Art and the Pixels of Life and Death...

Oct 14, 2013 by

Art and the Pixels of Life and Death

Whether or not Video Games can be art is a just a minor question that begets the provocative centuries old debate on what should and should not be considered Art. Roger Ebert maintains that video games cannot be art due to the fact that “the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art.” He even goes on to say that “no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.” However, many critics have pointed out that the medium on which videos games are built upon is still at its infancy; todays video games are the cave drawings from prehistoric times. In my eyes, I consider art as anything...

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‘Art’eroids – Does Games and Art Merge?...

Oct 13, 2013 by

‘Art’eroids – Does Games and Art Merge?

Arteroids is the embodiment of copywrite evasion and plagiarism. There really is nothing spectacular or novel about it. Sure the developer aimed at artifying the game by turning all object into words. Both the incoming ‘arteroids’ and the defending token are words, with only the background, explosions, and missiles fired as objects. After destroying and successfully defending myself from an incoming word, there is a strange squelch like sound issuing from the gameplay that is supposed to further establish this game as artistic. These sounds that erupt after hits are no discernable English words but do sound like painful outcries. Maybe the art in the sound was that it mimicked my internal dialogue during gameplay. It’s at this moment of artistic interpretation that I’d like to coalesce Arteroids with an illuminating article about videogames...

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the truths of life and love in a rectangle, several pixels high...

Oct 13, 2013 by

the truths of life and love in a rectangle, several pixels high

Playing Passage was a new kind of experience for me. As an “artistic project”, it doesn’t compare well with anything I’ve ever played, so instead of evaluating it as a game, I’ll just talk about what I took from it during and after play. On my first play of the game, I didn’t have a concept of the game’s “purpose”, and had no idea what was going on. I walked into a woman, fell in love, and kept moving. Am I doing that right? What was the increasing score in the upper right of the screen counting? Is it my age? It wasn’t until about halfway through the game that I realized that my character was being tracked by a “lens” that was moving away from the my character, pushing him to the right...

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