"We try not to engage in debates as to whether games are art because it tends to be too abstract to be meaningful," adds Sunni Pavlovic, studio manager for thatgamecompany (developers of Journey). "I don't believe that art is something design aspires to," she says. Speaking with Paola Antonelli, curator of the museum's department of architecture and design, the move wasn't a comment on whether video games constitute art but an effort to collect exemplary forms of interaction design.
New York’s MoMA recently added a selection of games to its collection - titles like Dwarf Fortress, Tetris, SimCity 2000 and flOw.
I still haven't had an experience in gaming that has touched me as profoundly as many of the films I have watched in my life and that is a problem for me." "This to me is where games are still lacking - that in-depth dissection of story and protagonists. I think that we're still in the very early stages of exploring narrative and character in the games industry and I think that this is one of the real strengths of art house cinema. "I can think of a lot of games that I would consider to be art but very few that would measure up to the art house film comparison. Jessica Curry, a composer and co-director of game studio The Chinese Room (the developers behind Dear Esther), trained at the UK's National Film and Television School and offers a different perspective.
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"I think there are parallels between the rise of tools like Unity and GameMaker, and the way that cheap and accessible cameras and editing software led to a boom in indie filmmaking in the early ‘90s." When games become cheaper and easier to make, it's not just big studios who get to release them. Smith also sees similarities between our growing access to the tools of game production and those used in making movies. "I think there's certainly a growing art game scene, and how that relates to mainstream games is similar to the way art house cinema often reflects and responds to mainstream cinema."
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Graham Smith, editor of PC Gamer, says one of the benefits of the comparison is that it allows us to see how more experimental gaming sits in relation to famous franchises like Call of Duty. Broadly speaking, it favours artistic or experimental vision rather than packing audiences into a multiplex. Art house is itself a difficult genre to pin down, most people know an art house film when they see one. And it is in describing them to a non-gaming audience, that the art house comparison can be useful. Their unifying characteristic is what they aren’t rather than what they are: none of them fits the traditional video game mould. Kentucky Route Zero is point-and-click game with an atmosphere of magic realism and a focus on dialogue.
Bientôt L'été features a virtual beach where the waves bring thoughts pulled from novels by Marguerite Duras. Two of the best known in recent years – Dear Esther and Journey – involve crossing landscapes, perhaps real or maybe psychological. They are more concerned with atmosphere and mood than with tasks, thrills and action. The games in question are generally those that challenge traditional ideas of what a video game should be. Is art house cinema a useful reference point for these harder-to-pin-down games? But those characterisations are often too broad and a wealth of games are left unaccounted for. Cinema is one of the most frequently used, with ‘blockbuster’, a term borrowed from Hollywood, acting as shorthand for commercially successful mega-budget franchises like Grand Theft Auto. Video games are still carving their identity in the worlds of entertainment and culture, and media coverage often looks to other industries for points of reference.
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