I've actually got something to add to whole Games as an art form discussion that apparently ended a month according to dates everyone posted.
I really love movies, and I don't dilute myself into thinking I'm an actual movie buff or an authority of them, it's just a passionate hobby of me.
Akira Kurosawa said (assuming this isn’t a butchered version of the quote) "For me, film-making combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.". And I think that’s my attraction to watching movies. For me, truly great films seamlessly marry exceptional pieces of from multiple art forms into a singular experience.
I believe this is where there’s a disconnect for video games, and people not considering it in art form. The actual interaction aspect of games doesn’t blend together with their cinematic aspects, whose foundations were set by the decades of film making that came before it. The challenge is to smoothly blend the experience of what you see, hear and do.
I greatly enjoyed the game Okami, both in its story telling aspects and the game play. Despite that, I don’t feel these are truly the same experiences. I would enjoy using the celestial brush to fight and solve puzzles, and seeing the next pieces of the story as they unfold, but it felt like distinctly different aspects. I feel the story telling had artistic merit, but not as much as the game play, which I felt was simply fun. All though I’ll admit, there was a certain aspects of drawing life back into the world and restoring faith to people had a certain emotional attachment, it still differs in how I felt about the story telling itself. In short, it did quite feel like a singular experience, it was like experiencing a game and an anime.
For that reason I think the Wii actually is a greater step towards games being accepted as an art form. It’s provides opportunity for a greater more natural form of interacting with games. I also feels it’s creating an important change in the gaming industry’s future that help avoids it’s from entirely being dominated by nothing but superficial advancements in special effects, something that I fell does plague many modern movies, and increasingly is plaguing games as well.
This all of course is my personal feelings on the matter. I think the Wii might start provoking people into my line of thinking of balancing two conflicting aspects into one complete experience. Potential games like Pollen Sonata, Sadness, and Capucine may all be first in early generation that greater embraces this ideal, or not.
