I was reading Tim’s review of Mass Effect and then I got to thinking, as next-gen becomes current-gen, should games be recognized as art? It’s a pretty big topic that a lot of people have debated so I thought I’d weigh in my opinion. Tim put it forward that since you feel conflicted by a game, it should be art. I agree with that statement completely. Art is meant to evoke a reaction of some sort. It doesn’t define what the reaction should be, and it doesn’t care. So in games like Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4 where you end up feeling for the characters, essentially pouring a part of yourself into the game, this is evoking a reaction. You could say that the more control you have over a characters decisions, the more artistic it becomes.

Prettier graphics make a game pretty, but as any gamer knows, graphics do not a good game make. The same is true of it being art. A game like Bioshock, where you have to choose whether to murder or save a young girl, which got a load of complaints about it; that is art. Call of Duty 4 where you see your comrades in arms murdered in a brutal fashion; that is art.

But until games are seen as more than a geeky past time of nerds it’ll never be recognised as such and by that time games will have matured even more.  Will we be playing God by that time?

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