This has been a gigantic issue for years on both sides, whether games like Shadow of the Colossus or Flow can be considered forms of art, or if they’d be let into the medium. I tend to explain things from my perspective. So sit back, relax, grab a coffee. We’re gonna be here a while.

Let’s start off simple. What is art? “Art is….” Exactly. Art is whatever you want it to be. BUT! The general collective opinion on what is and is not considered to be ‘Art’ for thousands upon thousands of years has led us to a few distinct examples of what art is.

Art is a painting on a wall, a sculpture in a room, an orchestral piece of music, or a visual expression. Basically, a painting, music, and film. That’s art. If it touches your soul and was made by another person(or people), that’s art.

So why aren’t games considered art? By this logic o’ mine, they’re made by large groups of people, include motion, visuals, and music, and on occasion, evoke emotions.

Point #1: Games are not art because of their interactivity. Read that over a few times and the rest of this will make sense.

Games are not Art because of their interactivity. Along with it, Art can not be considered a Game because of the lack thereof. Let’s say you go see, for example, Avatar in theaters. Is it interactive in any way, shape or form? Of course not. It carries on whether you watch it or not. The movie will still carry on it’s set path for eternity because you can’t affect it. This movie is a form of art because of it. “Alright,” you say, “if that’s the only difference, then why not lessen the interactivity of games? Then they’d be considered art.” Good point. Which leads me to…

Point #2: Interactivity is what makes a game a game.

If a game did not have interactivity at all, it would simply be a movie. Pick your RPG of choice. Final Fantasy. Zelda. Hell, even WoW. Would this game you chose be as exciting and worth playing if you just sat there and watched the events unfold on-screen? Who in their right mind would watch a 40-hour movie without being able to do anything in it? Would that truly be an entertaining game?

Point #3: Not every game deserves this art argument.

Not even close. There’s a lot, and I’m talking 85% of games out there that do not apply. There are maybe one or two games per year that inspire this argument. Every so often, a game that has too much creativity for its own good comes along and the issue comes in like a tide. Carnival Games? Hell no. Halo series? Now you’re catching on! “You just brought up Halo as an artistic game? Are you mad?” Let me explain. There is one defining factor in what a game must do to even come close to being considered for this continuous argument. Tell a great story. Now you understand that 85% I brought up. Not every game tells a great story. Good, sure, Decent, yes, but very few actually tell a great/creative/compelling/interesting/artistic story.

But I digress. Something has come to mind that is wonderfully on topic!

“What of video game movies, and games based off of movies?” And the meteor hits! Usually, games based off movies and movies based off games, well, fail horribly. The only reasons either one see ANY dollar signs are because they play off of interest. You can’t do that. You can’t borrow success from one medium and honestly think you’ll gain the same rewards in another. Remember how I mentioned Avatar earlier? That movie made over $1 Billion in the box office. The game based off of it? Quite less. Super Mario Bros. 3 was the largest-selling non-bundled NES game. Did the Super Mario Bros. movie do similarly well, selling out screen after screen? Of course not.

Point #4: Games are not art.

It pains me to admit it, but yes. Games are NOT a form of art. They are artistic, that’s for sure….but they’re not art. No game has or ever will see the success a movie does, or be in a museum on display. Never. Why?

Point #5: Games and art are parallels of one another. Games borrow from movies, movies borrow from games.

But after all of this, remember…. Games are not art. They should be, and we as gamers will argue until the end of time until they are, but it won’t happen.

Games can be incredibly emotional. They can make you laugh like a crazy, or cry like you just lost your family dog. They can cause fear, they can evoke bravery. They can do everything a movie can do, they can try to mimic every element of every great movie in the past 100 years, but it will still be true…

Games are not art, because we decide what happens in them. Games are not art, because the rely on us to move the story along. Games are not art, because we interact.

What we play is a reflection of who we are.
The stories we choose to take part in show what we have interest in.

Games are a way of life. So much better than any form of art if you ask me…

For starters, they’re adding more than 10,000 words into the recognized database of words. Scribblenauts had 22,802, which is 1/27th of the English language. It has also been revealed that Scribblenauts 2 will have, drum roll please, a focus on the use of adjectives.

The game will also have 120 “new and improved” levels. The report in NP also says that the developers promise to make improvements to the game’s controls. This is big news, as the original’s controls had you tapping and holding the direction on screen you wanted to go– the same action for placement and interaction with objects on screen. You’d run when you wanted to pick something up, and possibly die from that mistake.

The game is slated to release in Fall of 2010.

Using a hippo as a ladder in a wet cave amongst pirate animals to reach a star. Only in Scribblenauts, folks.

Portal 2 has been announced. Rejoice. Yes. Oh yes. YES.

