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Comment by kenning | Hacker News Reader

Video game reviews usually have opposing goals: journalists want to elevate video games to an art and to elevate their criticism to art criticism, but users want them to quickly provide a helpful recommendation (which is represented by a number score).

Steam reviews are concise by design and give you a better idea of whether you'll have the same kind of positive opinion (for example, if all the positive reviews are memey, that says something significant). So I'd say they're definitely better.

I think some people who were video game reviewers will go on to become popular youtube "video essay" producers like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthewmatosis and the rest will get new jobs.

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The games press doesn't "want to elevate video games to an art". Games are art. And there are both game reviewers and game critics and the distinction is pretty clear once you've spent a few minutes figuring out if that particular person's thinking matches your own enough to be worth considering.

> users want them to quickly provide a helpful recommendation (which is represented by a number score)

Speak for yourself. I'm a "user". I also appreciate criticism that places a game in a historical, textual, and social context and that often tells me more about whether I'll like the game than "oh yeah, it runs at 60fps solid on my 1080Ti". A game reviewer might have put me off of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus or NieR: Automata because of gameplay ephemera they didn't like; game critics turned me onto both games because they were must-play experiments in how we tell stories.

Videogames use art but its not art. Or more specifically, its not created for their artistic value. Videogames are a amusement product over an artistic product.

For example, a stunning artistic videogame but boring versus a ugly game but funny.

There are many types of videogames with many different audiences, similar to movies. You can argue that videogames aren't art by pointing to Call of Duty, just as I can argue that movies aren't art by pointing to Suicide Squad. If you argue that movies are art by pointing to Citizen Kane, I'll point to Spec Ops: The Line or the Stanley Parable.

I also think you're conflating "art" and "visual design".

Even within Call of Duty, I would certainly call the single-player campaigns, from the original game up through today, successive iterations on a presentation of a narrative message even completely divorced from the ephemera of play (which is itself artistic in nature, though less universally obviously so).

Quake would be a better example, but I'd hold, too, that the decisions and the ephemera of that are art as well. Nothing says you can't play art.

This argument has been used against many media now very readily accepted as art: that they're just amusements, they're not art. They frequently come from critics of other media that don't want to expand the club, and they are invariably demonstrated to be incorrect over even the short term.

As for your example, there are boring but beautifully shot films--2001: A Space Odyssey certainly fits that bill for me. There are engaging films with crude cinematography--the original Clerks comes to mind, for a certain time and audience. You are drawing a distinction without a difference.

> Games are art. This is really off topic but simply put, not all games are art. And I don't mean that in the way you might guess. Soccer is a game, it is not art. And games in general are not going towards a future where they are considered closer to art. The most popular game in the world is League of Legends, which people would think of as closer to an esport than art.

There's a small section of games which try to be pieces of art. Maybe they are. But most people playing games don't think of them as art, they think of them as games.

Appeals to "most people" are ugly. Most people reading books and watching films don't think of them as art, either. What they think their nature is and what their nature is wonderfully different things.

The only reason to sniff at any game, even something like League of Legends, and declare it to Not Be Art is to deny the active artistic intent of the creators involved. It is exclusionary for no good reason.

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