Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years.
He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.“G
ames are not art.”
I said as much, rather pompously, in
this spot many years ago. It generated as much
reaction as I ever received, oddly enough.
Gamers want to believe their passion is more
than just a diversion—that it could aspire to
greatness, even transcendence. A friend of
mine, a game designer, insisted that games
were merely awaiting their Orson Welles. In
other words, the medium merely needed an
auteur to come along to create and refine a
new vocabulary for this form that would lift it to
the realm of capital A Art.
The games-as-art debate got a bit of a jump
start recently with a back-and-forth between
film critic Roger Ebert and author/director Clive
Barker. Ebert made the case that games can’t
be “high art” and Barker said that they can.
Ebert was a bit of a snot, but he’s right for the
wrong reason. He claims that interactivity, what
Barker called the “malleability” of the forms
and narratives of games, removes it from the
realm of high art.
That’s only half right, and BioShock made
it a little clearer to me just why that’s the
case. If any game can make a claim to be
Art, it’s BioShock, which deals with weighty
issues, is beautifully stylized, and breaks the
bounds of the medium. Even its use of Randian
Objectivism as the source of its dystopia is
strikingly original and persuasive. It is clearly
the product of artists: writers, visual artists,
musicians, sound artists, and designers.
But it’s not, in the aggregate, Art, for a
simple reason. Gamers are not lining up to play
BioShock for its Objectivist discourse: They are
lining up to play, to explore, to solve puzzles,
to shoot things. The main purpose of a work
defines it as Art, not the incidentals. The main
purpose of a game is to be played, like football
or poker or kick the can. However rich a narra-
tive, whatever depths of philosophy or human
nature or character are explored along the way,
these are not the point of the game. They may
be central concerns of the creator (artist?), but
they are incidental to the gamer: fine wallpaper
for the abattoir.Game /Art
GAME THEORY
THOMAS
MCDONALDI
t’s been a long time coming, but
once the Video Electronics Standards
Association (VESA) approved the
DisplayPort 1.1 specifi cation in April, it
became all but certain the digital inter-
face would replace DVI and VGA in com-
puter products. After all, the interface
standard—which is capable of meeting
the demands of high-def video and
copy-protected content—has the bless-
ing of many PC industry heavyweights.
Those companies are now stepping
up with announcements about forth-
coming products that will feature thenew con-
nector. First,
there was word
of Dell’s proto-
type half-inch-
thick LCD that uses DisplayPort and
which is rumored to be shipping late
this year. Now Samsung has stated its
plans to use DisplayPort (as opposed
to Dual-Link DVI) in its next 2560x
30-inch panel. And AMD, as well,
says, “We will begin shipping native
DisplayPort interfaces on our graphics
products in early 2008.”DisplayPort Finally Cometh
Computer users will see VESA’s new video interface in
shipping products (we mean it this time)I
n the grand world of videogames, console and PC titles share and share
alike. Whether it’s an engine here or a concept there, the divide between
the competing platforms is shrinking.
Epic Games is doing its part to make the console experience more
PC-like by allowing console players—specifi cally, those on the PS3—to
compete online with other gamers using user-created third-party mods.
To load mods on your PS3, you’ll need to download them to your PC
fi rst, then send them to your console across your home network. Unreal
Tournament III will ship for the PC and PS3 this holiday season, with an
Xbox 360 version following later.Console Games Borrow
a PC Page
Epic Games brings third-party mods to console weenies
quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
12 MAXIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2007
Samsung’s next 30-
inch LCD will feature
DisplayPort.DisplayPort Finally Cometh
Computer users will see VESA’s new video interface in
Unreal Tournament III will allow PS3 gamers to Monster Kill using a
keyboard and mouse and play third-party mods.