On Tuesday 2nd March I'll be discussing the nascent art of videogames in expert company at Foyles bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. We'll be examining the ways in which videogames aspire towards art, and what kind of artistry we can expect from a medium that, at its core, is both populist and—like all interactive media—ephemeral, vanishing the moment you switch off your machine.
Under the expert stewardship of BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, I'll be joined by Orange prize-winning author of Disobedience and sometime games writer Naomi Alderman, by games writer and director Justin Villiers (Dead Space Extraction, Fable 2), and by games writer Rhianna Pratchett (the Overlord series, Mirror's Edge). It should be a fascinating evening. I've written about games as art before, including this essay for the New Statesman, and the June 2008 essay for Prospect that kicked off my book-writing exploits. Towards the end of this essay, I spoke with Justin about some of the artistic tensions within the gaming world, and he offered me a fine few thoughts on the matter of games as art:
“The console has come out of the bedroom and into the living room. And there is now a real desire to craft stories with genuine arcs, to develop complex characters and to craft whole and believable worlds. There are already games out there you could describe as art… There was a game back in 2001 called Ico, on the PlayStation 2. You play a little boy with horns, in a world that’s visually based on Giorgio de Chirico. The story is so simple and touching, the mise en scène is beautiful, and the characters move with such grace. That’s art. Still, in narrative terms, much of the games market is still saturated with terrible stuff: super-enhanced soldiers fighting some evil covenant or other. They’re running out of ideas for that kind of thing, which is partly why the industry is welcoming dedicated writers, directors and artists."Almost two years on, I'm very conscious that the surface of this particular field has still barely been scratched by the mainstream media, in part because the critical and analytical tools needed to think about games like this are still in their infancy—and in part because games themselves are developing at a frantic pace. They still have a lot of growing up to do, alongside their audience.
Then again, they've already come a long way—as those who have eyes to see will find if they know where to look (links are to the trailers for Okami, The Last Guardian, and The Beatles: Rock Band respectively).
Fun Inc. event at Foyles bookshop, Charing Cross Road, on Tuesday 2nd March at 6.30pm. Tickets are free: email events@foyles.co.uk to reserve a place.
