This year’s San Diego Comic-Con was both exhilarating and disappointing: The sheer number of high end games that I was able to take a look at was great; the quality of said games, not so much.

Let’s start with the good news:

Metroid: The Other M looks good; As a member of the “combo-beat’em up” genre it is extremely difficult to tell if it is fun per-se just from looking at it, but the graphics were excellent, and the person playing the game seemed to be having fun. I am a video-gamer and writer, not an empath; I am bad at telling if someone is having fun just by looking at the back of their head.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood’s multiplayer looks absolutely refreshing. What could have easily become a sordid affair of lousy balancing has become an extremely refreshing cat-and-mouse game (at least, that was the theme of the game mode on display.) named “Wanted”. Effectively, there are several players; each is assigned a target, and the object is to kill your target as stealthily as possible while avoiding the person who is sent after you. Did I mention that this mode is played in a crowded city right out of the single-player and that the player models look just like the people walking around in the streets? As a fan of LARP games like “Assassin“, I am now extremely excited for this game.

Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions actually looked good. As a game that I had barely heard of, I was immensely interested in the game’s refreshing, comic-booky, look. Again, like Metroid: The Other M, it is hard to attest to the “fun” of the game (especially since it was not a demo but a gameplay video that was on display), but with some innovations, like first-person fisticuffs in boss battles, I am not going to strike this one off of the noteworthy list just yet.

Gears of War 3 also looks good; the graphics are nice and crisp, and the new Beast mode seems fun. In a nutshell, the players play as Locust soldiers that need to batter down the defenses of a COG hideout and slaughter all inside in a given time-period. What I would be interested in would be if this could be done with players controlling both sides of the battle; a team of COGs defending against a wave of Locusts.

Now for the bad news:

Medal of Honor looks just like Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I really cannot justify a reason for this game to exist, except for the hope that its single-player campaign is better than the Bad Company one (which is not that tall of an order, seeing as Bad Company 2 had a really bad storyline). It seems as if EA is following a new production path: “Same game, now even less funny”.

Halo: Reach looks just like every other Halo game in existence. While I may still buy it, seeing as I am the only 360 owner without a Halo game to my name, I cannot justify this purchase for anyone that owns Halo 3.

Playstation Move looks awful. Two games were on display: SOCOM, and a swordfighting game. The SOCOM game looked like a Wii shooter, but even less fun. Remember how I said that I cannot tell if someone is having fun just by looking at them. I take that back. THE BOY PLAYING THE GAME WAS NOT HAVING FUN. On the other side, the boy playing th swordfighting game was looking visibly tired (not to mention frustrated) whilst playing the game. Who wants that? The only time I want to be tired after playing a video-game is if its name is Wii fit. If I wanted to become tired playing a game, I would go outside, and play a sport. Video-games are for when I am too tired (read: too lazy) to do that.

Red Faction: Armageddon’s graphics were bad. While some of the gameplay innovations looked fun, such as being able to create your own cover, and the integral destruction that is now synonymous with the words “Red Faction”, the graphics were abysmal. To put it in perspective, Metroid: The Other M looked better than Red Faction: Armageddon (though to be fair, that is as much a credit to Metroid as a demerit to Red Faction). Add to this a trite storyline pulled out of the dark abyss of cliche, and I cannot say that I am excited for this game any longer (which is a shame).

Playstation’s 3D was disappointing. While it is hard to judge the graphics as the game on display was a mere remake of an older game, a cartoony aerial dogfight simulator featuring Sly, the 3D itself was annoying: if I moved my head even slightly from a perfect center with the TV, the 3D would break. I cannot attest to headaches and motion-sickness induced by it as I only played it for about two minutes before becoming bored, so I can only say this: Ye of small attention spans, fear no headaches here.

