Quote:
Originally Posted by Krylo
But, like I said, playing the game, and doing things (like that) with the game can be art, but the game itself isn't, because it lacks the context that would allow it to make those things I said before. I think this is actually why we came up with the idea of performance art--that sometimes an action can present social views, or beauty, or all those other neat things we prescribe to art, better than anything else, but there's no way to really save the ephemeral act, ergo performance art.
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Chess doesn't lack context, it is context. It exists to shape and guide the experience of people who play it in order to lead them to particular types of experiences and understandings. You can't separate the playing of chess from the game itself because the entire point of the game's design is to create the experiences people have when playing it. Emotion and beauty? Experiencing the beauty of the flow of a well-played game, or the emotional turmoil of the sheer inscrutability of how a better player beats you, are encoded into the game's DNA, just as much as the heartstopping pressure of whether to call a bluff is encoded into poker, or flipping over the board and going THIS IS BULLSHIT HE ALWAYS GETS ALL THE HOUSES is built into Monopoly. A game that didn't inspire emotion would be pretty much the shittiest game (IE, golf).
Every game that exists essentially looks at the broader scope of human experience, behavior and interaction and recreates some aspect of it in microcosm. Society basically by definition is the construction of rules and laws in order to encode values and beliefs and shape and define how we understand and interact with the world around us and games simplify and distort the rules governing those interactions so that we examine them and develop a greater and deeper understanding of the whole.
If games aren't art then frankly it's art that comes out as the inferior expressive form because games command the attention of their players and create a directness and authenticity of experience which no passively observed piece of static art will ever hope to match.