Art in Games

Good God, whereas I'm one of those people who actually love the new PoP trailers, but there some people who just have some negative comments about this. As the words of the wise Ben 'Yathzee' Croshaw from Zero Punctuation says...

The thought occurs that for all my banging at the "games are art" drum, art is only as good as the culture that surrounds it. A game could give the most extraordinarily emotional experience in the entirety of human culture, and bring tears to the eyes of a jaded war veteran with no eyes, but it's all for naught if it's not surrounded by self-important bearded tossers who read too much into things for a living...

In other words, you have the arty-Okami-type people who actually love the games that are basically 'not-going-to-hyper-realism-with-photorealistic-graphics' and have really distinct and different art styles than the other popular games and then there's the typical-fanboy-FPS-type people, who never actually understand and appreciate Klimt, Picasso and Aardman Animation, hate lots of brushwork that artists spent ages to put their efforts to the public and would rather wowed at the grapics that have realistic faces and all wanted blood to be as realistic as possible and just basically never put a foot on a fine art gallery, whatsoever. If you choose the second optiion, congradulations; you've just awarded to being a dumb person, who spends life not caring for the changing world and you never, ever seen the Culture Show, watched some documentaries and most importantly...you hate the colourful artistic direction that the games are going to that way, instead of going to crappy never-going-to-be-perfect-photorealistic graphics that are basically covered in browns, greys and dark tints that would best described as dull and lifeless.

If I were you, just don't be afraid and pick a damn art book, like Van Gogh or something, look at the beautiful illustrations, watch some Studio Ghlibi movies or the anime version of Metropolis; appreciate the world as it has some hope and most importantly...STOP SAYING TO DEVELOPERS ON WHAT YOU REALLY WANT! Ben Mattes has defended himself that he wanted the new PoP game on a more artistic and poetic direction and wants to join the Okami bandwagon and also says that the Sands of Time trilogy has already concluded AND is AND WILL NEVER, going to join the WW and T2T stuff ever again.

And possibly wanted to apologise to Jordan Mechner, for creating the 2nd and 3rd PoP game to the wrong direction. And I highly respect Mechner, because he really wants the PoP series to be more fantasy and poetic rather than the hyper-realism crap that has no soul and would rather put some dull environments that I'm going to say 'meh, where's the variety?' and some other stuff.

And if you're STILL denying that games can be art and they can have as many different art styles as they want, then your IQ must me really low and your soul is completely hopeless and would carry to purgatory when you die; that way, you'll regret it.