Of course I can tell you what the painting is. I can even name a few different types of paint and patterns I can draw with – I can’t tell you how. That’s the difference, I think a lot of traditionalists have a hard time understanding it, and it’s hard to tell just because they don’t understand how a particular piece is made, they can erase it on the spot, and say it’s because that was done on the computer, it’s not real.
Want to hear a decades-old debate unfold within the PC (and the gaming community in general)? Make video games art. How is this relevant?
Well, think about the owner of the regular gallery or the head of the arts committee. Stereotypically, they’d be a little older, a bit old, and wouldn’t play Red Dead Redemption 2 from start to finish — they’d think media-promoted games like Space Invaders. Or Pac-Man and consider it a fun pastime.
Not to mention the hours of coding that go into modern titles, often cinematic-quality animations, and shows covering the motion and sound capture of some of the world’s biggest names. Field – These games are only seen as a waste of time.
This is the kind of difference you come to. If you’ve played Red Dead 2, you know the story, you know the acting, you know the sets – all of which deserve credit for their merits, but instead written off for their formatting.
It’s like movies in that we are at the (relative) beginning of their life cycle. Right now, people compare games to movies the same way silent movies are compared to novels – because that’s what we’re used to and technology isn’t fully appreciated.
But leave it for a few years and hopefully fans will have a better understanding of not only what the game is, but also how it presents the art even though it comes from a PC and is viewed on the PC – and the radical (and often criminal) Limit of effort levels that are put in in these titles, and that the fact that it relies on computers is not cheating in some way, but a necessity that stems from coordination.
