When I started playing video games, a wide-eyed child fascinated with the concept of taking the moving pictures on the television and telling them what to do with my NES controller, the core ideas behind gaming were simple and concrete; you’d move Mario to the right because that was the only damn direction to go, you`d jump on top of enemies for points, and it ended with you fighting some inscrutable boss creature. Essentially the idea of distinct levels, a lives system, and points, hoo boy were there points to accumulate.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I’m unsure if you’re aware of this, but The Future (with intended capitalization!) is finally upon us! I now have no doubt that we are mere years away from floating cities, flying cars, jetpacks, and everything else the 1950’s promised we’d have decades ago! Why am I so sure? Two words: Motion. Gaming.
But sir, you’re undoubtedly asking, what is motion gaming? How’d it come to be? To which, if I can answer properly, I must respond by going on a little history lesson. Going all the way back to the dark days of November, 2006, and the release of the Nintendo Wii. At the end of the last gaming generation, with the three-headed monster that was the Xbox, the Playstation 2, and the Gamecube all fighting each other for supremacy in the video game market, there were clear winners and losers within this struggle.
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The concept of “Video Games as Art” has been a hotly contested topic, with its origins coming into the mainstream only within the last decade. Many see gaming as nothing more than the puerile pursuit of young boys and bloodthirsty, mal-adjusted teenagers, and have been quickly dismissive of the “Games as art” belief. Roger Ebert himself wrote that he believes games could never be as artistically worthy as literature or cinema. Many others, myself included, beg to differ, and can attest that there are moments within video games that have struck us with such sadness, passion, or joy that no other word but art could possibly describe what we had been playing.
To be fair, the definition of “art” is a bit…murky, and depending who you ask could mean any number of things. And to be even MORE fair, there are an exceeding number of games out there which are most certainly NOT art… at least from my opinion. For every “Shadow of the Colossus” that gets released we get dozens upon dozens of forgettable first-person shooters. But the point of this article, as I fumble to get back on topic, is to display a couple of games, in no particular order, that I feel are unequivocally “art.” These are solely choices of my own opinion, and if you disagree with my opinions, or are absolutely horrified that I missed your favourite piece of gaming art, feel free to call me a moron.
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An exceptional time in familiar territory
The life of Mario must be an exhausting one. When he’s not trudging his way through another eighteen holes of golf, painting artistic masterpieces with a mouse pad, or simply training for the next Olympics, he’s being forced off his Italian-stereotyped ass and pushed into action to save a comically inept blonde from giant turtles, as many as multiple times a week. There must be days where Mario just sighs and wonders if he’s not stuck in some “Groundhog Day”-esque nightmare.
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