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Crawl and 1OOO wrote:

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Of the selections I quoted, this

Shadow of the Colossus is a poem. Its ideas and expressions aren't spelled out for you. They're subtle. You either get it, or you don't. And like any good poem, not getting it says a lot more about you than it does about the poem.

is the most problematic. I do think it is good to try to connect videogames to other art forms, because connoisseurs of other art forms are just much more mature in their appreciation of their chosen art than the vast majority of videogame players. Videogame players could learn a lot from lovers of poetry and cinema.

The problem is that you're not really learning from lovers of poetry. The idea that you either get a poem or you don't contradicts hundreds of years of higher English education. I also do not believe that any lover of poetry would say "you either get a poem or you don't."

People who love poetry can explain very precisely while a great poem is great, from broad terms like the theme of the poem, down to the nuts and bolts of individual phrase and word choice.

You do not need to go into nuts and bolts analysis of a videogame, which could be tedious, but before anyone writes a review, I think they do need to have the idea in their head that they could at least in principle explain precisely why they have the opinion that they do.


I think the problem with your introduction is that you're not really learning from cinema, either. I believe you're starting that review with a flawed premise: That things take long, long periods of time to develop into "art". Yes, it takes some time for something to develop into art, but how long? One reason *I* personally disagree with your thesis is that I think even Super Mario Bros. is a great piece of videogame art. But you can completely forget about me: What do people that think about other art forms think? If visual artists could somehow find the first images ever drawn by humans, would they care? You darn well bet they would! It'd be a tremendous find! Visual artists care about and respect the history of their art form in the way that sadly few videogame players do. Just about every art history book I've seen mentions cave paintings.

When you then mention American Beauty or Shawshank Redemption, it COULD be just because you really like those movies and think of them as examples of art. But paired with your statement that maybe only now have videogames become art with ICO and SotC, your choice of movies that are less than 20 years old seems to imply that you're trying to say that only maybe recently have movies become art. But absolutely no cinemaphile would agree with that. In fact, quoting Roger Ebert,

What is fairly clear from both [the critic's and director's Sight and Sounds best movies ever] lists is that the critics and directors think great movies stopped being made circa 1980. The newest film on the director's list is Scorsese's "Raging Bull" (1980), and the critics select nothing since "Godfather, Part II" (1974)....

That's not true of all best movie lists: AFI's top ten also includes Schindler's List, which is relatively recent -- but both the Sight and Sounds list and AFI's are topped by Citizen Kane, which is pretty old. IMDB even has Shawshank Redemption as the number 2 movie of all time, but even that has Casablanca (1942) in its top ten.


Art forms develop, but not really from worse to better in some chronologically monotonic fashion.

On the matter of the poetry thing, I guess I was sending a conflicting message. I agree that poetry is something you need to be educated in to understand. That's what I meant with the last line of the sentence. If you don't get a piece of fine poetry and take everything it says for face value, it says more about you and your level of comprehension than it does about the piece of poetry. So how would you suggest I fix that line?

On the premise of my introduction. It wasn't that things take a long time to become art. It was that sometimes, simple and practical things can become art forms. Writing was no doubt used to convey information before it became an outlet for literature. Theatre is believed to have originated from tribal reenactments of battles and hunts. And those cave paintings. We cite them as art in our text books, but was the Cro-Magnon man really trying to make a work of art or was he just trying to say "Hey, there's buffalo out there in the plains. Don't get trampled."? It's possible those paintings had a pretty practical, non-artistic purpose. Likewise, I somehow doubt it was the intention of anyone to create something that could be considered art when video games were in their infancy.