WhyGamesMatter

The young lady in today’s image had an excellent costume at GenCon this year.  When I saw it, I was reminded of two things:

1. The general Japanese trope of having blue hair, as described in Strongbad’s e-mail.
2. The second season of the Doodlebops, where the characters switched from the spandex hood with fake ears to the just using make-up.

Don’t take that second one to be a bash on the outfit; it was a great transition, and I tend to think that well-applied, thin make up goes a long way toward enhancing the outfit while keeping it light.

Today, though,  I don’t want to spend much time talking about costumes and Doodlebops, though.  No, today I want to talk about games as art.  One of my earliest blog entries dealt the issue of whether games are art.  In that article, I kind of called out Roger Ebert for his assertion that they are not art.

http://www.whygamesmatter.com/2010/05/16/passing-all-batons/

I recently went back to re-read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics,” and I came across an excellent definition of art.  McCloud defines it as follows:

Art is any human activity that doesn’t grow out of either of our species two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

While I understand this is a very broad definition, I think this definition is far less likely to have cranky snobs claiming that future endeavors are not “art.”

What do you think?