VIDEO GAMES AS AN ART

Topic : Virtual Environments

Even before watching Virtual Environments by Peter Gornstein, I always thought about whether we should consider computer games as a form of art or not. I believe that there are certain similarities between video games and renaissance art. After I watched the video, my ideas about computer games did not change, they even became stronger because the video clearly demonstrated the technical side of creating a game by using the game called Rise: Son of Rome as an example which actually proves that there are an indisputable connection between video games and renaissance like encouraging creativity and imagining the unimaginable.

In the video, Peter Gornstein claims that ‘’We’re using depth, we’re using space, we’re using light. All of these tools are used to tell the story exactly the same way that a Renaissance painter would do.’’ Surprisingly, these tools that Gornstein mentioned refer and match with Alberti’s ideas in On Painting. Moreover, Gornstein says that they’ve used a painting of Marcello Venusti’s as an inspiration to create Nero’s palace. So, it can be deduced that they used a form of art to create another that is a more aesthetic and visually appealing one and actually by doing this, they somehow accept that they are influenced by the ideas of renaissance.

In addition, in the first paragraph I mentioned that ‘’imagining the unimaginable’’ is another common feature of renaissance art and computer games. In renaissance period, there are a lot of pieces of art that actually created by imagining the unimaginable. For example, lets look at Michelangelo’s famous painting, the Creation of Adam. When we look at the painting, we can see that there a lot of things that Michelangelo figuratively described  with his own words such as the images of the God, angels and Adam himself. For more ‘’technological’’ example, I want to give Far Cry: Primal, which is a role-playing game that takes place in the dark ages. This is another example of imagining the unimaginable because we don’t have enough information about the early life in the dark ages to create the whole environment and make it look realistic. So, I think this is another common feature, which actually my personal best because it’s harder to create imaginary things and make them look beautiful and aesthetic than just perfect the existing one.