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Comment by bobthechef | Hacker News Reader

Those were...games...

It's like saying that Alice in Wonderland or Wind in the Willows are mere... books...

Games are an art form, completely on par with books, paintings, or movies. I'd say they are one of the most important art forms of our times.

I used to believe that games were an art form - but I just can't get behind them being completely on par with books, etc.

The writing is often so terrible... I wish I could think of a single video game that touched me like The Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables.

Most games seek to entertain rather than to provoke. They are the Harry Potters and James Bonds of the world. Go a bit deeper and you find what you are looking for though. A hard limit of games is the fact that books let your reading experience be entirely visually unique to you. A character looks a certain way to you, their actions have your own interpretation.

For me, Firewatch was a stunning call to action about avoiding the problems in your life. Beyond direct narrative, there is the silent story seen in games that is rarely seen in books. The implied bits, the attention to detail, the care and love to the craft. For example, there are bits of the Zelda franchise that trends a hair into Jack Kerouac's ending of On The Road. The little moments where you can feel and realize the breath experience of those you interact with, the people you save and those who save you. In that moment you can feel that book-like internal narrative defining all that could have been or might have been. Zelda Wind Waker is exceptionally notable in this space. Majora's Mask defined it.

Play an Infocom text adventure. Art, computer game, no picture.

But most books are terrible, too! If we want to pick masterpieces, then you will easily come up with a bunch, from Loom and Star Control II all the way to Disco Elysium.

But masterpieces are few. For each cartridge full of second-rate mindless 8-bit games there is a pack of books by Barbara Cartland, or whatnot.

Battletoads

Try Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds). There's a lot of games that are more vehicles of storytelling rather than what is a traditional videogames.

> The writing is often so terrible

This is also true of the vast majority of books ever written.

I agree that games are not quite there yet, people who already put them on the same level of depth that books or movies earned the “art to be taken seriously” badge for in the past seem to rarely consume either (or are of the type that will try to convince you that zombie and splatter movies should be viewed as a piece of art as similar in value as Schindlers List).

However one could already say that they are the most innovative (and interesting) art form these days.

Check out The Longing, Wanderlust: Travel Stories or Firewatch for recent emotionally deep games.

Have you SEEN the utter volume of terrible books, music, visual arts, and so on? Taste and quality does not dictate whether something is an art form.

Go play some Interactive Fiction titles. Such as Trinity, Anchorhead, Slouch Over Bedlam, Vicious Cycles. These will give you an experience far more complex and rich than any book, ever.

Even Roger Ebert fell hard for Cosmology of Kyoto

lol you probably enjoy it when textbooks tell you the proof is left up to the reader

Games made to take advantage of hardware innovations that were then built upon. Nintendo has had a direct hand in the implementation of new (or newly low-cost) technologies that have then gone on to serve as the basis for more widespread innovations. Ex. They placed a cheap infrared camera in their Wiimote to enable controller tracking (which means that that tech got into the hands of millions of users). An engineering student reversed this, using that camera to track LEDs placed on a pair of glasses to achieve cheap headtracking.(1) This was then used as the basis for the tech in Microsoft's Kinect(2), which served as the basis for the tracking technologies we see in modern XR setups. That's just one example of many.

1: https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw

2: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/johnny-lee-kinect-hacking/

In childhood especially, the line between the virtual and the real is flimsier than you think.

Nintendo for some reason appears to have this effect on the generation that grew up w/ Super Mario World, Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong.

I played these games at friends' houses back then and didn't see the appeal. Games like Need for Speed, Mortal Kombat or Goldeneye 007 felt more real, less 'kiddie' oriented. But these games aren't really spoken of much these days, while Nintendo originals definitely are.

Time doesn‘t treat all franchises equally.

Need For Speed is considered to be in decline. Mortal Kombat‘s making was a bit controversial with the whole “make employees watch graphic executions to nail the art”, now that in 2021 the focus is less on kids watching violence and more about not abusing employees. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/05/one_mortal_kombat_...

Mario more or less has inspired the same kind of nice fuzzy feeling and polish that is the series’ mainstay. Breath of the Wild reimagined Zelda into an explorable open world to rave reviews.

Please explain your statement. I don't understand what you mean and would like to.

What's your point? Those memories are no less real.

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