In short, my visit to Comic-Con has completely re-written my expectations for this year and the next, though I am noticing a trend: Companies like Activision and EA are just trying to sledgehammer their way through games development: Their philosophy is that the next game has to be BIGGER, BETTER GRAPHICS, and WITH MORE EXPLOSIONS, and THE SAME FRICKIN GAMEPLAY AS THE PREDECESSOR WE GOT BORED WITH, where the real answer is to come up with something original, like the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, or Spider-Man’s graphics. We have reached the point where graphics have become so good, there is almost no point in improving them; work should instead be spent doing more interesting things with them. New ideas must be explored, not discarded.

Also posted (by me) on Bitmob: http://www.bitmob.com/articles/comic-con-in-review

Spore, the game-that-would-have-been-but-failed-spectacularly-because-it-tried-to-do-too-many-things-at-once-and-ended-up-doing-mediocrely-at-all-of-them is getting a reboot. And yes, Maxis is still trying to do everything at the same time. This time around, they are making an RPG and are using the Spore mechanics of “evolving” your creatures to upgrade your character. That in itself doesn’t seem so bad; Spore iteration for the DS was effectively a Spore RPG, and a darker version of that could be okay. However, on top of this is some sort of Pokemon-esque, with tag-teams of three different spore creatures under your command, as well as five different types of spore parts that fit into 3 different class archetypes. Meh. And don’t forget the cheesy pseudo-science names like “plasma-genesis”. No thank you.

Also, there’s a super grungy trailer:

Maxis is serious guys, and they have a grungy trailer to prove it.

It’s still too early to really tell if this game is going to be good, but so far… don’t get your hopes up.

Also on Bitmob!

I will not lie to you, I have been obsessed with Singularity (360, PC, Ps3), by Raven Software and Activision, ever since I played it back at Comic-Con 2009 (I believe I even wrote a post about it). At that point, it blew me away completely. Nearly a year later, it is still an excellent game, even if it is completely different from the game I played at Comic-Con.

Singularity’s storyline is surprisingly coherent, despite the standards that have been set by time-travel based stories whether they be in book, movie, or game form. In a nutshell (and I will try to be as spoiler free as possible), it is set place in an alternate universe 2010, in which the Soviet Union had found an extremely powerful but volatile energy source, Element-99 on an island of the coast of Kamchatka, Katorga-12. At the beginning of the game Captain Nathaniel Renko, an American Black Ops agent, is sent on a mission to investigate anomalies on Katorga-12. From there, predictably, all hell breaks loose. However, despite the beginning of the game being wracked with such utter confusion, the plotline is fairly intriguing and worthy from that point forward, reminiscent of Bioshock, as well as containing several “travel through time to correct the present” elements, similar to 1c’s Cryostasis. There is even a moral choice at the end of the game, though a certain lack of clarity as to how to proceed with the “good” ending led me to accidentaly ending up with the “really bad” ending. My only complaint about the storyline is that the characters in the story are extremely cardboard; literally no depth or character development is involved in the entire game.

The gameplay of Singularity is excellent, with a good learning curve, introducing new aspects at just the right time to maintain interest. In addition to conventional weapons (which are regrettably imbalanced; as the sniper rifle, shotgun, and chain-gun are pretty much the only weapons worth using), you are able to use time-control based abilities; allowing you to knock back enemies with a blast of force, age them to dust, freeze time in an area, or turn enemies into “reverts”, zombies that will attack anything that moves. On top of this, there are such special weapons (weapons that cannot be conventionally bought from a weapons locker, and must instead be picked up within levels) as  the Seeker, which fires a bullet that you can then control, using it to target enemies that lay behind cover. The game’s feel is much like that of a survival horror, such as  Dead Space, though during the final level of the game your time-control abilities are completely unlocked, allowing you to completely decimate waves of enemies; even at this point, the game retains an element of difficulty, as you are forced into environments that put you at more and more of a tactical disadvantage. The enemy variety is excellent, and you will find that you have to develop radically different strategies to defeat different enemies. In addition to the stellar combat there are also several challenging puzzles; there is even a certain inanimate object reminiscent of Portal’s Companion Cube. All in all, the game is very well paced andl is an extremely fun ride.

