By ccesarano 1 year, 11 months ago • 0 Comments
So I’ve been in a depressed enough mood lately as it is, but the one thing that I took joy from was just about made meaningless this Sunday when I watched the Academy Awards. Ever since my Film Arts class I’ve had a greater interest in films and my standards have rose a bit, so while there’s a lot of politics and other bullshit during the Academy Awards I was interested in checking them out nonetheless. Partly because last year was actually really good for film despite trash like Revenge of the Fallen and New Moon!
The very fact that The Hurt Locker won so many awards is all the more surprising. I would’ve preferred District 9, Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and a couple other smaller hits got more attention, but let’s face it. Genre-flicks never do all too well with awards for some reason, even though they can convey messages in great ways (District 9).
Yet the very next day I go online and my twitter feed and sites I check are loaded with nothing but predictable praise of the mediocre, i.e. Final Fantasy 13 and God of War 3 (ok, GoW3 may not be mediocre, but the franchise as a whole is really nothing special). It was like a sucker punch to a still-healing wound.
It’s a pretty heavy statement to say “no one treats games as art”, and in the end I’m bound to sound like a pompous ass about it. But you know what? I never lie to myself about who I am. I’m not some sort of genius or superior intellect, or else I’d already be out of my parent’s house and would have gotten a job right out of College. But my intelligence is definitely focused on creativity. Both sides of my brain hone in on it and various aspects of art. As a result, I’ve always been highly critical of games. Now that I took a Film Arts class I’m not only more critical of film, but even MORE critical of games than before. It sort of took my perceptions of games and honed them even deeper, so that I went from being a critic to being an even bigger critic.
Yet when I look at the games industry and compare the Spike VGA Awards to the Academy, it becomes clear as day. If film were like games then the movies getting all the attention would have been Revenge of the Fallen, The Hangover, New Moon and Avatar. In that lineup, yeah, Avatar certainly would be the best of them. Too bad there are so many better movies from 2009.
I know I’m not the only writer that takes games as seriously as I do and is so often going against what the rest of the industry seems to say (Tim Rogers and Ben Croshaw were doing it before me). But what effect have they had in all the time they’ve been writing?
So I need to take a break from it for a while. I’m not going to be writing about games except for a column starting up soon, and I’ve already got three pieces ready for it so I’ve got time. I might try and write about games that I DO consider high pieces of art, just to remind myself why I love this medium as much as I do. But unfortunately it still feels like “why bother?”. I’m not going to change anyone’s opinions, and I’m in no position of influence where people can think “Huh, he may be right”. Instead I’ll just seem like some self-important Internet fuckwad.
I love video games, but this industry is so sickening that I really don’t know if I want to be a part of it sometimes.
None yet.
