Archive for the ‘Games as Art’ Category

For a while now I’ve wanted to write about games as art (“GaA”) and to discuss some of my observations and opinions (right, wrong, or ludicrous) about their evolution (and in some cases their reversion or de-evolution); I know that I want to discuss particular historical points in gaming and that I want to review technological changes that have shaped the way in which games can express certain themes and ideas. I have also, in thinking about this (likely) series of posts, realized that organizing all of the information that is worth talking about is no small feat — I still do not know how all the pieces will fit together.

But today I was inspired with an answer to a fundamental part of the question of organization: “Where to begin?”

One option is to follow a chronological path, trying to climb the disjoint ladder of gaming’s history, but this has been done by others and it is very hard to do well in my opinion. Really, it seems unfair to claim that video games are somehow the beginning of games as art, so to start in the era of Spacewar (or, maybe more appropriately, even earlier) seems to miss a part of the point, but on the other hand I don’t have any suitable academic or experiential background to begin rattling off the details of ancient precursors to games like Backgammon, Chess or Go. Another choice is to approach the discussion thematically, choosing particular themes or ideas and then discussing games and series of games that express them well, but this too misses something of the point I’m struggling to find and explore — it diminishes the overall concept of games as art, reducing them to niches and genres. As you might guess, this list of options could go on for some time, so I’ll spare you any more of it: what I was inspired to do today was to answer the broad and deceptively simple set of questions that, at their root, all amount to “Why?”

Why play games? Why care about games? Why, why, why?

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