The video game industry

To begin dissecting the idea of an entire medium to determine its place as a culturally-significant art is pretty difficult. But the business of video games and the journalism surrounding them are a good place to start, as these two are deeply linked and in other artistic medium it is a very real concern where they cross.

The mainstream portion of video games is a pretty bleak landscape from my perspective. Part of the reason I don't play video games as much is that 99% of video games seem to be brand-centric, relying on nostalgia or name recognition. Take a look at this week's top game sales. It is basically all sequels and games bundled with the Wii. Though one might argue that with the advent of flash gaming making game development cheap and easy, the business aspect driving game sales can't simply be brand. Why would gamer's go for a $60 game when they can play a ton online for free? There must be better quality games for that price, no?

Well, from my experience, the business of video games prevents them from telling truly innovative, interactive experiences. It is their name: Video games are games, they are meant to be fun. Any other emotion or message aside from that is secondary.

Because of that, basically every release from mainstream publishers of video games have simply reinvented the wheel in the last 30+ years of the industry. Some attempts have been made to truly innovate on an interactive level, but by far, the chart-toppers are familiar play-experiences re-skinned to convince the audience they are experiencing something new.

My final point of this brings in video game journalism. A blog such as Kotaku.com or product review site like Gamespot.com might be able to focus on a breadth of different games, from mainstream to indie to a few populist games. But the problem is they are reviewed as play experience, based on standards of fun rather than artistic merit. At this point, indie games are still turning tricks to get the attention of these blogs, offering creative pricing models and packaging them together on online distributors.

My question is this: How does this divide of coverage affect the artistic nature of video games as art? If indie developers are pushing their critically-lauded games in creative payment schemes, how will they ever make money and build the resources to bring their unique perspective to a larger audience? And how does the video game journalist community impact this by who they choose to review?