Discordian's Blog

I completely agree. I actually had a friend in my English class last semester who wrote his last persuasive paper about precisely this.

Agreed. Brohoof to you!

Beautiful.

Can you believe I came up with this all on the fly? There was a little forethought involved but for the most part I typed this up as I thought of it.

I have been a gamer for over 20 years and I have seen games evolve from 8 bit pixels to fully rendered 3D that looks so real you think you are watching a high budget movie and everything in between. It was an artform then and it is still one now.

Excellent post, definitely worth posting again, on here. I always love seeing arguments for video games being an art form. Too often I see all games lumped together with Soulless Cash-in Modern Military Shooter 52, when doing so would be like lumping Fantasia in the same group as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.

 

Games hold an interesting position in the art world, because of their immersion factor. I've touched on this previously, but it's always worth talking about.

 

A painting can show you a warrior fighting a slime in a plain with a castle in the background. A video game can put you in that warrior's shoes. Games are also interesting because they cannot fully stand by themselves. While pong could possibly be considered timeless by many, the games that are fondly remembered and still enjoyed to this day are the ones that play great, as well as be any combination of good-looking, good-sounding or well-written.

 

I personally believe gameplay only carries the experience so far. You can have a game that plays great but looks and sounds mediocre, and while it will be entertaining, it won't be what it could have been.

Excellent post, definitely worth posting again, on here. I always love seeing arguments for video games being an art form. Too often I see all games lumped together with Soulless Cash-in Modern Military Shooter 52, when doing so would be like lumping Fantasia in the same group as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.

 

Games hold an interesting position in the art world, because of their immersion factor. I've touched on this previously, but it's always worth talking about.

 

A painting can show you a warrior fighting a slime in a plain with a castle in the background. A video game can put you in that warrior's shoes. Games are also interesting because they cannot fully stand by themselves. While pong could possibly be considered timeless by many, the games that are fondly remembered and still enjoyed to this day are the ones that play great, as well as be any combination of good-looking, good-sounding or well-written.

 

I personally believe gameplay only carries the experience so far. You can have a game that plays great but looks and sounds mediocre, and while it will be entertaining, it won't be what it could have been.

 

I am in full agreement, Roop. You touched on everything in your blog post that I also believe. People don't look at video games as any more than children's toys, always have, but gaming has become so much more than that to the point that video games even got their own exhibit in a museum dedicated to the technological wonder of interactive gaming!

I am in full agreement, Roop. You touched on everything in your blog post that I also believe. People don't look at video games as any more than children's toys, always have, but gaming has become so much more than that to the point that video games even got their own exhibit in a museum dedicated to the technological wonder of interactive gaming!

 

There will always be people who call forms of art meaningless. I mean, didn't people call the piano "evil" or something? That's kinda off-topic, but meh, worth bringing up.

 

I believe many more people would see video games as deeper and more thought-provoking, if the only games they saw weren't the sepia-tone muscleman shooters and such that are the norm these days. It's like how in cartoons from ages ago, when a sitcom needed to have a character play a video game, they just put a space ship on a screen, added nonsensical names and threw in random beeps and blips. Generalizing, in other words. Happens to all mediums, but video games get it worse.

 

It makes me happy to see that people are looking past that more and more these days. Still, we have such things as angry mobs saying VIDEO GAMES MAKE PEOPLE GO KILL EACH OTHER, so there's still a lot of progress to be made.

There will always be people who call forms of art meaningless. I mean, didn't people call the piano "evil" or something? That's kinda off-topic, but meh, worth bringing up.

 

I believe many more people would see video games as deeper and more thought-provoking, if the only games they saw weren't the sepia-tone muscleman shooters and such that are the norm these days. It's like how in cartoons from ages ago, when a sitcom needed to have a character play a video game, they just put a space ship on a screen, added nonsensical names and threw in random beeps and blips. Generalizing, in other words. Happens to all mediums, but video games get it worse.

 

It makes me happy to see that people are looking past that more and more these days. Still, we have such things as angry mobs saying VIDEO GAMES MAKE PEOPLE GO KILL EACH OTHER, so there's still a lot of progress to be made.

 

Indeed. Especially with this Connecticut shooting that happened. By all reasons it was just another shooting....OH but people found out he plays video games! THEY MUST BE THE PROBLEM!

Wholeheartedly agreed with this blog, and all replies I brohoofed. When writing stories, I frequently get my inspiration from games (played or just watched) as well a movies.

The advantage of videogames is that they're interactive, you can walk around and look at everything.

 

There's a problem when they're too hard of course; it gets boring and repetitive, and if you can't save shortly before the hard part, it's really frustrating to go through everything just because you fail at that one point. That's where I decide to quit, and watch some gameplay videos instead. But that's off-topic.

 

However, it's most definitely a form of art, and like all kinds of art, they can be good or bad. And beyond that, there are different characteristics that help make each game unique.

The visuals can be stylized (Sonic Riders) or realistic (Deadly Creatures), the storyline intricate (Okami) or simple (Spore Hero), the controls complex (Super Smash Brothers series) or basic (Call Of Duty series), the races and species real (ObsCure) or imaginary (Legend Of Spyro series), the settings realistic (And Then There Were None) or fantastic (Super Mario Brothers)...