Most of us at Gamocracy have been away this week. While Rémi and Morgan went skiing, I stopped by New York on the way back from California -jetsetter or what?- for what was mostly vacation, assorted with a couple work meetings.
Despite the break I still got hit gaming wise. And it wasn’t just one lost sprayed bullet randomly scratching the foot. We’re talking major, straight to the eye, AK47 headshot, fired as it was by “The L Magazine”, a free cultural guide to NYC.
Among other things, it was asking this on the cover:
For the times they are a-changing
The magazine was sitting on the coffee table in my room at the Chelsea Hotel when I got in. The place is well known for housing artists stopping by the city, including Tim Burton this week, and I assume all guests get “The L Magazine” in their room.
We all grew up playing games and watching the televised Inquisition echoing claims by “Familles de France”, the local family values lobby, that video games were about to damage the brains of our entire generation. Or was it that we gamers would all turn serial killers sooner or later?
While they might have been right on brain damage, at least in my case, aren’t we all lucky they were wrong on the serial killer stuff? According to scientific calculations by Michael Pachter, had their predictions proven right, the human race would have been extinct approximately 14 months, 23 days and 4 hours after Nintendo released the first DS. (That’s early 2006, people! Can you imagine human kind coming to an end before events such as Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt or revelations about Tiger Woods’ manhood?)
From major threat to would be art form, video games must have their legs real sore for coming such a long way, so fast.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
That said, answering the question is as pointless as the need to printing paper can be. It can hardly be done with words. Yet a good amount of people, and surprisingly enough (or not?) a good number of game designers, are trying to do just that…
It’s like asking what love is. Unless you’re a big time philosopher writing a 600 pages summary on the topic, you’re bound to fail. And fail again.
Stop for a second and think about successful music acts: one can tell they made it when journalists start asking pointless questions about them. Now think about even more successful music acts: they just don’t answer these! They know what they’re here for is turning the audience’s water into wine and they stick to it.
If it tastes good, others will write the gospels.
Asking about the downfall of modern art in 8 bit style? How ironical.
Video Games can very well be art. Read my ratings at Gamocracy.
Of course some people can see video games being just corrupt form of entertainment ruining the society and they wonder how people can play video games so much. The same way I wonder how someone can go crazy about ugly abstract paintings, something that is widely called arts as well.
Writing code is art in itself, although usually the final program that is ran off the code does not show the fine art that goes in doing the program (and good that way, since more usually than not the code is so bad it wouldn’t be very artful). Music is art. Creating a suitable sound environment for a video game is art.
Let’s go to visual side then, who can deny that graphics are not art? Creating beautiful player models, items, textures, sprites, full motion cutscene videos etc. is its own area of art.
Now what are video games? They are something that contain all of the previous elements integrated into telling some sort of story.
So if video games are not art, they are collections of many arts. But then, combining all of these together to form a working whole, that I would classify to be the ultimate art.
And now I’ll go back to preparing my Physics seminar…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inVgCnIobz0