Details are incredibly scant at the moment, as this is breaking news for the day. Thankfully, Gamestop’s product pages are actually worth looking at this time. The page for Portal 2 lets on to a very intriguing feature that has not been divulged yet: Co-op. This makes me wonder how you’ll be able to use portals from yourself, and from other people… oh come on, Valve! Don’t wait! Give us more details! All we have right now is the leaked cover for the April issue of Game Informer:

A full announcement is expected sometime at GDC next week. Perhaps the ASCII images’ clues towards 3.11(GLaDoS’s version in the text) really are leading up to March 11th.

Portal 2. Portal 2. PORTAL 2.

We now have answers to the question “Why?”.

According to G4TV.com, both Jason West and Vince Zampella have sued Activision. Why, you ask? Their termination comes just weeks before Activision would have paid them royalties for Modern Warfare 2. Activision hired lawyers to essential find a way around California’s public policy that states that employers must pay employees what they are due, and ran with it.

There’s the answer none of us wanted to hear. Activision are being a group of greedy, corporate, heartless, cold-blooded bastards. But that’s just my opinion.

Monday’s was much more cryptic that today’s is…to begin with. It unleashed a new achievement where you carry around radios (26 of them) to detect interference in the various test chambers, and finding the exact point on the map of this interference causes the light on the radio to change from red to green. Achievement progress! The internet swarmed like locusts on this, decoding the intereference(some of it morse code) into ASCII pictures of large-scale, Portal-themed art.

Today’s update, however, starts off by giving the answers first and creating questions second– They changed the ending. The ending after you disassemble GLaDOS, after the building explodes, after you’re left lying on a street amongst the rubble and shrapnel of Apeture Sciences. They changed that final scene.

I’m playing through the game from scratch to complete both the achievement and the viewing of this changed ending. I truly admire what Valve’s doing here with Portal. The game came out in December of 2007, and just over two years after they’re changing main parts of the game. The same could be said for Team Fortress 2, but then again, TF2 doesn’t have much of a solid, detailed storyline behind it.

Early this morning, reports came in across various forums and blogs that many, many PS3 systems were suffering a sickness of sorts– the date was being reset to December 31, 1999. You thought Y2K was over with, didn’t you? It only escalated from there, though, as reports came in of trophies being erased, save files being deleted, even so far as older, at-launch consoles bricking. PS3 Slim models seem to be unaffected. This freak technological occurrence has caused Sony to literally tell it’s user base to not turn on their systems, and that a patch would be available in 24 hours.

In the late afternoon, and I noticed this on my own Steam account, Portal got an update. You know how Valve like to be extra cryptic with their game updates? The trend continues! The update brings in the weirdest of the weird– radio chatter, an achievement based off of the radios in the game, hidden morse code, and references to dinosaurs. That wasn’t a typo. Dinosaurs. As of this post, I’ve not seen any progress in terms of deciphering the confusion.

That is, in part, because there is another, much more powerful story at hand. Just before midnight EST, an article was posted on G4TV.com, which you can see here. The offices of Infinity Ward, developers of the massively popular shooter Modern Warfare 2, were surprised with an unannounced bumrush of security personnel. IW studio heads had apparently met with Activision that morning, and the staff hadn’t seen them since.

The mood around the Infinity Ward offices is currently described as “freaked out” and “confused.”

Read more: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702911/Security-Appears-Unannounced-At-Infinity-Ward-Studio-Heads-Missing-Staff-Freaked-Out-.html#ixzz0h07p1Mms

In their position, yeah, I’d be a little freaked too. It gets worse, gamerverse. Jason West, one of the head staff at IW, posted this on his Facebook page as a status update:

Jason West is drinking. Also, unemployed.

Not only that, but his Linkedin profile, which shows current and past occupations, has also been changed to show that Infinity Ward is now a former place of employment. Confirmation of all of this IW hoopla came from MTV Multiplayer’s Patrick Klepek, through one of his tweets.

This is an ugly day, to say the least. To lose use of one’s PS3, especially this soon after Heavy Rain’s release, must surely feel like a knife in the back.

EDIT: Breaking news concerning the IW fiasco! It seems earlier today, Activision cited a human resources investigation into “breaches of contract by two senior employees at Infinity Ward”. Jason West was one of those people, apparently. What I’d truly like to know is the specific details of this. What breach of contract? They made a game that made billions and on schedule, no less.

EDIT 2: Our own Dillon has informed me of this site, where the internet is going psycho over deciphering the Portal updates. It’s surprising how deep and cryptic it gets.

EDIT 3: As of this morning, another Infinity Ward senior staff member, Vince Zampella, has updated his Linkedin profile to show that IW is now a former job.