The Art of Gaming

Posting a Shadow of the Colossus screenshot now, so I'm not tempted to write five paragraphs about it later.

In another bout of pro-video game blogging, I find myself drawn to one of the more obvious feats of skill required to make a good game: the artwork. I'm a big supporter of the idea that the art doesn't make the game great, the story does, but the artwork definitely can have an impact on our opinions and expectations of a game. If we see more, we expect more, and if we see less, we expect less.

What makes video game artwork so exceptional, in my opinion, is the fact that it has to be fluid (like the music). A movie or TV show may have amazing special effects, and look better than any game can, but whoever put those effects together knew exactly what they were animating, how all the scenes would line up, and how it would appear. Video game programmers have to predict the player's possible movements, and animate every possible step your character could make. And any game programmer worth his mettle should be able to make it look good, too.

Screenshot from Capcom's Okami - not an artist's rendition of the game, but an actual moment as the player pauses to take in the scenery.

Okami is kind of an obvious example - It's a relatively recent game, designed to look at every moment like a traditional Japanese painting. It's beautiful, well designed, and has much more than just the artwork to make it an amazing game. I'm kind of cheating by mentioning it, though - Capcom strove to visually impress their audience with this game, putting all their graphical specialists together to pull this off. In most games, the artwork is just one of the mediums used by designers to tell a story.

A Big Daddy in BioShock, by Irational Games, bears down on the player.

BioShock, another relatively recent game, is a first-person shooter/survival game, which I've never had the chance to actually play myself. The team who developed the game worked hard on the dystopian storyline and compelling atmosphere, but somewhere along the way they managed to make the game visually striking as well, with graphics generally only pulled by science-fiction film artists.

Scenery on the Shivering Isles, an expansion set to Bethesda's best-selling Elder Scrolls: Oblivion game.

Bethesda has always impressed me with their artwork, but maybe that's because I've actually played their games (side note - at the moment, I haven't actually played any of those games above that I've been raving about, just read blogs and seen videos and screenshots). The fourth game in their Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion was visually stunning, to the point that it made it difficult to travel around between cities, because I always wanted to stop and take in the sights. The ever-changing sky, the ocean of golden grass, the deep, lush forests, the frozen, looming mountains.... None of these visuals added to the plot or story of the game at all, but they richly added to the playing environment, making the game feel more real and much more worth the effort to play.

Screenshot of the elusive I, Robot arcade game, 1983, published by Atari.

One thing all these games have in common, however, is that they're recent, all released in the past five years (Except Shadow of the Colossus, I guess, which came out in 2005). Anyone who's been watching the industry can see plainly how video game graphics have improved since Pong in '72. I, Robot, released in 1983 (just before the Video Game Crash of '83) was the first video game to use 3-D polygon graphics, a major break from the 2-D Donkey Kong and Pac-Man games that were so popular. Because the 3-D graphics were strange and unfamiliar, the arcade game never caught on, and of the 1000 machines built, very few exist today. However, this was the first game to push the envelope on the graphics department, testing what the system had the capabilities to do, and it is praised now for leading the way to the modern age of graphics.

Which leads me into what I really wanted to tell you guys about. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is getting ready for a new Exhibit, titled 'The Art of Video Games'. The exhibit, scheduled to launch March 16, 2012, and run 'til September 30th, will showcase the digital art gamers are most familiar with, starting from the beginning of the first era in the early '70s and working up to the most visually stunning games that are popular now. The exhibit promises to be amazing, as one would expect from the Smithsonian, and particularly interesting to the niche group of people who would normally never show up in a 'stuffy old museum'. Anyone who wishes to can vote of which games will appear in the exhibit, with voting ending April 17th.

I commend the Smithsonian for taking extra care to value an entire fictional media that is most often overlooked by 'intellectuals'. I can safely say that I now have more than one reason to visit our nation's capital next summer.

Screenshot from Flower, a popular 'Art Game' released by thatgamecompany.