery, bricklaying, cooking... all crafts.
By "art," I don't mean any sort of graphic design. I'm talking Capital-A Art... or "Ahhhhht," if you are wont to pronounce it that way.
My quick and dirty definition of art, in two words: creative perception. To me, the highest levels of art are distinguished by an individual's ability to communicate a unique experience through his/her work to an audience that is not at his/her level of talent.
That last bit is important to me: you should not have to be able to play the trumpet to grasp Miles Davis' music. You should not have to be a painter to grasp Van Gogh's paintings. You should not have to be a writer to grasp Ernest Hemingway's novels. If you are a musician/painter/writer in the appropriate examples above, hey, it helps. But to me, one of the requisites of "art" is that an expression (and for the best artists in any genre, that expression is a complex, specific emotion that the audience can relate to) is understood by a layman. A person can be moved by watching Apocalypse Now without ever knowing about Panavision, Lee Strasberg, or EDLs.
I don't pretend to have fully defined concepts above, but I think they'll suffice to support my argument...
I don't believe that board game design is an art. I don't think it's possible to relay a complex, specific human experience through a ruleset. Perhaps a game's theme can have literary aspirations; I've seen rulebooks that are made up mostly of backstory and only a fraction of which are the actual rules of the game. But I have yet to see a good, enjoyable game that can consistently, in playing after playing after playing, convey any sort of creative perception.
When I finish reading a book or get to the end of a movie, I feel that some sort of transportation has happened. If it's a good book or movie, I'll feel that I've somehow changed directly through the experiences I've read/seen, even though I wasn't actually there.
I do not feel this way after playing a game. When a game is over, I've either won or lost.
Oh sure, different games have a different feel. Some games have climaxes that get my heart racing (for me, this would be one of the good "heavyweight" German games, Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence). Others make me laugh out loud (Apples to Apples). Some are nice, light, gentle affairs that have enough strategy to make the tactics interesting, and enough tension to keep me interested, but certainly aren't brainburners (Carcassonne).
But none of them put me through a specific experience that transforms me at the end. None of them convey a specific, consistent emotion or mood. At the end, the experience is the same: it was a game.
Again, this isn't a put-down, or any sort of admission that three hours spent gaming is "worse" than three hours spent watching a Kurosawa film. But I don't think we should dive into our games claiming that our pawns represent man's innate humanity and the auction mechanic we've implemented is an allegorical representation of our relationship with the cosmos. We should dive into our games with the intent to make a fun game. Everything else - theme, mechanics, graphics, length, et al - is secondary. A game component's only worth is in how it adds to the game's fun.
Certainly, an artistic work, like a novel or a film, has to have an equivalent element. We'll call it the "pull factor." Both need an interesting plot, and/or interesting characters to keep their audiences' attention. A piece of music has similar demands, only they're often more clearly, mathematically defined, in the rules of rhythm and the diatonic scale to which we expect music to resolve through (of course, many jazz musicians are skilled at breaking the rules of rhythm and melody, and getting away with it, which is what many people find so interesting about jazz; and visionary composers like Schoenberg and Partch disposed of the diatonic scale, but only because they developed their own tonal systems to replace it).
But with artistic works, there's often a second layer of meaning expected beneath that first layer of pull factor. Without it, we have a piece of bubblegum pop, or a Sandra Bullock movie. For that highest level of art that I'm aiming for here, I insist that a piece of art must have a deeper level through which its emotional effects are felt.
I don't think a board game is capable of holding this second level, and consistently delivering it at the same effect with every play. Perhaps one could come with (as a rather tacky, tasteless example) "Schindler's List - The Board Game." But I gravely doubt that you could create a ruleset that could consistently deliver the emotional payload that its subject matter deserves, while still having a game that's fun and replayable.
What I think keeps board games from being art is the fact that the experience is wholly dependent on the re-creation and enforcement of the game rules. All a board game is, is a controlled social structure with a quantifiable "winner." It's this structure that the game "is." We interface the structure through the game's theme, graphic presentation, and bits. But ultimately, the game is not in the bits themselves, but in their relationship to one another. When Black Pawn takes White Queen, there's no wailing and gnashing of teeth about how young and great a Queen she was, the future of White's kingdom, where the lonely White king will find another wife, and how horrible war is... at least, none that pertains to the game, nothing that is significant to the game's ruleset, and that is a necessary consequence of the action. The significance of the move is in how close Black now is to checkmate, and what White must do to overcome his/her significant disadvantage.
