Games are NOT more artistic than film

OK, I've left the Manhunt 2 thing alone. I made a little request about the game when it was announced (which brought a lot of traffic to my site from Take-Two Interactive over the following weeks), and I left well enough alone, even amidst the initial Adults Only (AO) rating, and it being banned outright in the UK and Ireland.

But then Gordon Hall, head of Take Two's Rockstar Leeds studio, says this:

"I don’t think Rockstar specifically has been picked on, but I do think that the wider issue attacks our entire industry. We need to teach people that games are an art form – they are more artistic than film.

"I think the games industry should rally behind us, because there will come a time when we’ll all have an idea that’s a little edgy, and we need to have the freedoms to express it.

"We are an adult entertainment industry – we may have started out with child-like technology making games solely for a younger audience, but it’s just not like that anymore. It might take legislature a little while to catch up, but if the industry sticks together hopefully we can change people’s attitudes quicker."

Granted, Hall's doing a corporate call to arms so people consider the import of what a rating can do. But there's no way in hell I'm letting this cast-off slide.

Games are "more artistic than film"?

Garbage. First, because you can't say something is more artistic than something else. It's art, so that whole, "I don't know if it's good, but I know what I like" thing gets in the way. It's subjective.

Second, let's compare the two. Let's arbitrarily say film "started" on April 23, 1896 (when Thomas Edison presented the first publicly-projected motion picture). That same year, we got The Kiss (The May Irwin Kiss) the first film ever made of a couple kissing in cinematic history. Six years later we have A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès' four-hundredth film). A year after that, The Great Train Robbery. And Chaplin did his first film by 1914.

In 1915, less than 20 years after the "start" of film, we had D. W. Griffith's 3-hour Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation.

Now, let's arbitrarily say video games started in 1972 with the patent for "A Television Gaming Apparatus and Method", the public display (if not availability) of Magnavox's Odyssey (the first home video game system), Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founding Atari, and Pong.

So in 2007, 35 years after the "start" of video games, with more technology, a bigger production infrastructure, multiple tempate industries (film, TV, publishing, music, toy manufacturing), and incomparably fast technological advances, we've got (*drum roll*) ...

(*sound of crickets chirping*)

Jack sh** (comparatively).

You know I'm big into video games. I seriously enjoy them. I've enjoyed countless games, and been moved to a degree by a handful (things like Planetfall, King's Quest III, Dungeon Master, American McGee's Alice, Indigo Prophecy, Breakdown, Psychonauts).

But they're not The Birth of a Nation, Metropolis, Modern Times (or The Great Dictator), King Kong, Singin' in the Rain, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai, 2001, Schindler's List, or hundreds of other examples.

If you could even say one art form is "more artistic" than another, games have light years to go to even touch the grandeur and elevation of film.

Ooh, but let's give him a chance with "... we’ll all have an idea that’s a little edgy, and we need to have the freedoms to express it."

Yes, because we have games that touch Psycho or Se7en or Fight Club.

Wait, no we don't.

(Hell, there's a whole snuff film industry of which Manhunt is a poor man's shadow.)

"We are an adult entertainment industry."

Really, Mr. Hall? Is that why the Nintendo Wii is rocking the company coffers, and you guys are in all sorts of financial arrears? (I know, there are alleged financial ethical issues of Take Two's that make that an unfair comparison.)

Is that why someone brilliant like Warren Spector partners with Disney? Is that why a largely licensed-fare publisher like THQ is doing so well? Is that why the Madden and Guitar Hero franchises make Electronic Arts and Activision the top publishers?

Please, soften the "adult entertainment industry" hyperbole. Pornography is an adult entertainment industry against which games (thankfully) don't even rate on a comparable scale. But at least they don't market to kids.

Um ...

(We may nickname this post, "The One That Kept Adam Permanently Out of the Game Industry".)