Vidya is art?

How come despite its insane popularity and creators insisting it's art, we still can't tackle controversial subjects?
You don't really see games deal with rape, incest, racism etc in any but juvenile and shallow ways.
If vidya really is an artform, why can't I play a game where I can rape my nigger sister?

Video games are interactive by definition. The experience of someone benig raped is highly emotional, the physical aspect is a very small part of the drama. AI currently isn't good enough for us to simulate social situations and have the player be able to interact with them (see the meme game Facade). The only way this can be done is by brute forcing it, writing as many different lines of dialogue (and recording them if your game has VA) as you can to try and cover everything the player will think of. This is more effort than most people are willing to put in, especially since the end product would still be able to be broken by players, as the dev can't possibly think of everything.

A movie can have a poorly acted rape scene in it, right? It's not really different within the context of their mediums.
What I'm wondering is why no one has even tried to handle these things in games.

Because games are either made to be sold to the lowest common denominator, or made by incompetent artists who couldn't work in any other field. In both cases, the story can't deal with serious issues.

I convinced my movie buff brother than video games were art just with the opening of Breath of the Wild.

There is no way video games, and all the designs and artistic and creative thought put into them, aren't art.

Contraversial subject doesnt make something art, it just makes it contraversial. Art is something that is reached by making the most use of all the aspects in your given medium, this is really fucking hard for games because it has so much more to work with and get right. Doesnt help that most Art creators are far more interested in movies than games.

I don't know that NO games have tried it. I can only think of Outlast 2, where it's implied your wife is violated when hillbilly cultists check if she's pregnant or a virgin or some shit, but I'm sure there are others.

Also, bad acting/writing isn't analogous here. The director expects the actors to be good, the writer thinks their writing is good. They try to make something good and fail. Game devs can tell from the outset that they would fail, so they don't try. I imagine in the current climate it's also not worth the outside drama to try something like that.

This is art.

Well, according to that theory of knowledge class I took art is based on the intention of it's creater and the reception of it's audience. Other than that there's no real classification of art.

Games just receive so much shit for doing anything controversial. Pretty much everything has been done in movies so nobody gives a shit these days. Unless its a big blockbuster without enough diversity

Games aren’t art, and they never will be.

Art is static and made to invoke certain ideas or feelings. Videogames are too interactive and dynamic to reliably convey any one cohesive idea.

A lot of pretentious devs try, and usually end up with extremely shallow and simple games with no player agency.

The further games are from art, the better

...

Because a videogame has to be programmed and programmers are usually not very artful and artists not very skilled at coding.

>Videogames are too interactive and dynamic to reliably convey any one cohesive idea.
That depends on the interaction and how much you can change. Nothing I do in Deus Ex changes the bigger ideas behind that game.

I would argue that games are art, but games that stick to being video games in the strictest sense are more artistic than ones that try to be artsy.

For example, I'd call Super Mario 64 before I'd call The Last of Us art.

they're not an artform, they're entertainment/toys that contain artistic elements because artists are hired to work on them. Games are required to be fun and that basically disqualifies them from being art, since art doesn't adhere to any rules. I guess it depends on how the games are criticized. If games stop being criticized by their playability etc, publishers will start funding "non-games" as long as they do well financially. That will never happen though because no one will waste money on that shit. If money and success were a non-factor in game development, you would probably witness a very booming artistic scene in video games.

But I still think all video games (at least the ones that are blatant cash grabs or shit) have enough artistic merits to be called "art." Especially in this day and age when anything can be art.

They tried to convey their ideas, and deus ex did it better than most other games, but when people think about deus ex the philosophical aspects of it usually come second.

Videogames are innately fun, so conveying serious ideas with them just doesn’t work. Mulling over the concept of complete global consciousness isn’t as inportant as JCs terrible voice acting, or torturing innocents with non lethals

There's such a thing as fun Sci-Fi with serious undertones.

too many people are needed to make games and the larger those groups are, the smaller and smaller it is the chance for them to go against the grain
video games aren't art until cunts are making shit alone in their garages and/or basements they are but not enough, at least not yet

Because SJWs.

but there is a lot of this

just AAA games suck and can't tackle this kind of stuff

on the other hand, "art" has nothing to do with tackling controversial subjects

Checkmate, kiddo.