Think about it. Directors and film studios hold focus groups for their films. They bring people in, run the film by them, and ask them what they thought. Sometimes they make changes, depending on the feedback. In effect, they are playtesting the movie!
But sometimes the focus group loves the movie, and it tanks at the box office. Sometimes the focus group despises the movie, and it winds up getting taught at NYU grad school 20 years later. There are so many axes and spectrums of taste and quality for something as artistic as a film, that focus groups can never completely anticipate a movie's actual reception. The best directors understand that a catastrophic focus group session can be fixed with a relatively small change in editing or scoring.
Us designers, we need our focus groups, even more than the film studios. For us, the ruleset is everything. We hand our players the rules, and ask them to be the projector and the screen. A flaw with the ruleset is a flaw with the game's fun, and hence a flaw in the game. There is no room for subjective expression, no "art is a bitter pill that must be swallowed," no growth through pain. The game is fun, or it is not played.
Perhaps it all ultimately comes down to conflict. In any dramatic art, there must be conflict. Young playwrights are taught that if a character shows a gun in Act One, it must be fired in Act Three. Conflict creates tension that drives drama.
(I won't get into comedy here, because it's arguably more complex. But comedy is also based in conflict, perhaps moreso than drama.)
Games have conflict, but the conflict is very clearly deliniated, because it must be exactly reproduced with as wide a range of players as possible. This conflict can't be too light, because the game will be too easy or feel too random; and it can't be too harsh, because feelings will be hurt and no one will want to play. It's our challenge as designers to find this balance; but it's our consequence that the balance removes any potential our ruleset has of carrying artistic weight.
Whew. Now, onto the denouement...
My artistic biases are all over this post. As you might be able to tell, I like loud, angry music; weighty books with moral oxymorons and contradictory behavior; and so on. One can say that games may qualify as art simply because they exist, as objet d'art. Perhaps that argument can be made, but I've never had the patience for still life or conceptual art.
The whole beauty of art is that it's subjective. Two people will never see the same thing. Maybe I'm in the minority here, and maybe most people have no problem seeing games as art. If that's how it is, so be it.
To me, designing a board game is a craft. It takes time, patience and skill. Some of us may never be good at it, no matter how hard we try. There is no shame in being good at a craft.
But I just don't think what we do is art.
First of all, thank you Gil, you've made me think about a a lot of important things; I think my mind has been wrapped up in this for an hour at least.
However, my first reaction was that I must reject it. Almost as if I must either disprove it, find an interpretation that works with my personal belief system, or find a different hobby.
That said, on re-reading things I found that I agreed with almost everything you said - except the conclusion. I also noticed that Dralius had already put forth the core of my feelings on art - although I would amend the defintion to "somthing with produces PROFOUND feeling" to answer the punch-in-the-face arguments. Anger may be an emotion, but I for one would not consider such 'heat of the moment' emotion to be profound.
Definitions are also important. To try and keep us talking about the same things, I'm going to try and stick to the defintions given (at least as they entered into my understanding) Craft is the ability to produce something well. Art is profound insight. Art, in the sense we comonnly think of it - 'objects of art,' necessarily includes craft as a medium to communicate the profound insight to other people. Craft does not necessarily include art: a shelf can be expertly made to take heavy loads for ages, but it would be a better shelf it was also pleasing to the eyes. Doing this well, in all situations old and new, requires a bit of that profound insight.
As this relates to games, there are two distinctions I would like to draw. The first is the difference between the ruleset and the experience of playing the game. The second is the games we are familar with now versus the potential of games.
The ruleset is not the game. The ruleset generates the experience of the game. The ruleset is crafted. The experience is art.
Consider a painting; a traditional medium of art. The parallel here would be that painting is a craft, not an art. A person can paint very realistic pictures, but say nothing profound. The exerience of viewing the painting, if it is profound, makes it art.
This is not to say that the experience of playing every game is art. The experience may not be profound. And in most cases today I think this is the case. The mechancis of the games are beautifully crafted. But do we feel like better people for having played them? In most cases, I, at least, would say no.
Yet I contend that it is possible for a game to be profound. I have heard tell of people learning life lessons from Go - you may see that a battle here is lost, but go fight another one in a different part of the board, and it may come back to where you started and change the conditions to make your position the stronger.