Posted by kari.petroschmidt
A couple of years ago, a movie critic named Rodger Ebert wrote an article about why he thought that games could never be art. It sparked outrage from the gaming community, orders of magnitude larger than what he expected. As a result, he ended up conceding that games could in fact, be art.
The fact that this argument was taken seriously at all demonstrates the sensitivity people in the community have in regards to their preferred pass time. If you’ve ever really gotten into a game, to have someone discredit not only the individual work but the entire medium is beyond ignorant. No one would take you seriously if you said music wasn’t art, so why is it different with games?
Perhaps because, where music is thousands of years old, games are still in their infancy. Having someone try and explain games to you can be tedious, but the pay off is being on the cutting edge of interactive entertainment. I think games are the ultimate form of expression – they combine audio and visual elements like film, but have the added component of interactivity. I could imagine in 100 years, games being something akin to a real life experience. Imagine that? Actually living out a story through all of your senses.
Gaming is a truly massive industry with steady growth that our country has yet to really capitalise on, which is kind of odd when you consider that this country would be the perfect place to develop them, given our relative lack of natural resources and highly educated populace.