The graphics of the game are decent, with varied environments and good lighting. The soundtrack is also good, as is the voice-acting, my only complaint being two minor aesthetic decisions: The first is the horrid Russian accents that all of the characters have. Yes, I realize that it is Russia, and that Russians speak with Russian accents (for the most part) when they speak English, and it makes sense that they speak English to you as they can see you are an American from your military uniform, but why do they have communist propaganda in English? Use subtitles for crying out loud! The second issue that I have with it is the insistence on using backwards “r”s at literally every opportunity. Yes, there is a letter in the Russian alphabet that looks like a backwards “r”, but it makes an “s” noise! These annoyances aside, the graphics and soundtrack are good complements to the game as a whole.

God damn it you incorrect R

The single-player campaign of Singularity is rather short, clocking in at around 8 hours, but it has plenty of replay value thanks to alternate endings and the “this only makes sense if you knew the ending ahead of time” time-travel elements of the plot. It also has a multiplayer mode, which despite some original interesting addition of letting you play as one of the mutants in a multiplayer arena, the novelty quickly disappears, as thanks to a brutally slow health regeneration system, you will get exactly one kill per life almost every single time.

Overall: 9/10, buy if you love games like Bioshock, otherwise rent.

Seeing as it is Twilight season yet again, go out armed! Proclaim that you belong to Team: Fortress 2!

Alternatively, you can join Teams Nosferatu, Tyler’s Van, or Cthulhu

As a video game blogger, I usually stay far away from politics in what I write. However, this one issue is too relevant to ignore: Senators are proposing to give the president a kill-switch for the internet.

Effectively, what this would do is that, in the case of national security being compromised by an attack (which, to their credit, is a legitimate concern), the president could flip a switch (or in the collective internet’s imagination, push a giant red button) and shut down most of the internet, including government, business, and even video game servers in the process.

The first nagging issue about this is “Wait, they’re shutting down servers that we pay monthly to be able to use! Will we get our money back?” In fact, the answer to this question is no. Part of the bill states on page 87 line 16 that

“the covered entity shall not be liable for any punitive damages intended to punish or deter, exemplary damages, or other damages not intended to compensate a plaintiff for actual losses;”

Basically, what this means is that not only are you not guaranteed your money back, the companies can do whatever they want with your money after the president hits the switch. There is a bright side though:

“noneconomic damages may be awarded against a defendant only in an amount directly proportional to the percentage of responsibility of such defendant for the harm to the plaintiff, and no plaintiff may recover noneconomic damages unless the plaintiff suffered physical harm.”

Which translates roughly into saying that no, the CEOs of service providing companies are not allowed to rape you after the president hits the switch.

However, there are more issues with this bill: Instead of making us safer, it actually endangers us even more. With this bill, all a terrorist has to do to shut down our internet is to hack into some minor priority government website, scare the hell out of the president, and BOOM, bye-bye internet. Sure, he won’t be able to access important information and such, but HE JUST SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET! That in itself will cause irreparable psychological and economic damage to the country (not to mention the fact that nobody will have a clue what is going on, leaving the country exposed to more conventional, physical, forms of attack). In an analogy, in a scenario where you cut your hand on something dirty, instead of the government applying anti-septic to your hand to kill the infection, it decides to turn your brain off. Yes, the infection won’t spread, but neither will you!

This man may become sole controller of our internet, yet he has admitted that he has no idea what the difference is between an iPad and an Xbox

Finally, this kill switch is in the hands of the president. Last time I checked, there was no pre-requisite for candidacy that involved tech-smarts. Which means that the technological lifeline of the entire country is in the hands of someone who may or may not know a single thing about what is at stake. This sort of switch should be subject to a panel of five sys-admins, not one guy who’s only real clear strength is the ability to make good speeches.

