Gaming: The New Frontier of Art?

There is no denying the astonishing creativity that goes into video game, MMORPGs, and virtual worlds. And over at The Guardian, the UK’s cultural gatekeeper, Alastair Harper makes the case that some video games, at least, deserve a place on the shelf beside literature, music, and film:

“As happened with comic books becoming graphic novels in the 80s, each year there are more developers willing to take risks with storylines, develop more complex moral situations and generally raise the bar so high that it’s becoming plain ignorant for anyone interested in stories to ignore them.”

Harper cites Bioshock as a game that takes full advantage of its medium to make salient points about, as he says, “freedom of decision.” One clue to the depth of this game can be seen in the Flash introduction and in hearing the cinematically tense score that plays along. Bioshock has already won scores of awards, including the Spike TV, British Academy, UGO, Yahoo!, GamePro, and the 2007 Game Critics Awards game of the year for 2007. Sound suspiciously like art awards? It’s no coincidence.

In the future, as virtual worlds get more complex and the tools in which to tell as well as to receive stories become more user-friendly, storytelling in the gaming world can only improve upon itself over time.

But it also may be worthy, because of the immersive quality of much of this new entertainment and storytelling, to continue to think of games and worlds as being distinct from the other art forms. Because the great visual art (at least up to the middle of the 20th century) was made within a certain context, with people accustomed to looking at art in certain ways and in certain places.

The great novels - from the mid-1800s until now - were also printed in an era in which people grew more accustomed and comfortable with the printed word, an era which may be winding to a close. And film, as a passive medium, comes to us in a certain era and can still be a spine-tingling, passive art.Games, to use a tired phrase, are interactive.

But this one element may be the one that separates it most from other art forms.