ludology and games as art

I was reading about Roger Ebert's stance on video games failing to be art and it made me think about the efforts to study video games on their own terms. The field of ludology has become more of a focus for media theorists recently, and we read an article introducing the field in class as well. What I'd like to ask or propose is that games might NOT actually be art-- once they're created, that is. I think that the "art" that video games have might be in the creation itself, and once the artifact is complete it is merely a game.


I was thinking about this because ludology studies the rules of a game-- these rules are fixed. Although games present a sense of freedom and "free reign" to the players that use them, the reality is that gamers can't really bring new rules to a game, they can only work within its confines. You could argue that there are games with more open-ended, flexible rules that allow players to "create" (in a game like Spore for example, or in games where the avatars are customizable... although these are more suspect because again, your choices for customization are limited). While video games are certainly valuable artifacts for study because we can glean things about society from them, they might not be "art" in a strict sense. After all, you don't often see arguments for areas of cultural studies as art when they examine cultural trends and logics of a certain time period.

However, the process by which games are created certainly are marked by a series of formal and artistic decisions on how the message is conveyed. It would be hard to argue that art and artistic decisions don't play a major role in how we perceive and interact with games, but in a way, our interaction with the artistic decisions of the creators is limited.

In other words, when we examine famous paintings, we can look at them, maybe touch them and smell them, etc., but we don't really bring anything new to the table by examining them-- the "art" of these things is in the production.

This reminded me of the idea of performance artists who strongly believe this, that they are true "artists" because their art is in the making and performance which an audience witnesses. After the performance is over, the "art" and aura is gone, and the consumers are left with just a memory. I'm not sure if all of this makes sense, but it seems like the definition of "art" might need to be reexamined in light of video games and new media culture. Thoughts?

Ryan Aliapoulios