Category Archives: games as art

Anticipation 1

By Rubes | Published: February 26, 2009

A couple of indie games that have been in development for some time are nearing completion. I’m jealous. I’ve also really been looking forward to both, so I’m also very happy.

I’ll talk about one of them later, but one I’d like to mention now is The Path, a game by Tale of Tales. I’ve discussed this title briefly in the past, but I’ve been following it for quite a while. These are the folks that made The Graveyard, the art title about an old woman in a cemetery that generated a lot of discussion on the tubes about games as art, and challenged people’s assumptions about what technically constitutes a “game.”

From what I’ve seen so far it appears likely that The Path will again stimulate conversations about games as an artistic and storytelling medium. See for yourself.


The Path, Grandmother’s House teaser 1 – the hall from [More...]

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Making the Rounds: Machinarium

By Rubes | Published: February 5, 2009

This game has topped my list for Most Anticipated Seriously Beautiful Game for some time now. Amanita Design is a small group of indie game developers responsible for some very cool, short point-and-click Flash games in the past: Samorost1, Samorost2, and Questionaut, which was nominated for a British Academy Award. Hell, they’ve even made a short little adventure for a band I’ve enjoyed listening to in the past, The Polyphonic Spree, which includes some previously unreleased music. In each case, the recognizable artwork is beautiful, the gameplay is light and engaging, and the accompanying music and sound effects are charming.

For a while now they’ve been bringing this same style to a full-length adventure, Machinarium, which is an IGF finalist this year for Excellence in Visual Art. I’ve been following along from afar, and every small snippet I’ve caught has been raising my [More...]

Also posted in adventure games, indie games | 2 Comments

blueful

By Rubes | Published: January 27, 2009

Aaron Reed has written some pretty fine IF. Gourmet was one of my favorites from the 2003 IF Comp, just a lot of fun to play. It even has its own theme song (judge for yourself). And of course there’s Whom The Telling Changed, which received much well-deserved recognition and was a finalist in 2006 at the now-defunct Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. I also see that Aaron was interviewed back then for Get Lamp, Jason Scott’s (hopefully) upcoming documentary on text adventures.

He also lives about ten minutes away from my house. We met a couple of times at the quarterly Utah Indie Gamers Night, and he’s a pretty fascinating guy.

Aaron is about to launch his epic new work of IF, Blue Lacuna, which he is calling an “interactive novel”. Before that, though, there is an online [More...]

Also posted in indie games, interactive fiction | 2 Comments

Tale of Tales Goodies

By Rubes | Published: November 27, 2008

Tale of Tales is the Belgian group led by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn that brought us the thought-provoking poetic “art game” (for lack of a better term, I suppose) The Graveyard. It was an intriguing piece that generated a lot of discussion around the tubes, much of which was unfortunately negative because many people didn’t quite get that it doesn’t fit the traditional definition of “game”. It was also created with the Unity engine, a very cool 3D game engine/development tool that runs primarily on Macs, and which I came very close to using for Vespers. In any case, I thought it was a worthwhile experiment and I have a lot of respect for what these folks are trying to do.

Of note, Gamasutra has just posted their postmortem on The Graveyard, which I think is a great read. They posted it on their web site a [More...]

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The Money Factor

By Rubes | Published: August 11, 2008

Seems that money is on people’s minds lately.

Jay at The Rampant Coyote recently published an article on The Escapist about mainstream developers going indie. It’s a good read that involves a number of interesting folks from around the indie scene, including Steven Peeler from Soldak Entertainment, Steve Taylor from NinjaBee, and one of my Torque heroes, Andy Schatz of Pocketwatch Games, among others. The article nicely summarizes many of the issues driving and confronting indie game developers — creative freedom, independence, marketing and publicity, piracy, and distribution. Of course, underlying most of these issues is the money factor. It is, of course, the focus of the main question (“Why give up a steady paycheck in order to labor in relative obscurity?”), and from the article you get a good appreciation of how money impacts so many different aspects of development on the indie side. One particular insight, [More...]

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You Want Art With Those Games? (Part 2)

By Rubes | Published: April 14, 2008

This is the second part of a series of blogs that aim to contribute yet more internet detritus to everybody’s favorite age-old argument: Seriously, are computer games an art form?

Part 2: “Games as Art” = “Games as Storytelling Medium”

In Part 1, I proposed that computer/videogames are not yet a true art form, but are capable of being one. To do so a game will need to come along that has a substantial impact on its players because of its beauty, insight, or emotional power, in the same manner as some of the successful works from other forms of traditional media like film, theater, or literature. Without a form-defining piece, the medium will likely continue to make some advances and convince some individuals, but fail to achieve widespread acceptance by the public as a true art form.

For a game to have this kind of impact on its [More...]

Also posted in interactive fiction, story in games | 11 Comments

You Want Art With Those Games?

By Rubes | Published: April 3, 2008

This is the first part of a series of blogs that aim to contribute yet more internet detritus to everybody’s favorite age-old argument: Seriously, are computer games an art form?

Part 1: Games Are Not An Art Form

By now I would guess that most people with a finger on the pulse of the computer/videogame industry have the sense that there is a growing movement for this medium to be regarded as something more than a hollow, trivial pastime. The “Games as Art” debate has certainly been ongoing for some time now, and unfortunately for everyone I feel the burning need to chime in. Part of the argument that games are not, and perhaps never will be, considered a true art form is that the medium has yet to produce any works of timeless relevance, unlike more traditional media like theater, film, and literature. In other words, the experiences [More...]

Also posted in story in games | 10 Comments