The Art of Game
With thanks to Andy for the link, I'm reeling from reading an astoundingly poignant piece on the potential for games as an emergent artistic medium and art form. N. David Griffin over at configsys.boy! has posted a must read entitled Arts and Electronic Entertainment. I continue to be generally optimistic that the games industry as a whole is on the cusp of something extraordinary. Similar in concept to Vernor Vinge's Singularity, as published on KurzweilAI.net, I sense an imminent evolutional jump that will set new standards upon which all new forms of the expression will be referenced. Mr. Griffin emphasizes this by expressing concern for a collective conscious effort to break through the stagnation building mind sets that plague the games industry today. Fantastic.
What is more curious to me is if ANY game is considered art, or artistic? Is chess an art-game? Is GO considered art? This seems like a new idea altogether for the medium known as games. ;) It would be interesting to see an art-game. I'm sure that it's possible, but I don't necessarily think that that means it must be 3d and have nice reflection mapping and surround-sound. The idea of advanced technical know-how to achieve an artistic statement or implication seems utterly ludicrous to me. If one can't make an art-game with 2-d 4-bit graphics, what makes you think you can make one with 64 or 128 bit machines? This sounds like non-sense to me. As an added note, though honestly - I can't recall WHERE I saw it, Rez is apparently being featured on display at some modern art museum. And, for those of you that have never seen/played this game, I can tell you that it's quite stunning to look at (not to mention play), and probably closer to an art-inspired piece of coding than much else I've seen out there.
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