Video Games: Can They Be Considereed Art?...

Oct 14, 2013 by

There have been many debates with regards to if video games can be considered art.  Many people strongly stand on the side of “no” as they do not act as a proper medium to provoke “depth” or “emotion” such as what is traditionally considered art.  Whether it’s a painting or sculpture, video games are not considered to be a part of art to a vast majority.  Robert Erbert says “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.”  In my opinion I can understand where he is coming from.  Video games are still very, very early in their lifetime and while the evolution of technology is extremely rapid, not many have attempted to make video games...

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Can video games be art?

Oct 14, 2013 by

Even before playing one of the assigned games, the question of whether video games could be considered art seemed to have an obvious answer to me: of course they could! Humble’s game The Marriage is an example of a game that definitely has artistic qualities. The game starts off by showing two squares, one pink and one blue, floating around on a coloured backdrop. The squares would interact with colourful small circles and change size or transparency and the game was over when one or both of the squares disappeared. Visually, this game actually reminded me of some of the paintings I saw at a modern art museum in France. Personally I don’t like or understand modern art whether the squares are fixed on a canvas or floating around a computer screen; however, both forms have...

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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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Facade

Sep 16, 2013 by

Facade

This is the type of game that really pisses you off! I started playing games as early as the Sega Genesis (Sonic the Hedgehog!) and Facade was definitely the first game I played of  this kind. It was weird playing such a different game as I’m used to playing games with goals and accomplishments, but this game has none of that because you cannot win. A game without a chance to win just defeats the purpose of the game. No matter how hard I tried to be nice,  I always end up pissing off the couple in some way (maybe I’m not a nice guy?) , which pisses me off because I would end up having to restart the game. In the end, I came to the conclusion that trip, grace and I cannot...

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