Video games as an art form

Video games have evolved in these recent decades to become one of the main forms of multimedia and entertainment. From a business standpoint, video games take in millions of dollars every year, occasionally crossing into the billions. Recently, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V to home consoles. The Grand Theft Auto series has been a long running franchise for the company, with each installment selling extremely well and usually garnering critical acclaim. With the quality of the title almost guaranteed, many people chose to pre-order the game. These pre-orders, along with standard copies, earned Rockstar over $1 billion in the first three days, making it the fastest selling entertainment product ever (a record held at other times by games such as Halo 3 or Call of Duty). This kind of financial performance places it on par with, and frequently exceeding that of, movies, television, and music.

These other forms of multimedia are all considered forms of art by the majority of people. The distinct advantage that these other forms of multimedia/entertainment is that of time. Put simply, they're older, and people are more used to them as a form of expression. This is true in not just the perception of games, but the creation of them as well. Video gaming is young enough that many people are now discovering that it can be an efficient way to tell a story, and the means of which to do that.

In recent years, more and more games are aiming to be more than a bit of interactive fun or competition. One example is Irrational Games' Bioshock. Bioshock is set in the underwater city of Rapture, a city inspired by Ayn Rand's philosophies that has fallen into ruin over time. The game's storyline touches on issues of government, economic freedom, scientific restraint, and free will, all while giving the player a fantastic underwater environment to look at and explore. Another, more recent, example could be Yager's Spec Ops: The Line. At a quick glance, Spec Ops doesn't appear to be anything of interest. It appears to be a fairly standard modern military shooter, and as far as gameplay is concerned, it is. The storyline, however, attempts to deconstruct the current trend of modern military shooters. The storyline puts the player in the uncomfortable position of being an American soldier fighting against other Americans. This isn't due to the others being evil in any way. It's just poor communication in a Dubai that has been ravaged by a sand storm. The game attempts to make the player question why they are killing people throughout much of the game. At one point, you have to choose whether to kill a civilian (who stole water) or a soldier (who arrested the civilian, but killed 5 people in the process). The choices decide whether one of them, both of them, or you die.

Lastly, and most recently, comes Galactic Cafe's game The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is a game very much unlike the other examples. It takes place from the first person, and is narrated as the story goes along. However, the player and narration can be at odds with one another, changing the games storyline completely. At one point, the player (playing as Stanley) enters a stairwell. The narration says that Stanley went upstairs. The player can choose to ignore the narrator and go downstairs, with the resulting gameplay being nothing like what would have happened if they had gone upstairs.

While games like these exemplify some of the best narrative power that games have to offer, many other games eschew to the side of not trying to be art at all. Many competitive games such as Counter Strike, Starcraft, or League of Legends lean more towards sports than forms of expressive art. As independent developers continue to make better games and larger publishers are seeing the merits of artistic games, more people are attempting to explore gaming as an art form.