More to the point, he doesn't think they can be
fine art. Hapadeity actually has the right of it, pretty much anything is art, but there is a difference between, say,
Spiderman 2 and
Seven Samurai. One is a superhero movie with explosions and spandex, and the other is Akira Goddamn Kurosawa. That, I think, is why comparisons to Hollywood fall flat--yes, maybe Modern Warfare 2 has Hollywood-esque production values, but Hollywood is mostly garbage, and what isn't garbage isn't all Fine Art in the same way that, say, Steinbeck is. As much as I love
Star Wars or
Indiana Jones, if the far future enshrines these films as the greatest works of art produced by the twentieth century, I will suicide bomb the entire future.
In any case, just look at the poster kids for the Video Games Are Art crowd: Final Fantasy 6, Braid, and Silent Hill 2. First off, FF6 is crap and the opera scene isn't as good as it would be without the benefit of rose-colored glasses, but putting that aside, the characters aren't developed in the millions of battles that make up the bulk of the game, but in dialogue and cutscenes. It's basically a movie that makes you perform repetitive tasks to advance through each scene. Did Braid as a game--as a brain-bending puzzle game--strike you as art, or was this something that could have been done some other way? (No, let's face it, it's because it had a deliberately obtuse narrative and enough pretty Impressionistic pictures to fake it) Was Silent Hill 2 really improved by the fact that you weren't passively watching the character awkwardly swinging his pipe at a monster, but rather mashing a button and dying when you don't do it and wind up having to repeat the whole damned section over again? These are just movies with really stupid gimmicks. It's like if you were reading a book, but then you had to complete a sudoku before turning each page.
Children of Men is not a movie for the ages, but the guns in that movie scared the hell out of me. In a video game, guns are either a joke, in which case all tension is lost, or guns are super deadly and you spend a whole lot of time dead and frustrated. It took a while for movies to stop being bad plays that you could take anywhere and really come into its own as an art form; likewise, video games aren't leveraging the one thing that makes them different from movies--their interactivity. If someone eventually does come up with something that establishes games as a legitimate form of High Art, then fucking hurray, but in the meantime if I want something that captures the tension and horror of medieval war I'll go to Brannagh's
Henry V, not Medieval 2: Total War.
Of course, this whole discussion is irrelevant because within a generation, up-and-coming art historians of the Nerd Generation will be writing Ph.D dissertations with titles like "Murderous Mushrooms and Bottomless Pits: Mario, Gnosticism, and the Malevolent Materialism of the Mushroom Kingdom," and they will redefine art as we know it as surely as every other fucking generation is.
Edit:
http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/02/...eview.html
Quote: A video game is like a book, one with many chapters. When you get the book, you're only allowed to read the first chapter, and if you don't read it well enough, you have to read it again. When you've finally read the first chapter correctly, you can go on to the next, and after that's read well the next, and so on and so on.
Often it'll just be one particular page that's hard to read, and if you mess it up you'll have to go back and read the whole chapter over from the beginning.
Scattered throughout any given chapter are optional pages, usually very boring and repetitive ones that you're not compelled to read, but if you do read them, it makes it easier to read the later chapters.***
Sometimes the book will refuse to let you read the next chapter until you've done something else unrelated, like solve a crossword puzzle or write your name with excellent penmanship in the margins.
Sometimes the book will suddenly have much better vocabulary and sentence structure, and usually during those times the book reads itself for you.
If you need to stop reading the book altogether for a while and go do something else, you are only allowed to put your bookmark in between certain pages scattered at regular intervals throughout the book.
If you want to reread a particular passage of the book, you may only start at one of the bookmarks and read forward until you get to it.
These books all require very fancy bookcases to read, and periodically new, more advanced bookcases are released which will not hold the books you currently have any more, forcing you to buy (often inferior) sequels to the books you've already read, or occasionally updated versions of the original books with sharper text and fancier fonts.
Also, most of these books are about jumping.
Do you see why Warrior Guy IV: Battle of the Death Slayers is not the same as
Of Mice and Men?
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