Gamertell

In the October 15, 2008, issue of Wine Spectator magazine (p. 44), contributor Matt Kramer wrote an opinion piece tiled “Why Wine isn’t art - and why that matters.“

Inspired by a party argument where someone suggests that wine is art, Kramer argues that “fine wine is, at best, a high craft” and that, to call it art is “self-aggrandizing.“ He suggests that by getting people to accept that wine is art, winemakers’ “salaries will rise, and producers, for their part, will start pricing wine as ‘art.‘“ Instead, wine is simply an “amplification” and “refinement” of the existing attributes of the grape that happens to include the grape’s upbringing (“all the forces that create ta particularity of the site”). Lafite Rothschild, for example, is not created, but the result of craftily refining grapes grown in a specific area in a specific way.

Using wine-lover Kamer’s argument, videogames are then a creation from a blank slate, which makes any game art. Even if you have a…

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In Iowa, a 32-year-old man may spend 20 years in prison for possession of Japanese manga and will face penalties under the PROTECT Act (18 U.S.C. Section 1466A). Christopher Handley is still in big trouble because of the manga he purchased from Japan in May 2006 that the government claimed was obscene and depicted minors engaged in sexual acts.

Luckily for Handley, he no longer has to face the court system alone as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has decided to provide their expertise as a consultant to the defense and provide funds for use to support in obtaining…

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Title: Shaun the Sheep
Price: $29.99
System(s): Nintendo DS
Release Date: September 23, 2008
Publisher (Developer): D3 Publisher (Art)
ESRB Rating: “Everyone” for Comic Mischief
Pros: Good game for kids. Mini-games are moderately challenging. A few nice extras. Decent graphics.
Cons: Mini-game graphics can be subpar at times. The story mode is a bit short.
Overall Score: One thumb up, one thumb sideways; 80/100; B-; *** out of 5.

Shaun the Sheep is a children’s game based on the stop-motion animated series by Aardman Animations, the same people who brought us Wallace and Gromit. (Shaun first appeared in the Wallace and Gromit movie A Close Shave). The original series follows Shaun, a smart little sheep, engaging in short, seven minute, silent comedic episodes on a farm.

The game stays true to the original formula and, as such, perfectly reaches its…

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Title: Video Games Live: Volume One
Price: $16.98 ($0.99 per song download)
Release Date: July 22, 2008
Publisher: EMI Records Ltd. (Angel Records)
Pros: An excellent collections of impressive performances. Often well-orchestrated collections and homages to game music with an honest air of respectability that even non-gamers can appreciate. The name implies there will be a Volume Two.
Cons: A few segments are a bit slow and some of the instrumentation plainly mimics or masks the vocals.
Overall Score: Two thumbs up; 91/100; A-; * * * * out of five.

No matter where you fall in the games as art spectrum there’s no denying that plenty of artistic efforts are put into many games’ production. Case in point is the Video Games Live tour which offers orchestral performances of video game music that would be difficult for any music snob to scoff at.

The CD (and digital download) release of Video Games Live: Volume One offers selected studio and live performances featuring the Slovak Symphony Orchestra, Crouch End Festival Chorus and various soloists as conducted by Jack Wall.

Click through for a track-by-track review…

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Check out the gallery: Video Games Live: Volume One CD art

The reactions to the infamous art installation by Douglas Edric Stanley (wherein an interactive game of Space Invaders was superimposed over images of the attacked World Trade center towers) were almost entirely negative. The work was trashed as an offensive, meaningless, tasteless piece; and Stanley ended up taking it down from it’s display at GC last month. One writer believes we’ve all been too quick to judge, however, and that a large part of it is the fact that the piece was presented as a game.

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With E3 finally wrapped up and Comic Con just around the corner, it’s time to chill out and take a look at one of game culture’s coolest exhibitions: I am 8-bit. The game-themed fine art show is returning in 2008 to the World of Wonder Storefront Gallery in Hollywood this August 14th. This year, the exhibition is set to be the biggest ever, with work from well-known artists and newcomers alike…

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I know I’m mentioned before that it’s a given kid’s movies get games, but somehow I didn’t expect to see a Coraline video game. Maybe this is because I’d see a Coraline video game as being dark and Silent Hill-ish. D3Publisher is working on a video game to coincide with the February 6, 2009 release of the animated movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. So far DS, PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game are planned, with Papaya Studios (Medal of Honor: Airborne, Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey, Larry Boy and the Bad Apple) working on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions and ART (Disney Princess: Royal Adventure, Flushed Away, Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee) working on the DS and PSP ones. I’m hopefully optimistic, but Papaya Studios and ART’s former projects aren’t reassuring me.

