@jakkblades said:
@NoelVeiga: Sounds like we're at a stalemate of putting words into the other's mouth. As I've had to explain/defend in response to numerous comments on my post, I don't object at all to the idea of video games as art. I think they have always been art and no amount of COD's will wring that title away from them. My objection is to an outside party educated in the "principles of art" coming in and applying a foreign generalized rubric to this new challenging medium. But now I've been rebuffed so many times I'm in a corner that I don't remember if I wanted to be in to begin with. Suffice it to say, Wasteland was art in 1988 and not one of the designers had a degree from an art school or would have thought they needed it. What they had was experience, playing, making games, both on the table and the computer screen.
That's a more interesting argument, actually, and I still kinda disagree with you.
Game designers have traditionally been programmers, and there's this trend among the old guard these days that they should keep being that. "A designer needs to know how to code" and "engineering-driven gaming studios are the best" and so on.
And... well, yeah, that's mostly true, but it's probably because most people engaged in game making got there through the tech side, not the art side, or the storytelling side. And that's because, frankly, telling stories or making art in movies or novels or whatever tends to pay better, require less work and produce more immediate results, not because they're more compelling media.
So I kind of wish we'd see more of the games a fully committed artist fully engaged in the medium would make, as opposed as getting a bunch of coders and hoping that some of them have artistic sensibilities. It's a lot like film. Many of the best directors ever are photographers. I'm sure if you asked Kubrick whether a director who can't shoot himself could ever be a good director he'd laugh in your face. And yet, some of my favourite movies are made by people who approached the medium from the angle of theatre, or comedy or visual design or even painting.
Games are there right now. They are the art form of the programmer, who becomes a game designer by way of being a programmer who makes interactive art. I kind of want to see more games from people making that trip the other way around. There's always going to be tech there, just like every director can tell you if they want a long lens or not for a shot, but as middleware gets better and more standardized, that barrier of entry is going to start to go away and I'm eager to see what comes of it.
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