I accept myself as the son of my generation, I had to play, above all, “arcades”. From Street Fighter II and all its sequels to Mortal Kombat and the king: King of Fighters. Things like Pang and Tumblepop were my favorite picks.
BY: Esaka
Video games were a type of entertainment, although they included a specific visual taste that I would now define as emotions. Over time I began to write, draw and have interests in creation, until I found, precisely, writing. And with exercise and time, editing. Here the question arose what is art? Writing is an art, but is editing an art? Telling stories? Aesthetically appreciating a moment? So we accept the plastic arts, which may or may not tell stories but present aesthetic emotion, it makes us “feel something” and then, sculpture and painting also appear.
Over time (historically) and ipso facto for all generations from X to here, photography is accepted, video (film) can also be art… but, what about video games?
Theatre is considered as the concatenation of all the arts until then existing: literature in the script, music in the setting, bodily expressiveness in acting and plasticity in decoration, lighting and so on. Everything is there. Cinema, on the other hand, is the same, but through new production techniques, falsehood hidden in cuts and moments (the recording is not done continuously, nor in progressive order. It is not that things are recorded and presented that way, but rather that there is a post-production process to make these cuts credible and organizational). But the viewer is always led by the hand by the producer/artist(s).
Videogames increase the viewer’s freedom, now he takes control of what happens on stage: the character jumps, runs, grabs a weapon, talks to nearby people, sneaks up, crushes mushrooms and takes coins… or doesn’t. So, with these changes, is the video game an art or not?
It is not a panacea either, the different types of interaction to which the evolution of the media has led us (photography, TV, cinema, videogames) have meant that interactions with classical arts have also begun to change and experimenting on the creation of other types of dynamics with the spectators (avant-garde, installations, fluxus, improvisation and object books among an endless list).
But are video games art? Well, they can be. In the next part I will give an example of the possibilities of expression of the medium.
