Digital Controller Soul - Video Games as Art Jerry La Your hands wrap around the smooth black plastiform

contours of the controller. Your fingers rotate, tap, and flick at the buttons and switches presented before them. Your eyes are glued to your television screen. As you rotate, tap, and flick at the buttons, incredible things, things you could never do in the world of reality, occur before your eyes. You are building momentous structures from the resources to dug up from the ground with merely a pickaxe. You are robbing a bank and fleeing from the authorities in your stolen sports car. You are saving the kingdom from an evil, malevolent wizard. What initially started as a small white pixel bouncing between two rectangles, video games have evolved to become powerful mediums in storytelling and artistic expression. They have transcended above their initial purpose of entertaining players into works of art. In the early days of video games, the age of Nintendo Entertainment Systems and arcade machines, video games were designed to simply be played with. They were toys. Nintendo, one of the biggest game companies around had their humble beginnings as a toy company. Their intention was to accomplish some sort of objective, like getting from one side to another in Frogger, or obtain a high score like in Pac-Man. It was a simplistic approach that also challenged the players. Nowadays, video games have grown more complex in nature. Video games have evolved. They have became more than just getting a high score or accomplishing a certain objective. It was more than just being that invisible hand that guided a simple player avatar like a yellow circle or a frog across a screen. Their development draws parallels to the emergence of movies into the mainstream. The first movies were just a series of pictures that when seen in sequence would make it seem like the subject of the picture was moving. It was a slow evolution from just sixteen pictures of a horse running to The Great Train Robbery, which while silent, took elements from theater to make tell a story. It was a significant advancement, but films were still not yet held in the art regard. Over the next few decades, more technological advancements were made to film. There was sound: The Jazz Singer. Then there was color: The Wizard of Oz. And all of the sudden, there was a massive explosion in the popularity of film around the late 1920s and early 1930s. Film historians call this the Golden Age of Hollywood. It was during this age, that some of the greatest films of all time were produced. The American Film Institutes top ten is dominated by films of this era. Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and Gone with the Wind, which Ronald Haver, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called a work of art. These films have transcended above their medium, becoming more than just a series of moving images with sound, they were art. Now, what about that earlier mentioned parallel to video games? Well, it all began with Pong, the running horse of video games. Pong initially only meant to be entertaining to those who picked up the controller. As time went on, the video game industry continued to be constantly innovated. There was the change from pixels to 3D polygons

in Super Mario 3D on the Nintendo 64. Over the years, as hardware began to grow more advanced, the ability to program in more detailed polygons to create a more realistic picture and setting for the player to take in. The game mechanics changed. Role-playing games where killing enemies to gain experience and learn new abilities went from venturing from castle to castle slashing at goblins and dragons between changed into exploring vast open and dynamic worlds like post-nuclear wastelands or steering your spaceship through unexplored territory. This is all comparable to the development of sound and color. We have now reached the present day, where video games are prevalent and can just about be found anywhere. Just as movie theaters are in every shopping mall, you can play a video game wherever you can find a computer or console or phone. It all seems familiar. The video game industry is on the edge of a Golden Age, just as the movie industry entered in the early 20th century. Now I am not saying that every movie during and following the Golden Age of Hollywood is a work of art. Large big budget films in recent days have lost sight of cinemas original artistic meaning in favor of flash and fame with the only intention of making money and getting attention. This applies similarly to video games, as not all video games have transcended into art, as a good amount of them are made on a multimillion dollar budgets to only make a profit. A mainstream example is the Call of Duty series. But both independently produced movies and video games have grown in popularity as their purpose is not to make money, but to be art. Every art medium has something to establish itself as something unique. Theater has actors and live performance. Books have words on pages that establish something in a readers imagination. Paintings are...well...painted with paint. Music has so many other mediums within music. Classical being rigid and performed the same way every time but in contrast jazz has room to improvise. Video games...video games feature interactivity. This interactivity has made video games unique among any other visual experiences. The technology and techniques in developing video games are continuing to advance. I believe that we are on the edge of a Golden Age in video games, where more and more video games can transcend into becoming timeless. They can depict the struggle of human limitations, or the relationships between art and life. Video games are soon to be art, they will in time as long as we, the viewers, the players, continue to play on.