Saturday, March 27, 2010

Then of course there's Minesweeper.

A.K.A Videogames pt. 2




If you took the time to read yesterday's post and agree with everything in it, then you've found some new depth of boredom incurable by Youtube and Solitaire or you're Mr. Coit. Hi Mr Coit! If not, please disregard the previous fifteen words.

So first of all, I'd like to clear up a bit on how yesterday's rant relates to politics. You see, there was this one California guy who wanted video games to have health warning label's attached to them or something. Anyway, here's the new Senate Bill.

But anyway, for you people devoid of all purpose in life, the reason why videogames should be available

ARGUMENTS BY PROMOTION

I could go on about games that are good for your creative thinking or conductive to your periphery learning or good for you to let steam off of: think of how much you learned about Greek Gods by playing games from one of the many developers who treat the murder-and-incest-filled bin of Mythology as a free Idea bucket or how you learned the creative uses for a fishing pole in those obsolete adventure games. Imagine if Charlie Manson had Prototype to blow off steam: dozens of young Milwaukee gay boys would be alive and uncanibalized today. But really, most of those points are a bit arguable and I don't want to get into a lengthy ordeal with them so:

Games are Art

First of all, there really isn't much difference between Video Games and other forms of Media: it's like an interactive Movie that writes a book as you play while occasionally flashing provocative canvases of story(if done right, of course).
Some opponents of video games have tried to classify violence in them the same way as obscenity. Barring the fact that they're all ignorant twats, etc., even some forms of obscenity are treated as protected as having cultural value.

Art is defined as "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." By that definition, some of the more abstract video games would certainly qualify: journeys through the swirling gyres of geometric environment from the hallucinations of Frederich Chopin certainly offer 'more than ordinary significance', as do all those open to interpretation games that sacrifice fun for sending a message, and with the Playstation 3 having arguably the most advanced graphics system in the world (So much that the military buys them up for cheap processing power) meaning most of the games for it have ridiculously pimped-out graphics. For everyone else, there exists caricatures for games that want to paint a picture or send a message.
But I think art means something more than just pretty shapes and hidden messages. Books and Movies, the other literary art mediums, immerse you in a different world, assuming they're done right of course. Magical Schools? Rebel Alliances? Both offer an immersible world and interesting characters that provoke a response in the viewers. Whoever directed Wrath of Kahn said something along the lines of "Well, of course you can kill Spock, as long as you do it right", and Bill Waterson said "Entertainment can shock us, discust us, or provoke us, as long as it doesn't bore us". The goal of any entertainment is to entertain, whether it's through fear (horror), interesting facts (non-fictions) or green-skinned space aliens (sci-fi) etc., and that's what many games do.
Rather than rant further about those particualr attributes of those particular games, I encourage you to just check a "Games R ART!" forum or play some yourself. One game I will mention, however, is Bioshock. 18 hours of mucking about in an Objectivist distopia shooting people in the face after setting them on fire satisfies with immersive, well-developed worlds you get to discover all generated by a hormonally-supercharged evironment engine generating the imagination of several abstract artists satisfies all the definitions of art provided, so screw you Michal Atkinson.

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