What is considered “art”? According to Britannica art is: “A visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination.” Many mediums fall under the category of art: paintings, photography, illustrations, sculping–and what I want to focus in on–performance.
Performance as a medium is considered an art because it utilizes the performer’s body and the place of performance as a medium to express a story or creativity. Within the category of performance of cinema; the main difference being that cinema is performance captured in film.
Which leads me to the Machinima screening from Thursday. “Machinima” is the combination of “machine” + “cinema,” and it is a type of performance that uses technology interfaces as a medium to perform. One such medium is video games.
During the Machinima screening, a clip of Minecraft “Parkour Civilization” was played as an example of a more at-home form of Machinima. This made me think about how “Parkour Civilization”, and many of the older Minecraft roleplays from the early 2010s era of YouTube, are all also forms of Machinima performance, and by extension, art.
“Parkour Civilization” is a performance: it tells its story in a setting illustrated by the Minecraft world around it and the story is performed through actors represented by player avatars, similarly to how a play would be performed.
It combines the elements of cinema and performance: the story is seen through a limited first POV like how movies introduces specific camera angles, but it also was mostly-unscripted aside from a couple of major plot points, which is similar to improv performances.
While its story is silly in nature, it should not discount its creativity as an artistic performance. Parkour Civilization was not the first machinima performance in Minecraft either; there were many other popular roleplays such as “The Crafting Dead”, “Dream SMP”, “Minecraft High School”, etc. that all are considered forms of performing art for the same reasons as “Parkour Civilization.”
I think you have something interesting to say here, but you don’t really go deeply into it. The way you phrase it makes it seem as though it is in refutation to someone claiming it is not art, yet you give no evidence of that claim’s existence. If you are not refuting a claim, why is it interesting that this work specifically be considered art?