David Emery OnlineArt and video games
21 February 2008
I have always thought that video games were the future of artistic creation.
Back before I went to university I was faced with a choice: do the ‘art’ thing and study Graphic Design or do the ‘computer’ thing and study Computer Science. I chose the computer route purely because of the potential I saw in the video games industry. Of course, I’ve ended up ostensibly being a designer anyway but that’s a story for another day…
Games have been around in some form or another for only about 30 years, which is practically a blink of an eye in real terms – for comparison, after 30 years commercial films were still silent, relying on a live orchestra for every performance. It feels like in some respects however that the games industry is settling into its skin; the technology race that so typified the last few generations of consoles seems to be mostly over; the massive success of the Wii and its last generation technology (at least in terms of graphics and CPU) has put paid to that.
In the last few years we’ve started to see some dalliances with games that could be truly termed ‘art’. Ico is probably the first best example; while it masquerades as a traditional platform game (and is) it adds a level of emotion not normally found in the genre by coupling your character with a girl that you have to help through the game – the interaction between your character and the person you have to save elevates the game into something truly special.
In the 6 odd years since Ico we’ve seen a whole host of games that are worth thinking about on a more cerebral level; Killer 7, Okami and Rez are prime examples. At the same time, though, we’ve seen things move in exactly the opposite direction.
As any medium matures you start to see different niches emerge as more creators explore the form, and one of the largest explosions in the last few years are games that are fun. Pure games, with little thought to the concepts of plot and narrative, taking little influence from other mediums such as film (which is traditionally games’ primary source of inspiration). This wave of so-called ‘casual games’ was really kick started by Wario Ware on the Game Boy Advance, which was a collection of fast paced mini-games which could range from pressing a button to pick someone’s nose to shaking hands with a dog. Wario Ware pretty much lead directly to both the Nintendo DS, with its touch screen controls, and the Nintendo Wii with its motion sensing remote both of which have lead rise to games that focus on the thrill of activity, as opposed to immersing you with fiction.
The next phase is the continuing opening up of the industry, allowing more and more people access to be able to create games and expose them to a mass audience. At this years annual Games Developer Conference both Microsoft, with its XNA system for Xbox Live and Nintendo with their WiiWare system are opening up there systems further to allow distribution of smaller games, created by smaller teams, over their existing online games stores.
Part of the problem with the industry as it’s set up currently is that it requires big hits and large successes – there’s little room for the smaller independent titles that you see in the film world, for example, as marketing and distribution is so expensive and the cost to develop is so high. Now, these developments aren’t going to help with the cost to develop, but with middleware that does a lot of things for you coupled with the relaxed focus on things like graphics hopefully these are hurdles that are only going to get easier to clear.
Once we get into the position that creating a game that runs on a console connected to your TV is as easy to do as filming a short independent film I think things could start to get very interesting indeed. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the medium yet.