Video Games in General

While this blog is meant to focus on one work at a time, I will deviate from that format for this post because the focus of this one is going to be video games as works of art.

The concept of video games as art is a topic of much debate within the entertainment industry. In a very technical sense the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are protected creative works by the law. The issue here though is that many critics in the community refuse to recognize it as art, much the same has occurred in the past for what critics consider art. So many art forms were resisted at first, that it seems to be a right of passage for emergent art forms.The critics of video games do admit that games contain various forms of artwork, including graphic art, music, storytelling, and many others, they are resistant to calling the entire game art.

Many games, however, do incredible jobs of creating an interactive world which you can become part of through a combination of the various art forms. This creation of a story is what makes these games works of art. There are several games released in the last few years which, for the gaming community, exemplify what it means to be a truly great example of this storytelling and graphic art.

Three examples of these are actually Half-Life 2(2004), Portal(2007), and Bioshock: Infinite(2013). All of these have there own particular reasons for exemplifying what it means to be a good video game and story. The latest of them Bioshock: Infinite plays on prevalent themes from 1912 America, like racism and the deeply entrenched nationalism, creating an alternate America where these ideas are brought to extremes. This world they created allows for a very well received story that the gaming community is still raving about.

The latter two examples, both made by the Valve Corporation, are some of the strongest stories ever told through video games. These two games are almost universally accepted as shining examples of the art of video games and story telling. Half-Life in particular as a series is considered one of the most influential video games of all time.