This trend of spitting on casual gamers...

[Bodhesatva]

ckmlb said:

Bodhesatva said:

ckmlb said:

Bodhesatva said:

ckmlb said:

Brain Age has SPECIFICALLY been found to increase neurological function. Directly and explicitly. In this case, the adult value is in it's intellectual activity, not in it's purely aesthetic quality.

"Research has shown that reading out loud and performing calculations quickly are effective for training your brain."

Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Okami are very good, and you know I liked Shadow of the Colossus a great deal. But their "art" is largely just visual, unlike "The Sims" or "Civilization," whose maturity is in the gameplay directly. And please note that these are three games in a library of 1,500 Playstation 2 games. It's dismally low.

And again, my main concern is for something to be intellectually stimulating, the way Picasso's Guernica, or Robespierre's The Spirit of the Laws are. I do agree that aesthetics matter -- it's just not my main goal here.

In the case of Okami I can see how you say the art is largely visual. But in case of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus if you think it's mainly visual then you definitely missed the point of both games and need to go back and play them and get into them more closely because there is so much in such simplicity. Ico has to be the most beautiful story I have encountered in a game, so simple and so compelling that I can only describe it as beautiful.

That's the kind of game that I think even people who hate traditional games in general would admit is art.

As always, I agree Shadow of the Colossus is a great deal closer than most games out there, but in terms of plot it's still very far away, in my opinion. I haven't played Ico, so I cannot comment.

In general, we both agree that these small handful of games are the best examples of games-as-art available on Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube, so let's just agree to small differences here.  

The biggest problem is that Okami did terribly, Ico did very poorly and Shadow of the Colosuss had mediocre sales. This, more than anything else, should show you that there is a problem in Playstation land -- the games you most identify as "art" are either bombing, or coming close to it.

I certainly wouldn't suggest that Wii Sports is art; I'd definitely say it's more adult than Gears of War, but still not art. My belief is, however, that these more casual games that appeal to adults are the bridge to get there. If Gears of War, God of War, et. al remain the most important games this generation, then adults will continue to simply stay away, and the few games that ARE best suited for adults -- such as Ico -- will continue to do terribly. 

We aren't going to jump straight from "Video games are an 18 year old male fantasy land" to "Video games are high art." The first thing we have to do is get adults playing in the first place, and Wii Sports is able to do that.