Gamertell

Kotaku posted a very cool little story this week about famed Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers claiming that GTA IV is the best popcorn movie of the summer. Crossing the boundaries between the two media, he gave a very interesting (and pro-games-as-art) analysis of the social commentary and satire at play within the game. From the post:

“It’s a rare video game that enters territory marked by Scorsese and Tarantino. But writers Dan Houser and Rupert Humphries have created the vid version of film noir with dialogue that crackles even in the film’s darkest shadows. And they take every shot they can at social satire.”

That’s some heavy praise coming from one of the top pop-art critics of our time. It’s part of a heartening trend - serious, thoughtful criticism of games has been popping up all over the place lately, notably with BioShock and Call of Duty IV last year and the recent GTA IV and Metal Gear Solid 4 in the past few weeks.

N’Gai Croal (of Newsweek‘s Level Up blog) has long written about the differences between a critic and a reviewer (briefly paraphrased: a reviewer tells you if it’s worth buying, a critic puts it within a proper cultural context), and his review of MGS 4 illustrates this sojourn from what’s typically thought of as “games journalism” to actual, intelligent critical discourse. From his review:

“Now, we hate to draw lazy parallels between games and other media, so we’ll just list some of the influences we observed during our play-through of much of MGS 4’s first two chapters: the paranoid style of historian Richard Hofstadter; the covert-ops fetish of authors Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum; the grit and moral ambiguity of filmmaker Sergio Leone.”

Both reviews (the Newsweek and the Rolling Stone pieces) reflect a desire to place the respective game within the larger social context - using other films, books, etc. to legitimize and comment on the game.

This all begs an obvious question of whether games will ever enjoy the artistic legitimacy (although they’ve already shown the same commercial viability) as films do. I think the answer to that depends on how many intelligent, socially-conscious titles arrive and warrant serious criticism. For every masterpiece of the form (as most would argue MGS 4 is), there are 200 mindless shooters and Wii minigame collections. If these “serious” titles and this trend of the mainstream media to give proper credit are any indication, there’s room for artistic expression and mindless fun in our pastime.

Read [Kotaku] Also Read [Level Up] Also Read [Rolling Stone]

Keep up with the latest Gaming news! - Subscribe to our feed →