Children and Art

Some of my title posts only make sense to me.

Anyway...

Today I picked up BioShock, a new game for the xbox360 and PC. There has been a debate for some time, as technology has evolved and fully formed narratives have been possible in gaming, as to whether a game could ever be considered "art."

Roger Ebert wrote a very well-formed piece giving his opinion on that matter some time ago, and while I'm too lazy at the moment to google it and provide you with the link here, it's out there. (I'll probably come back to edit this and put the link here.)

It's not something I've had much of an opinion on, though I have basically held that there's no reason a game couldn't be art. Art is such a hard concept to define. Art versus craft...

Well, in starting up BioShock I have for the first time found myself feeling that a game has answered that question. Defined what a gaming, as art, can be. Narrative, visual, suspense...

I'm a casual gamer, though in the last few entries I have mentioned games. I'm looking forward to a game like Halo 3 because it's a great game to play with friends as much as I'm really intrigued to know where this story goes, how it ends.

When I was a kid games didn't have stories unless they were in the booklet the game came with. You had one button and an Atari Joystick, your imagination had to conjure up whatever objects were vaguely suggested by the pixels onscreen. Nintendo wasn't much better. Sega Genesis, well... so on and so on.

We're now to the point where developers and game designers are, must be, storytellers. Halo 3 will make more money in one day, from pre-orders alone, than the biggest entire WEEKEND Hollywood has ever had.

They're making a Halo movie, which while being hard-pressed to capture the scale and story of that epic series will likely have less of a hard time than anyone who tries to adapt BioShock.

Playing BioShock, I found myself not thinking "they should make this into a movie," but that this was far better than a movie, more fully realized than it could be as a simple film. I have to agree with my friend John, in a way. He wrote me recently and said that he wasn't all that excited about a film of the novel THE LOVELY BONES. He said those characters had been haunting him in the years since he read the novel and he'd prefer they go on haunting him in their own way.

Don't do a spit take with your coffee when you read what I'm about to write.

I think video games are reaching that point, along with books and film, where their experience can become a personal and involving one that would be diminished by being distilled to another art form.

Thoughts