A new Direction for the VG industry...

[MangaBottle]

We all know that video games are great entertainment. But we don't seem to be seeing it's full potential. Think about it -- books, movies, TV, music, comics and animation have been not just for entertainment, but to express social ideologies, and as a form of artistic expression. Why can't videogames do the same? It'd certainly be a challange to pull off, but with so many indie gamers out there I can't believe no one has thought of it yet (well, except maybe Jack Thompson, but he's a moron and doesn't count)

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

There's some, but it's mostly in "themes" rather than what gets the press.

 

[fate]

Why can't videogames do the same?

They do.

The only people who'd debunk this are snooty art elitists who spend their days sitting in front of a painting all day drinking Starbucks coffee trying to liken it to the meaning of life when it's actually just two random scribbles the painter made when he was drunk.

 

[Jukain]

Simon of the Chipmunks says "Marijuana".

 

[MangaBottle]

Can someone put a list of examples, please?

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

That'd be difficult. That'd be like citing movies as art, or books as art.

 

[Æsahættr]

The Metal Gear Solid series I would have to say is my favourite example of this. Not only is it stretching the boundaries of the genre by being so cinematic, but the ideological themes throughout them are really deep, relevant, and not always black and white. The characters (and by extension, the audiences) ideals and beliefs are challenged, with the characters dealing with these issues in very human ways. These are issues such as love, conflict, technology, free will, and loyalty - issues which have no need for context - timeless and prevalent in all times and places.

All of this and it doesn't detract from the game at all, which is really hard to do. The games also highlight messages and morals, and, with the exception of number one, do so in a subtle way so as not to be corny.

 

[Adamant]

All of this and it doesn't detract from the game at all, which is really hard to do.

The fact that you spend roughly 90% of the game watching cutscenes rather than actually playing turns off a lot of people, me included.

So yes, it definitly detracts from the game.

 

[Æsahættr]

All of this and it doesn't detract from the game for me, so that's a bonus.

Fixed, then. But that wasn't my point anyway. You sort of helped my point about breaking the boundaries of the VG genre, in a way, even if you were debating the wisdom of trying to do so.

 

[fate]

If art is "the expression of one's self", than every game since Pong is "art"... even the bad ones.

Any "list" would probably be a collection of what they think only qualifies as art through VG.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Not necessarily. Some games (and movies and music and anything really) are just there to be moneymakers and nothing else.

 

[ShadowDeeps]

In rebuttal to this thread of discussion I do have things to contest - I feel the film and TV industry in general has become trite, blearing, and monolithic in its offerings (and to come to grips with) over the years, to the extent that it throws many for loops with gems that seldom come into fruition. By that I mean gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity without much application of interest or what many would call "purpose", which does not leave room for what I'd deem healthy thought. The Saw movies are a great example - while I myself haven't seen any of them through it's not hard to surmise that they're less scary and more stupefyingly assaulting to the human sensory as torture films. I don't enjoy that so many franchises are milked for the sake of being milked, and though I feel no one medium is more artistic than the other I'd say the film industry is especially guilty of this (even though video games have been as well, but not as much so to me) as I'm not too impressed by most of the activity hefted up as of recent in the worlds of film. It's not doing anything for a special reason even if that does, ironically, make practice a requisite in life itself. But I digress.

Putting such things aside, I think video games have been made to express social ideologies in ways that perhaps transcends the spoken word of film, music, animation, or the written word or the sheer artistry of comic books. I've, like many, come to the epiphany that video games are no longer just video games but something more - a platform and henceforth abundantly more - and a medium through which to tell an art and narrative that you yourself as the player partakes. That's not to say music or animation has no place, or any medium - they all contribute towards video games as they act as platforms for drama, action, and what not. Series like Bioshock, Half-Life, Mass Effect, and what have you are all excellent examples to this, on my view. Games have been evolving for a long time now - in A.I, music, artistic license, voice acting, graphics, interactivity, plot elements, everything - to the degree where I do think it qualifies for an art form that easily ranks amongst films, TV, comic books, animation, music, books, and what have you as yet another form of media that perhaps better demonstrates how humanity has been evolving in good aspects, on a more positive note.

