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Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

If they are blind enough to not recognize games as a most modern and innovative art form, well then they should go down together with their departments and take the world where art is judged based on it's investment potential with them. Why isn't Another World the game celebrated same way as Mona Lisa the painting? Because you cannot re-sell it for millions. Programming is nothing less than practical philosophy (I deal with "objects", "classes" and other abstractions all day every day). Programming language is still a language, I know multiple and I can compare them which makes me a linguist. They should not try so hard to separate from science. They should acknowledge that art is evolving as well.

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Games are pretty new, I'd cut them slack on that one. Also, I've been a gamer all my life, and many games are bad, and are getting worse in terms of "artistic expression" as the production values go up and up. I'm sure we can look up a few indie games on Steam, and point to the great visuals, but a lot of those games are just boring. The game developer must always sacrifice whatever message, or aesthetic, or meaning they hope to convey for improved gameplay - the game must be fun. There's just not much art in games for that reason, the same way there isn't much art in web apps. If you want to point at the visuals, or music, we can do that obviously.

Anyway, this one seems like a recent game that proves me wrong: http://www.stanleyparable.com/

Games like Half Life 2 and Call of Duty try to mimic films in a very theme-park ride way, something many gamers have pointed out. The gaming community hasn't exactly figured this one out yet, so I'll let college humanities departments get a pass on this one.

Films are pretty new too, and academia has more or less embraced it.

What you just said is equally applicable to painting. Only in painting you can slap a piece of excrement on canvas and people will be afraid to call it shit. And it will still sell for $$$. So what kind of new research do they do? Examining Shakespeare and Homer for the 1000s time? They are not willing to adapt and they should go down. And they are, that why they are whining.

Well since I just defended my dissertation on videogame players I would say they are already doing that. There is a small but growing body of work on videogames by humanities scholars. As far as the whole videogame "art" perspective, I would suggest looking up "ludology vs. narratology" for some of the literature on the "right" way to study videogames themselves.

Well done!

Video games and programming languages ARE being studied in the humanities [1].

This is, in part, what the Digital Humanities doing, engaging with digital modes of cultural expression [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

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