I don’t write nearly as much about games as I should. Considering they incorporate the audio, visual and tactile sensory goodness I hold dear it’s more than an oversight on my part.
Perhaps there’s an intimidation factor to it all. There’s just so much there, there.
Fortunately, others do what I don’t and in a serendipitous confluence of RSS feeds, Twitter posts and Podcast episodes, all sorts of thoughts about games have come my way in the past few days.
First, Roger Ebert writes that video games can never be art. It’s an amusing read and erudite without being pedantic. His basic premise runs thus:
I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say “never,” because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.
The article is, in part, a response to Kellee Santiago’s Tedx 2009 talk at USC in which she makes exactly the claim Ebert tries to refute. Namely, that not only can video games be art, but that like all expression, they follow a trajectory towards art that all other mediums have taken.
This is good, because earlier that year Cracked’s Michael Swaim not only claimed that video games could be considered art, he even created a top 10 list of games that are art
Like comics, video games are a bastard medium, perpetually trapped in the purgatory of “low art.” No matter how well-crafted or sweeping or gorgeous they are, they almost never get auctioned off to millionaires with paddles. But even comics have had some success: The graphic novel movement is giving them some art house cred, R. Crumb drew some parents boning their kids and got a freaking Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and I heard Jeff Koons grudgingly recognized them as “a conceivable medium for the conveyance of art-like imagery.”
Well, the next time you get cornered by the Beret Patrol, or just want to flex your gaming-snob nuts, here are 10 games that would be hanging in museums if flat screens weren’t so damned expensive.
I side with Santiago and Swaim on this one. If novels and film are art, so too the novel and filmic games that are creating a multibillion dollar industry.
And if that’s not good enough, I’m still wrapping my mind around Jane McGonigal who doesn’t talk about games as art, but does suggest they hold the key to solving world crises. If only we learned to play them more.