 

[Fig]

One issue VG-as-art (in POPULAR PERCEPTION) has is that to be recognized as art in the public view is mostly a matter of time.

Video experimentation began in the 60s. The first commercial video games were presented in 1972 (arcade games). That is, 36 years ago. It would be another four years after that before something truly recognizable as modern video games (ie, a machine that could have new games added to it, as opposed to a machine built to play a single game) came around.

Now we can't compare that with most of the other arts, because we have no idea what was going on thirty-six years after they were invented. But there is one art we can draw parallels with: cinema.

The first public display of a moving picture show (essentialy equivalent to those first commercial ventures (by which I mean pong) was a series of animated short by Reynaud in France, in 1892. 36 years after that gives us 1928.

So what was the world of Cinema like, in 1928?

Well, let's see. Of the American Film's Institute "Best 100 America movies ever" list (1998 version), only The Jazz Singer (1927), The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Gold Rush (1925), (the 2007 version took out Birth of a Nation, added Intolerance (1916) and The General (1927)) have been made.

Charlie Chaplin (and the Tramp) is a well known figure of cinema, but his best years are still ahead of him: City Lights won't come out for another three years, Modern Times for eight, and the Great Dictator is more than a decade away.

Among other "big names" of cinema as we know them today...there's a new director that has had some success these past two years, Alfred Hitchcock. He hasn't made anything of MUCH note yet, and the future looks bright for him (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, etc are all a quarter century and more from being made)

John Ford has been directing for a fair while, and has made quite a few movies, but John Wayne, on the other hand, is a mere prop handler for Fox, who has appeared as an extra in a handful of movies.

From the top-10 males and female stars of the AFI, only Clark Gable (and Chaplin) are any sort of veterans, with four years of acting. Humphrey Bogart has just made his film debut. James Cagney and Spencer Tracy won't make theirs for two years, Cary Grant for three more years, Fred Astaire for five, James Stewart and Henry Fonda for seven, and Marlon Brando is four years old.

For the women, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich are veterans, and Joan Crawford has made her debut a few years ago. The rest of the great names? Bette Davis won't appear on film for another three years. Katharine Hepburn will come a year after her. Audrey Hepburn is a literal fetus in the last few months of the years, Elizabeth Taylor is still a few years from being even that. Marilyn Monroe is a toddler. Judy Garland is six. Ingrid Bergman is thirteen (and still far from the screen).

There's a new character on the screen just this year - an animator, until now not particularly noteworthy, has released some shorts covering the adventures and misadventures of a strange anthropomorphic mouse he wanted to call "Mortimer" but was convinced by his wife to call "Mickey" instead. Of course, history is still nine years away from the december day where this animator will show the rest of Hollywood that feature animated films are more than a bad joke with his Snow White. He has yet to win anything, either.

While we're on the topic of winning anything, one would of course wonder what the buzz is for the Oscar this year. Well, the buzz is mostly that people are going to hold a ceremony and hand out awards for movies over the last two years: there have not been any academy awards given out yet. In fact, the first will be given out in May next year, during a fifteen-minute ceremony in front of 250 persons. It will not be broadcast, and its results will be announced a long time in advance.

What about the Palme D'Or, the Golden Lion and all those other awards? Well, no one's talking about any of that - they're still, afterward, a decade and more in the bright future.

Technology wise, someone made a sensation just last year: Warners released a movie titled "The Jazz Singer". It had something surprising for a feature length film: sound.

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So yeah. Forgive the rambling, but I felt it useful to look at how 1928 would look from our perspective.

From OUR, of course. From their perspective, there had been tons of great movies made before, and tons of superb actors. Much like we view video games today.

I have little doubt that video game will one day be considered one of the arts. I have little doubt that when that happen, the history of video games in our years will be remembered, and some video games will be rewarded. From where we stand right now, it seems likely Final Fantasy, Zelda, Mario, Warcraft and some others will all be names that will appear as "Masterpieces of the video games", as well as lots of more obscure games. But that's from what we can see now. In twenty, fifty, eighty years people may have a very different take on things, and that's when there will be enough distance, enough perspective, to really make the call on which video games will have become timeless classic - masterpieces, art - and which will have been forgotten.