Click to view the 197 page bill (In PDF format)

SOURCE

Also published by me on Bitmob

Valve recently announced that Portal 2 was going to be delayed. However, instead of the mass anger and shock, or at least annoyance that would accompany a similar announcement from pretty much any other publisher (because, despite their humble origins as the developers of Half-Life and their continued first party releases, Valve is really more of a publisher  than a developer now), we almost felt a feeling of appreciation, of companionship with them. This is by no means a rational reaction, but regardless of this, it is espoused by pretty much all of the gaming industry.

When Activision or EA screw up, everyone is talking about it and criticizing it brutally. Even arguably beneficial moves such as EA’s ‘used tax’ that forces people that buy a game ‘used’ to have to pay to play online are thrust under a spotlight of extreme scrutiny. And forget about getting away negative moves, such as Activision’s almost indefensible move to fire Vince Zampella and Jason West to try to deny them their bonuses for making a succesful game. However, when Valve messes up, everyone, myself included, seems eager to say “it’s okay”, or laugh along; it barely takes any criticism at all for what is a negative move in all aspects of the word.

You don’t blame them either

This behavior is puzzling to say the least. However, the weirdest thing is that even though Valve is notorious for never making timely releases (the concept of “Valve Time” is so universal, it even has its own heading on the Valve Wikipedia page!) we let Valve get away with it every single time. Even Valve realizes its reputation, even mentioning, nay, trumpeting that fact in their announcement of the games forthcoming lateness:

“…indicating the follow-up to the “ground-breaking title that earned over 30 Game of the Year awards despite missing its original ship date” would not be ready in time…”

In this quote, Valve even seems to be saying “we’re so awesome we can do what we want with our release dates”! Its outrageous that instead of becoming offended, people feel compelled to be nice to Valve as a result and only get more excited for the game. Why do we put up with this?

Valve believes that this is a triumph

The reason, I believe, is that despite their horrid timeliness issues, Valve has still largely been good to the gaming populace. Pretty much every single game they have made has been excellent (unlike say, EA’s [insert random sport franchise here]), they have been kind to modders by making their games infinitely moddable, which is arguably part of their allure (Unlike say Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). Finally, Steam is a great, convenient system, and with it Valve goes beyond the call of duty (pun always intended). In fact, with the exception of the rampant delays, Valve has had only one failing in recent memory, that of releasing Left 4 Dead 2 only a year after the first Left 4 Dead and not delivering on anywhere near the amount of downloadable content that they had promised.

As a whole, I guess you could say what saves Valve is the fact that they have character. When they deliver on what they do, it never fails to impress. And even when they do not deliver, they do it with style: if you have not read the official letter from Valve explaining the reason that Portal 2 is late, you should definitely check it out for a few laughs.

So, despite their failings now, I will definitely be lining up (in spirit only, thanks to Steam) to buy Portal 2  the day it comes out.

Also posted by me on Bitmob: http://www.bitmob.com/articles/stockholm-syndrome-valve-why-do-we-still-love-you

I apologize for not updating more; I have been busy working on a (gasp) podcast. You can now hear me, as well as several other members of the Mac-PC gamers community on All Your Base Radio! As a result however, I will be putting up less editorial posts, in favor of more and more reviews. Speaking of which, here is one:

For five years, Xbox 360 gamers have been awaiting the release of the psyochological horror game Alan Wake (360), developed Remedy and published by Microsoft. The game, stuck in a long development cycle, has finally come out, and while it occaisionally shows the fact that parts of the game were made five years ago, as a whole it delivers.

