Something that came to me regarding what is considered literature?

[Previous]

Because everything fits neatly into a category where everything is absolutely equal

not every blob of paint on canvas is art~

[Chutzpar]

i agree honestly, talking about whether or not an entire medium qualifies as art or not is pretty much 100% pointless
but that doesn't negate the double standard
if you want games to be taken seriously you can no longer use "but it's just entertainment" as a means of deflecting criticism. it's a pretty crap way to deflect criticism in the first place anyway.

[Dazz]

I'm going to go by, the script of a videogame written out would be literature if published as such, as there would be no way to determine the difference. However, once it becomes a game, it can be considered art if by that nature it is.
Art is subjective, so it's impossible to say what is and isn't art. I can criticise somebody's cooking of a burger, but I don't think it's art, so I can't criticise it on that level. However, I know that there are people out there who believe that cooking IS an art, and I'm not going to tell them that they're wrong if that's how they feel.

[Sunlight]

On the subject of what can be considered art, I would say that anything could, as long as someone sees it as such. I mean you don't really even need to produce some sort of product to be able to call what you do a form of art. I would say that what makes something "art" is if there is one or more individuals who would call it such.

In other words, a person who is really passionate about cooking could probably refer to his or her food as art, while someone who sees cooking like another form of work and doesn't have the same connection to their product wouldn't.

A person who spends a long time making a sprite could call it art, while someone who slaps together an edit would probably call it something that they made because they either just wanted compliments or to use it in a game.

I'm not saying that something that takes a long time or something that just looks good instantly becomes art, it becomes art when someone actually looks at it and thinks of it as a labour of love, and not something that they had to do. An ugly edit or even simplest of sonic recolors could be considered art.

As to if videogames could be considered literature though, I would say that it depends on what type of game it is. I mean it has to in some form consist of letters.

[Kriven]

First, I have to question why we're twisting the thread into becoming one of art instead of literature. Dio clearly stated literature, and I'm pretty sure if he meant art he would have said that. The OP read way more along the lines of "Does Cloud Strife stand beside Romeo and Juliet?" than "Do video games belong in museums with the Mona Lisa?" His post, at the beginning of this thread, was specifically questioning whether video games, and he didn't even say all video games, would fit into the artistic subfamily of literature -- that is, art composed of words and syllables (calligraphy being more of a visual art, and book design being more of a craft [crafts are also arts IMO]).

With that out of the way, here's what I think on this topic (and I'm really glad you made me think about this, Diogalesu. Thank you.) In my opinion not all video games could be considered literature because not all video games utilize words in a poetic or prosaic manner. Just for an example, you've got a slew of games like The Legend of Zelda franchise with lots of menus and all the item names spelled out for you and lists of spells and all this awesome stuff, but just because it uses words doesn't make (these menus) literature. I would, however, make the argument that because many of these menus are composed of pixels, and so are pixel art, they could be a form of calligraphy, but I digress.

Of course in most modern games there's a lot of dialogue and cinematic things going on between stages, even during stages. The thing is, most of that dialogue is being presented to you non-visually, and in a non-literary form. It is voiced for you. This, I consider, like audio books, like poetry readings, like film adaptations not to be literature. It is not being presented as literature, and rightfully so considering it does not use any part of the literary alphabet to convey itself to you.

However, the script that was being read from? That could easily be literature. Why not? What makes the script different from Shakespeare? It's got stage (or vocal) directions, it's got dialogue, characters. The scripts for video games are crazy detailed, and I can't see a reason why those should not be considered literature.

But of course, the scripts are obvious. What about the games themselves? Well, no. Games are not literature, they are video games. In the hierarchy of art, video games are there own medium falling somewhere under the "Visual" spectrum. However, the interesting thing about a lot of art, particularly art forms created during the 20th and 21st century, is that they are composites of other forms utilizing the strengths (and sometimes weaknesses) of other arts to create something new.

Similar things have happened for centuries, but it became prevalent in our past and current pair of centuries. You kind of always had calligraphy with literature, and many cultures create images to accompany their stories, but with the 1900s came that surge of comics, which was the first great merger of art. Comics brought together the forms of literature, calligraphy, and various styles of visual art to create something completely different. Whole new. Then came movies, which brings together more art. Movies bring in performance art, they bring in music (which itself is so many different art forms), they bring together filmography, sounds, special effects work. That's all art. And let's not forget about all the different art forms that movies themselves have created and the blends that go with them: animation, stop-animation, insane stuff like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where they just throw it all in at once.

Well, this all carries over into video games (which, now that I'm thinking about it, can be divided into a billion visual art forms what with sprites, and models, and whatnot). Games are a lot like movies. They combine visual arts, sometimes of various forms, with sounds, with musical art, with story telling (which is wholly separate from literature), with coding (which I would say falls under the "crafts" part of art.) And of course, in some titles, with literature.

Games like Tales of Phantasia and The Legend of Zelda make use of literature to carry their stories. In these particular games, the literature isn't even accompanied by voice overs, it's all there to be read. And a great number of other games have various literary features to explore, like the character guides in Kingdom Hearts and Pokemon which are basically encyclopedias. This is, in the game, presented as letters, as words, as characters representing syllables. That is literature.

So are the video games literature? No. Do the video games contain literature? Yeah. Absolutely. Without a doubt there is literature in video games.

I'm sorry if I rambled or got a little carried away. This topic got me really excited. I just really enjoyed thinking about it, and I wish we could have more topics like these on this board. Especially ones that weren't almost immediately assaulted by some of the crapslinging upthread.

it becomes art when someone actually looks at it and thinks of it as a labour of love, and not something that they had to do. An ugly edit or even simplest of sonic recolors could be considered art.

This is the definition of art I've been searching for. Thank you for finding words that phrase it so much more clearly than I ever could have.