Short Blog: Games as Art 2
Yes, first blog in half a year and it will be only a few lines. Since Silent Hill: HC was fairly disappointing for us long-time series fans, I thought a header change was in order. So here's another golden opportunity for a developer to screw it all up. However, I doubt in Team Ico's case they'll perform any less than stellar. It's not like they're handing it off to a US company, right? Nope, they understand what a precious commodity a good idea is. So here we go, the theme of the blog: Another 'Games as Art' topic .... noooo, don't zone off into space on me because this one's going to be easy. What games would you personally classify as art? You don't have to rationalize your decision unless you really want to of course. Here's mine: Bioshock 2, Silent Hill 2, and Shadow of the Colossus. These games understood what atmosphere and emotion can do for a game.
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Alli! Hmm, apparently these are all 360 titles eh?
In general, I just consider Games an art form, and the games I've mentioned are just more "artfull". "Games as art" is becoming one of those terms that get increasingly meaningless as time passes.
If a game can make you forget that it's a game, then it succeeds in creating something more like art.
SH turned out as disappointing? well that's bad
Hello Fari
There are also many others out there that I may have simply forgot to mention. In my opinion, all games are art, for they all seem to provoke emotions and each game can do the latter in its own way.
I haven't come across story-telling and atmosphere as I did in Bioshock, originality and beauty as I did in World of Goo, artistic design as I did in Okami, beautiful writing and puzzle design as I did in Portal and Braid, and Oddworld, well, it really has been a long time...
Good blog IG, and it's good to hear from you.
I also think something needs to be said here about general polish in games. Today, I think there is an obsessive demand for a spit-shine polish on all games that are released to even a small amount of hype. Games like Halo, God of War raised the bar, as did Gears of War and Halo 3. A team that can take risks, like Ubisoft did with the new "artful" PoP, but the game is still safe in that it's relatively small in game-size (something I don't think we'll ever agree on as a community).
This is surely the age of safe bets.
Another game to point out is Borderlands. I really respect that they were near alpha when they said "know what? Let's reset all the 2D and 3D art, and rebuild leaning heavily with the riskier conceptual style that was intended". The game itself comes across as a pretty crass title. But the team working on it are surely approaching it from an artistic perspective.
dQ, I have to agree with you on the PS2. I always thought that we were in the golden age of gaming less than a decade ago. But we've simply lost a little traction lately. There's less and less games pushing any type of boundary and simply tagging another number at the end of a series. Eventually the industry will straighten out and we'll see another revolution. It usually starts with the PC, no? I think games can be produced for less on the PC than it can on the home console.