The plot of the game is excellent, containing all of the necessary elements for a pyschological horror game. To give as few spoilers as possible, Alan Wake, a popular writer, goes on vacation to a secluded town in the Pacific Northwest (oh yes, good idea Mr. Wake) whilst suffering from two years of writer’s block. The next phase involves extreme confusion, and eventually, we find Alan regaining consciousness in a car crash a week later, with his wife missing, and foreboding beings of shadow trying to hack him into tiny pieces. The plotline is rich with excellent characters that really stand out; the only parts that are flawed are the character Agent Nightingale, an FBI agent that is antagonistic towards Wake for literally no reason (methinks a bit of background story was cut out here), and the ending, which is very sub-par compared to the rest of the game. Finally, there is the option within the game to find manuscript pages, pieces of a book supposedly written by Wake during the week he cannot remember, and they help to fill in the backstory. Unfortunately, you must actually read them (or hold them open and listen to Alan Wake’s voice read them), as opposed to the Bioshock style “play the message while continuing to adventure” method, which is a real let down.

The gameplay is excellent, with great controls and user interface. Your main weapon in the game is light; you must first shine a flashlight (or use a flare, flash-bang, or other light-based device) at your enemy before you can deal any damage against them with conventional weapons. The pacing is great for most of the game, and the game keeps you right on the borderline of running out of ammo, which will force you to sprint to the next safe haven (in the form of a particularly bright street light) while trying to dodge enemy attacks. However, the pacing breaks down towards the end, as the creepy exploration horror is replaced with last stands against the creatures of darkness while your allies take forever to warm up a helicopter, open a door, or do something similar. Additionally, the last level was extremely poorly designed: It can roughly be described as “get in a car, drive a mile, get out, run a hundred yards, kill two enemies, get in a new car conveniently located in front of you, drive another mile, rinse and repeat for about thirty minutes”. Still, as a whole, the game manages to be very creepy, even at the lower difficulty levels.

The graphics of the game are a mixed bag; thanks to a five-plus year development period, a lot of the graphics feel outdated; the way that characters animate just looks wrong, and faces are only capable of showing one emotion, so overall the graphics are so-so. However, this is combined with absolutely excellent shadow and light effects, and thanks to the generally dark setting, these tend to trump over the worse aspects of the graphics. The soundtrack of the game is great, and with the exception of one ridiculous level played on the stage of a heavy metal concert, it adds to the creepy feel of the game. The voice-acting is great, however the timing seems off: The characters mouths move in completely different patterns from what they are saying; I’ve seen better mouth-voice synchronicity in bootleg anime dubbed in Spanish (don’t go there).

As a whole, the game is excellent, delivering chills, especially in the dark. Despite the relative shortness of the game, clocking in at about eight and a half hours for a play-through, the game has a lot of replay value, with tons of collectible stuff accross multiple difficulty levels. Additionally, with free DLC (assuming you bought the game new) coming out a month from now and even more DLC coming out after that, the game will entertain for plenty of time.

Overall: 9/10 Buy

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction by Ubisoft Montreal (PC, 360) is an amazing game, with one caveat: It is not a Splinter Cell game. While that may sound perplexing, seeing as “Splinter Cell” is in the title, right between “Tom Clancy’s” and “Conviction”, it barely resembles any of its predecessors in pacing, tone or gameplay. That being said, it is still a great game.

The plot of the game is completely incomprehensible; even after completing the game, I had to check several different internet sources to get the full story. Somewhere through the blur, I picked up the themes of revenge, Sam Fisher (the protagonist)’s missing daughter, betrayal, more betrayal, pointless car-bomb that kills pointless character for no particular reason, even more betrayal, and giant EMPs. However, despite this, the pacing of the game is great: the entire game feels extremely cinematic, with fluid combat and ridiculously amazing actions available literally at the touch of a button. I realize that it is very hard to convey this feeling in words, but I will leave it at this: The game feels more fluid and cinematic than actual cinema, and some of the sequences put even James Bond films to shame.

