Are video games art?

That’s a question that a lot of gamers ask each other, and the answer is a tricky one. Many people say that art should only serve itself or… that is shouldn’t be for monetary gain, or there’s no “Citizen Kane” of video games. These are all very complex conversations but there’s one thing that’s important for all mediums be they art or not, their legacy.

Books as I’m sure you know have been around for a very long time. There are spectacular novels out there to be experienced, and I love reading but they have an advantage over video games, you don’t need a console or a TV to experience their moving stories, or their great revelations that have shaped the world we live in. Games require this infrastructure if you will. And until older games started being released as downloads on newer systems, you needed THAT particular console, from that time period that hopefully still worked, and hopefully you could find a copy of this epic game that everyone loves and speaks about.

Imaging this was true of all media, and that the only way you could listen to the Beatles was on a record player with first printings of their albums. Or to read a famous Russian author you’d have to read it in Russian from a hundred year old + printing?

Isn’t that an insane thought?

Good Old Games a great place to get old school PC games - Image via Wikipedia

How quickly would things fall out memory? How many classics would be lost in the shuffle? It’s a scary thought! The same thing has been happening to gaming in the last 20 years, but now it seems that game companies are starting to get a handle on their legacy.

Sony for instance started its PSOne classics line on the Playstation Network, and it’s keeping these old franchises alive for new generations of gamers, same with Nintendo and its Virtual console, full of not only games from Nintendo consoles, but those from Genesis, Neo-Geo and others. Steam and Good Old Games are also keeping older PC titles alive. This is the closest thing we gamers have to a library and it’s an encouraging thought that these games when put up on networks such as these will be there forever.

One of the greatest Video game story telling experiences - Image via Wikipedia

Soon enough, gamers when hearing of a great influential title won’t have to search far and wide, and hopefully with convergence (heaven forbid) games will make it onto other systems as well. I wouldn’t mind playing through Grim Fandango lets say on my PSP or something like it, or maybe System Shock 2. These titles right now are unavailable. Despite their huge influence on the medium no one will re-print them, they need to be ported, and emulators need to be built by these companies to keep the history of games alive.

The longer that games aren’t available in this library of video games the more chance of them falling into the abyss, and forgotten altogether. Collecting will perhaps become a less interesting endeavor, but at least we’ll have an idea on where the medium has come from as gamers, instead of being fed mindless drivel that the modern entertainment establishment is so good at shoving down our throats.

Stories in games are one big component of this. It seems that the more popular games are becoming, the more generic their storylines. Every year ten or more shooters come out with “something bad going down in the Middle East” or “space marines protecting the world from aliens”. In the old days games weren’t always like this. Activision the publisher of the amazingly popular Call of Duty series used to make weird and risky games, one of which, Haunting featuring Polterguy is one of my favorites where you play a punk who was run over by the father of a family, and to get back at them, you haunt every house they go to with hilarious results. Could you see that corporate juggernaut take that kind of risk today? I think gamers having such a short memory for games send new gamers a disservice, sentenced to relive sequel after sequel of games that might have originally broken the mold, but now rest on their laurels and collect money like it’s going out of style until it becomes stagnant enough to be discontinued.

Having older games on hand for everyone to enjoy really makes for a smarter gaming public, one that’s harder to fool and more accepting of new ideas, this is a real change for the industry and it will prevent us from falling into the trap of stagnation that comic books (another artistic medium) was caught in for so long. (If you don’t believe me, name five popular comic book series that aren’t about superheroes or violence).

Coming soon to a PS3 near you? - Image via Wikipedia

Sony releasing PSone Classics, soon PS2 Classics, and (if the rumors are true) Dreamcast classics, is a great thing for gaming. I hope to see other game classics for sale on the network as well, and not just as parts of shovel ware bundles. Buying a great Genesis games for 99 cents would keep me busy on the bus for sure, or perhaps a Neo-Geo or Turbo Graphics 16 game. The Iphone is moving into this territory, and it’s profitable, just look at the sales of Tetris as a “Mini” on the network. These are no-brainer money makers and they’ll make new games coming out even better. Games companies have these IPs just sitting there, being torrented all over the internet they might as well make some money for their former works, just like publishers do with classic novels, or film studios do with classics films. When we do have a Citizen Kane of games, and it’s coming, we’ll have to preserve it for future generations, and that’s what these great projects are doing.

What do you think?

PSOneClassics.com