Video games are one of my favorite hobbies. They are fun,
engaging, and challenging all at once. Video games have become popular hobbies
for like-minded people, including myself. Today, thousands of people play video
games. There are several different issues in games that stand but today I’d
like to focus on one: are video games art?
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| Dragon Age and its sequel use a dialogue tree system, in which the player character can say (almost) anything they want. |Source| |
Video games, like films, are visually stimulating. Both have
pretty colors and flashing light but that’s not the only thing to their
presentation. Films challenge artists to tell their stories and messages through
what the viewer will see. Video games do the same, but the approach is more
direct and interactive. When you watch a movie, you can’t control what’s going
to happen. The good guy will save the world in the exact way that the directors
want. With video games, however, players are part of the story telling process,
where what they do has some sort of effect on the present situation. Games like
Dragon Age and Mass Effect have taken the player’s interaction into consideration
and let them make their own decisions that affect the story of the game on
major levels. The developers of these games make you feel like you were part of
a writing process and that’s what makes them enriching, in my opinion.
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| The Last of Us is one of the most memorable games of the past generation. |Source| |
On the other hand, a common complaint among gamers today is that video games are becoming too much like movies. While I personally think
that it’s only a small hand full of developers who are making games too similar
to movies, those developers do indeed make film-like games. Games like The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls are good examples in recent memory. The way I see
it, the reason why gamers don’t want games to be too much like movies is
because they want a strong balance of storytelling and action. They don’t want
to play a story game that doesn’t have any interaction at all, nor do they want
to play an action game that doesn’t at least attempt to have a plot behind it. Gamers
don’t want to watch a boss fight; they want to actually fight the boss. Although
I’m a writer who enjoys the stories of the video games I play, I do think that
action and gameplay is important. If a game isn’t fun to play or hardly
playable at all no one will play it. The games they seem too much like movies
do have some gameplay in them, but there usually isn’t much to the gameplay.
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| Final Fantasy is considered to be a mainstay within the video game community, among Mario and Legend of Zelda, and is known for its Active Time Battle System, one I personally find boring. |Source| |
"I don't think I have what I takes to make a good action game. I think I'm better at telling a story." - Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy.
So, why do these kinds of developers choose to make their
stories into video games instead of films? That’s a difficult question to
answer. Everyone’s motivation is different, but I feel that the reason is
simply because the developers enjoy video games as a medium of art. The
developers are just that; video game developers. That’s their job. They could
choose to make a film instead and, arguably, achieve what they are trying to accomplish
better than they could in their game. Yet, the developers chose to make a game.
I think that video games will eventually become an accepted and respected medium
for adaptations of novels or many even comic books. The Batman: Arkham series of games are a prime example of pop culture
icon adaptation.
Overall, I would say that, yes, video games are art and that
we shouldn’t worry about the unique qualities of gaming going away, for I think
that developers and franchise owners will find that video games are a good
medium for adaptation of other stories.