The gameplay is great, with a very easy feel of the transition between hiding and quick flurries of action. Splinter Cell: Conviction offers stealth based gameplay, like its predecessors. Unlike its predecessors, however, it is much more quickly paced, with less hiding from cameras and navigating unseen: In a sentence, instead of lurking in the shadows, you are striking from them. To facilitate this, new to this game is the “last known position”, which shows an outline over the last place  the enemy saw you. This can be used to then flank enemies, and is an entire strategic mechanic of its own. Also new to this game is the “mark and execute feature”, which allows you to mark enemies, and then dispatch from two to five of them instantly with a flurry of shots. Finally, it is easier to tell when you are concealed or not, as instead of a meter that you need to be constantly checking, the game now turns grayscale when you enter the shadows. Unfortunately, this makes the graphics less impressive, and you will often bump into objects you can barely see while cloaked in the shadows. In my opinion, a look more akin to the muted landscape and glowing enemies of Assassin’s Creed would have benefitted the game much more (especially considering that Conviction and Assassin’s Creed are made by the same studio). However, the shadows are a mild nuisance, and the game delivers regardless, in part thanks to its great AI system: The enemies will move around realistically, creeping up to, and then quickly jumping out to where they think you are in an attempt to surprise you. The single-player campaign is rather short, lasting only about six hours, but there are plenty of miscellaneous missions that you can do by yourself, not to mention multiplayer modes and an entire co-op campaign.

The multiplayer in the game is quite enjoyable, featuring several different modes. There is a full-fledged co-op campaign (all co-op can be done either in split-screen or with players over Xbox Live), as well as stand-alone mission modes. In Hunter, you have to eliminate sets of enemies patrolling an area (prefferably without alerting them, which causes them to call in reinforcements). There is also Face-Off, which plays like Hunter, except the two human players are head to head, trying to eliminate AI enemies and each other to reach the highest point total. Another mode is Last Stand, where players are tasked with defending an objective from successive waves of enemies. Finally, there is Infiltration, which is a throwback to the original Splinter Cells; you must navigate through an entire level without being detected. Additionally, the multiplayer modes can be played against people through a matchmaking system (as opposed to the Modern Warfare 2 Spec-Ops co-op multiplayer, where you could only play against people on your friends list), and all of the modes except Face-Off are playable in single-player mode as well.
The graphics of the game are decent, even though 70% of the game is played in a grayscale. The soundtrack is good, and the voice-acting as a whole is excellent. However, one annoyance is that when enemies are alerted to your presence, they will effectively begin yelling insults and threats towards you such as “stop hiding in the shadows like a ******, Fisher” and “I had friends at the [insert previous level location] Fisher”. While I realize that this serves the purpose of effectively telling you that enemies are still around, I wish that they had come up with more realistic lines for them, like maybe communicating with other members of their squad (not to mention how odd it is that they immediately know that they are being attacked by Sam Fisher).

Overall, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction delivers, even though it strays from the path beaten in by its predecessors. It features full fledged single player and multiplayer experiences, and it has plenty of replay value.

Overall: Buy 8.5/10

Having played about four hours into Splinter Cell: Conviction, I have noticed two new trends in gaming this year: Immoral characters and desperate dads.

Lately, tons of games are beginning to abandon the premise that you are the good guy that plays by the rules. While there have certainly been games like Grand Theft Auto where you break the law and do immoral things, throughout these games have still tried to make your character likeable and sympathizable with.

Not anymore.

Games are beginning to accept that they are but narratives: The player does not have to reach a happy ending, he just has to finish the story. As a result, many games are taking their protagonists off the deep end and making them extremely immoral, even unlikable. God of War 3 has done it: Kratos was still a pretty gruff guy in the first two games, but now in the third game he is literally a monster. The developers seem to have realized this, and they even play some of the god-killing quicktime events from the point of view of the god that is being utterly decimated; you are shown what a bastard Kratos is becoming. Likewise, in Splinter Cell, the goal is no longer to protect innocents, or to save anyone: The whole game is to kill off the people that killed Sam Fisher’s daughter, in droves. Sam Fisher becomes an utter bastards, and his brutal interrogation sequences show it.

