In making purchasing decisions, the meta elements of art are often more impactful than the artistic elements of it. We don’t buy things based on some objective standard of artistic merit, we buy them because something about that meta-experience catches our attention (i.e., the color of the packaging, the person selling it, the item’s immediate utility and price, the novelty or popularity of it). These meta-textual elements do not enhance our interpretation when we’re trying to do a ‘death-of-the-author’ style dissection of the art as presented, but when we’re deciding what art to consume and buy in our daily lives, we’re mostly not analyzing it that way. Art that explores the boundaries of a medium is often hard to parse without stepping back to examine everything about the experience - the framing or presentation of it, the title of the piece, the structure of the text in literature, the casting or marketing in theater or film. This is similar to the way that someone analyzing Mark Rothko’s paintings will understand them much better, having visited, or even heard of, the Rothko Chapel. We don’t consciously register many of the mechanisms by which games convey meaning and narrative, and so we assume they’re not even trying. In most cases, we do not perceive the whole art piece, having started from the assumption that our form and manner of engagement with it are meaningless and aesthetically or narratively pointless. It was then that I understood why we’re having such trouble viewing games as art. I find Firewatch interesting because a majority of players have shared they enjoyed the game for its artistic value and atmosphere but found themselves frustrated with the ending, the game’s world unresponsiveness, and the elements of player choice unrewarding. Firewatch earned tepid praise from the pretentious and buyer’s remorse from the disengaged players of games with more guns. As it stands, the Academy award Oscars for ‘Outstanding Marketing Merit’ in the category of ‘Subject Matter Interesting to White Men.’ Video games, meanwhile, find praise for their consumer value per dollar, if at all. I suppose that might be the case if we were to take the Academy at their word and accept that they award Oscars for outstanding technical or artistic merit. Did you play Firewatch? It had a pretty sexy marketing campaign back in 20, attractive enough to make certain reviewers decry it as the video game equivalent of Oscar-bait.
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