Part shooter, part explosion in
a glow stick factory, Rez is one
of the most striking action
games ever made.
AdviceToolbox
Sometimes they’re fun, sometimes they’re garbage,
but games can also be art, Howard writesThe principles
of game design
What’s more, the expression in the medium
needs to be brand new, while the concept being
expressed needs to be a fundamental truth of
humanity that everyone recognises. Great art
has both.
There’s a process to creating art. The first
step is reaching into your brain and pulling out
a significant feeling or concept, because it all
starts with actually having something to say.
The next step is about whittling this concept
down to a coherent and expressible idea, at
least linguistically. This enables the artist to be
more intentional and focused when making
the choices necessary to execute the final step:
choosing a medium and finding the elegance
or eloquence in the medium to convey your
idea fully.
How will I express my concept in this medium?
Will the medium host my concept in a way that
feels smooth, natural, and clean? If I answer
these questions successfully, when I show my
work to people, they’ll likely say, “Oh, of course.
I know that.” Well, yes you do, because it’s
speaking to a fundamental truth. Art is, on its
face, a contrivance. It’s a made-up thing from
the beginning. There’s nothing organic about art;
it’s the specific, intentional rearranging of things
to create a specific result. But that result can
speak to an organic human truth immediately
recognisable by those experiencing it. Now
that’s art.
Pablo Picasso probably put it best when he
said, “Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes
us realise truth.” Art evokes reactions and
communicates ideas. The more accurate
the communication speaks to our commonAUTHOR
HOWARD SCOTT WARSHAW
Howard is a video game pioneer who authored
several of Atari’s most famous and infamous titles.
onceuponatari.comrt is an integral part of video
games, and there’s certainly an
art to making video games, but
are video games art? This long-
standing question was brought
back to the surface a few years ago when the
film critic Roger Ebert proclaimed that video
games could never be art.
This is an absurd thing to say. Specifically,
the claim that video games can never be art
is neither a bit absurd nor largely absurd. It is
medium absurd. I say this because video games
are a medium, like oil painting or music or
sculpture. No medium is art, but any medium
can host art. I want to distinguish art from craft
here. Craft is realising some design or concept
in a medium. Art is the expression of an idea in
a medium. Art is achieved when my work of craft
rises to a level beyond function and becomes
a communication.A
28 / wfmag.cc
Directed by Thatgamecompany’s
Jenova Chen, Flower was
intended as an “interactive
poem” about nature.