Another recurring theme this year is fathers trying to find/avenge their daughters. God of War, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Nier, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and even Bioshock 2 share this motif, and quite honestly, it is getting annoying. Find some other reason to have the titular character go on an adventure/rampage please, it’s getting annoying.

Come back Monday for a fullSplinter Cell: Conviction review!

Before reading this article, please realize that I am not here to prove a point per-se. In writing this, I am having an equivalent of a philosophical battle of whether or not games are art. I intend to take whatever position I find to be the most accurate after I run through the facts: As I am writing this preface, I still do not know what my end result will be. Read on:

Roger Ebert says that video-games are not art. However, his article has actually very little to do with whether or not games are art; instead, it merely pokes holes in a previous argument he was provoked by. Penny Arcade’s response to Roger Ebert manages to do exactly the same thing, except against Roger Ebert. In this article, I will try to avoid this petty arguing as much as possible, and instead I will focus on the actual question: Are games art?

The first problem with defining games as art is that brings up the question “What is art?”. One could say that art is difficult to create, but most post-modernist painters have proved that one false. I could say that art is beautiful, but Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange is definitely art, but is likewise anything but beatiful: It is dark and violent. One could say that art is visual, but music is also art, and unless you count album covers, it is not visual. My personal view of art for quite some time until I began writing this was a medium through which an artist conveys meaning to the viewer, but then this blog could also be considered art. That point of view would be flawed. As a result, I believe that art is an expression of the artists opinion which the viewer can either decide to like or dislike in complete subjectivity. While everyone agrees that Leonardo DaVinci was very talented, that does not mean that you have to like his work. Likewise, I can think that “2+2=4″ is beautiful, but ultimately, it is a fact: “2+2″ can not equal anything other than “4″. There is no opinion as to whether it is right or wrong. While it seems like blogging, or any form of argument would also fall into the category of art, that is incorrect. Ultimately, I will be either correct or incorrect: Eventually, I will be either proven wrong or right, and thus agreeing with me would no longer be subjective and this would no longer be art.

If that is our definition, then video games are certainly art. They can be either good or bad, and they can convey the artist’s opinion. That is not to say that all games are to be valued: I’m a vide0-game critic, my job is to ultimately tell you that some games are garbage. But the same is true about books, music and movies! What I think is novel about games as an art form is the depth of the medium: It has visual art in the form of graphics, narrative art in the form of a plotline, audio art in the form of the soundtrack, and it has the art of allowing you to experience the art’s world from the inside. Regardless of how much you wish, you are not Harry Potter. You experience a movie storyline as a bystander, at best. However, in a video-game, you are the character. You can experience the entirety of the artist’s vision, not just a two-dimensional sliver of it. And as a result, you will be forced to make choices, that fully show the depth of the art: The simple fact that I could not bring myself to kill a Little Sister in Bioshock is proof of this, I have been subjected to the artists’ world, and I have experienced their ideas.

There will be people who will disagree with me. I will attempt to anticipate their arguments:

1. Video Games are violent:

I will begin this by saying that not all games are violent. However, I will follow that statement by saying “Who Cares?”. Many extremely valued movies, books, and songs (not to mention the countless paintings depicting bloody torture and massacres), are extremely violent but are still considered art.

2. Video Games have a point: They can be won

Again, my answer to this is “So what?”. The ultimate thing is that in winning a game, you are completing the artist’s vision. “You win” is just a way of the artist saying “I’m done, move along”. By winning the game, you have gone through the artist’s meaning first. Saying that games are not art because you can win them is like saying that movies are not art because they have a credit roll at the end.

3. Video Games are for Children

This is not true in the slightest, however, someone will say it. I reiterate: Games are not just for children, they are deep and can convey meaning to people of all ages.

In conclusion, it is my belief that games are definitely art, and that there can be no other description for them.

But don’t take my word for it, leave comments.