Will the games boom birth a new art form?

[imomus]

This year, writes John Lanchester in the current London Review of Books, video games will earn more money in the UK than CD and DVD sales combined (£4.64 billion for games, £4.46 billion for all CD and DVD sales.) This was reflected in our flat this week; I bought a video game (for the Wii console I gave Hisae for Christmas) but certainly didn't

Comments

[krskrft]

I think the biggest hurdles thus far are, as you mentioned, the cost of making games, and as you didn't mention, the absolute top-down nature of the publishing/distribution process. For PC games, the latter isn't as big a problem, but when it comes to development of console games, the console manufacturers basically control, at all levels, what can or cannot be played on their systems. In that way, the video game world very much like TV right now, in that while you may manage to create the content (despite its great expense, depending on the scope of the project), you can't just come along and broadcast it wherever you like

[krskrft]

True, but as I understand it, there's still a top-down gatekeeper process as far as what gets published/distributed via the XBox Live system. And of course, this is to say nothing at all about the closed system console manufacturers currently operate regarding the retail discs they allow to be played on their systems. The bottom line is that they control their proprietary software development kits, so however you look at it, the process is top-down. And while it's becoming easier for independent developers to break through, certainly, via XBox Live and whatnot, they still have a lot of work to do as far as developing opportunities for autonomous production/publishing/distribution

[krskrft]

I should adjust my argument a little bit by saying that the video game world is very much like TV before the ubiquity of internet video. It seems as though video games, at least on the console end of things, are still stuck in a relatively conservative system.

[diesel_pioneer]

I think there's a lovely heterogenous relationship between games as the act of playing, and the experience of art.. I've never been ardent videogamer, but by and large the ones that captivate me are the ones which have none of this narrative, task-reward structure. Which provide a framework for one's own games (for instance as a teen I once played GTA 3 for about half an hour just following people around, which in retrospect was, like, totally Vito Acconci) much as some broomsticks, chairs and a bedsheet could be a framework for childrens' games. Like much art that I enjoy, it's about using a framework to one's own ends

[grzeg]

Many have already expounded on the “game-as-art”… I remember your highlights on Myst vis-à-vis Doom.

Seeing passed the fact that most video games are consumer products for purchase, socio-cultural creative forces do exist - not only in making (including user-created content), but in playing video games: an entire generation has grown up immersed with playing video games - they do not read the instruction manual for a video game, they just begin playing and figure things out along the way. It’s the gamers’ mindset, a different way of learning and knowing than the previous linear cultural standard of consuming knowledge. Optimistically, it’s a way of knowing the world as a place of creation - rather than of consumption.

For better or worse, the new medium and art of video games is changing the way we think.

[krskrft]

Just an example of how stultifying the process of publication/distribution can be to an independent artist: This guy made a full-length, old school RPG for the Nintendo DS that actually looks really, really great, certainly of publishable quality, and is now on a 100 day sit down protest because Nintendo refuses to sell him their software development kit, even though he apparently meets all of their requirements (including setting up his own development "business," renting out separate workspace, etc.) to do so.