I was cleaning out my Dropbox when I came across this wondrous piece of garbage that was my first attempt at extended academic writing. Why I chose to tackle a philosophy paper my Junior year of High School, when I've never written such a paper in my life, is beyond me.
Pardon the poor formatting, and the poor everything else, haha. Regardless of its quality, it's interesting to see how much I've changed in terms of writing, and even my thoughts on videogames as an art-form.
Enjoy at your own peril!
See, defining something as art or not art is so nebulous and confusing. Art, period, is nebulous and confusing at a certain point. I like science. It's less messy, founded on some reasonably well-defined fundamental axioms, and can better weather the buffeting maelstrom that is the human mind. I mean, sure, human minds made science, but when we constructed the scientific 'machine' we built in a defense against ourselves. When we constructed the artistic 'machine', there was no such thing, but then again, should there have been? And the point of the scientific 'machine' is to churn out the truth of what is going on in the natural world; the point of the artistic 'machine' is not to churn out truth, though, is it? (I'm not an artist so I don't know, but at least from my point of view if it looks like anything other than 'look at this attention-grabbing, mind-touching, sometimes-message-having bit of human expression', I feel like the artist is bullshitting me) It seems like even the social sciences is troubled by this, too, because they deal in the empirical, but there's a very unempirical component to it, which I don't think is necessarily all that bad because economists can analyze the economy all they want but you also see them opining on where it ought to go and there seems, at least from my vantage point in the sciences, a smaller divide between analytic economists/sociologists/psychologists and policy-making economists/sociologists/psychologists than there is between scientific researchers and scientific policy-makers. The social sciences even have their own 'machine', which seems to simultaneously be for churning out truth about society and churning out opinions on what to do with it.