If you haven’t read Coraline, you should. It’s a children’s book with a story anyone can enjoy. Coraline discovers a door in her family’s apartment which leads to another, alternate world, which is inhabited by Other Mother, Other Father and alternate versions of people in the real world. At first Other Mother and Other Father seem nice, as they give Coraline the attention her real parents seem to busy to provide, but things turn dark quickly, and Coraline has to save herself, her parents and three ghost children who were captured by Other Mother. If you’re interested, the first chapter of Coraline is available online at Harper Teen. The video game adaptation will likely follow the events of the book and movie.

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No matter where you fall on the videogames as art debate, there is still plenty of respectable work being done by professional artists for videogames. To celebrate some of the often unseen and under appreciated masterpieces created for games, Midway has released the full-color, flatbound paperback book, The Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons published by Design Studio Press.

The 160-page book collects more than 200 illustrations works that include paintings, pencil sketches, ink and digital creations for five games: Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat, Psi-Ops, Stranglehold and The Suffering. Many of the woks are presented in full-bleed format (8 1/2 x 11 in.) or spanning across the fold or wider works, with comments either by the artist or of the game’s lead artist. The last chapter also includes art from the company’s archive that was no used in any game.

All of the art in the book, save one pixelated image, is represented in high detail with lush colors. A few are so big you almost wish they had included some of those annoying fold-out pages so you could appreciate the massive scope of the work. There is a decent mix of character designs, concept art and background images used to study color treatments, lighting and textures for possible use in games.

The nice thing, this is not packed with images of scantily clad hotties you’d find in many so many so-called “art books.” Instead, it offers pages of intricate images you can study for hours, wondering how these artists produce such beautiful images in such short time (often a day or two each) that, if they’re lucky, are marred by a few editor’s scribbles and end up in a vault.

The art ranges from smaller sketches to large environments drawn on dozens of pieces of paper and then pieced together like an oversized puzzle. Again, you’ll wish a few works folded out for more detailed views. Styles also range from pencil to digital creations, showing than artists need to be able to work in many media even when the end result will be a purely a digital production.

Most gamers will certainly appreciate this as a nice coffee table book that guest can thumb through, picking out the Mortal Kombat character designs in the first chapter by Vince Proce, Angie Lange, Luis Mangeubat and Pav Kovacik. With four artists taking stabs at iconic characters, it becomes clear that most of these are group projects.

The most impressive art are the backgrounds and environment treatments for Stranglehold by several artists including Stephan Martiniere. The same chapter also features a hyper-realistic character designs by Vince Proce who took countless images of staff members and professional models and melded them into people you’d swear you’d seen in movies or even walking down the street.

Artist comments are also pretty interesting, especially those by Ben Olson for The Suffering. The most memorable lines are about to Swam Borrower, a character design that didn’t make it into the game, that reads, “I still think the idea of having a tube hooked up to your face that leads to your own swollen man boob is pretty twisted. Does he drink how own breast milk> Or maybe he’s an aquatic creature he fills his boob full of sea water so that he can breathe on land? Yea maybe it’s kind of a goofy idea.” The creative process can certainly take an artist into the strangest of places in his or her mind. Horror fans will appreciate Olson’s other works in the book often meld fleshy creatures with spikes, tubes and various weapons.

For anyone studying videogames or simply appreciating various art forms, definitely grab this book and give it a lengthy gander.

Site [The Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons] Read [The Gamer Gene] Also Read [Destructiod]

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From our favorite Japanese import site, J-List/J-Box, comes a Dig Dug dot art toy that’s a lot like a mini Lite Brite (without the lights).

For $9.50 plus shipping, you get a kit with 520 small colored pegs, two small peg boards and a stand to display your finished bit of pixelated goodness. You can also join the two pieces together to make a cute little scene for your desk, bookshelf or simply or tack on the wall.

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While the debate rages on about whether or not videogames themselves are art, collections of game-inspired art are gaining popularity.

Case in point: The Into the Pixel art exhibition to be shown this July (11-13, 2007) at E3 2007 and opened to the public at the E for All Expo at the LA convention center October 18-21, 2007.

The collection was unveiled online yesterday (June 22nd) and features 16 multimedia works “selected by a panel of jurors from a field of submissions gleaned from artists around the world”. Now in it’s fourth year, the collection includes concept art, sketches, and digital paintings from and inspired by games as diverse as Viva Pinata, Dawn of War, and Lair.

Site [Into the Pixel] Read [Destructoid]

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