the mofo with the info.

The minds at Penny-Arcade have a new comic dealing with their newfound feelings at having switched to the flamboyant Apple lifestyle. While they joke about the dangerous path they have set down, I saw the announcement that the two authors of the comic were switching to Macs from PCs to be groundbreaking, and a signal of a big victory for Apple in general.

Here’s some background. Penny-Arcade is the most widely read webcomic around, and they primarily deal with the topic of video games. They have a rabidly fanatical fanbase, and are treated by video game manufacturers as journalists; they have access to sneak previews of new games and consoles, they have been commissioned to make supplementary material for big video games such as Rainbow 6 and World of Warcraft. In addition to this, they have traditionally had a strict anti-Mac attitude; a character in their strip Charles, is typically ridiculed for his love of the Mac platform in general. This has made sense, as they are gamers, and there are… exactly one game (s) available for the Mac that are worth a crap. So I was pretty surprised when they announced over a month ago that they were both looking into buying Apple machines, spurred by the switch to the Intel processors. Though as a Mac fanatic, I am pretty happy about this, it had me a little confused. The switch to the Intel platform has very little impact on the immediate availability of games for the Mac. In fact, due to Rosetta issues, there are reports that some games that worked on old Macs will not work or will run slower on the faster powered Intel Macs.

So… These people were unconvinced by Apple’s switch to BSD, they were unconvinced by Ellen Feiss, and they were unconvinced by Tiger. Why switch now, when nothing has changed from their perspective? How could two users so defiantly anti-switch be swayed by a change of architecture, and the announcement of minor improvements to the basic hardware that they offered before? I have a theory, natch.
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In a recent review of Doom, film critic Roger Ebert dismissed the entire platform of video gaming in the context of art. When questioned about it in his answer column, he responded:

I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.

Now, the arrogant tone of this blurb has drawn ire from the blogosphere round. I really don’t care about Ebert’s opinion on video games; for that matter, I wouldn’t ask Roger Ebert to review literature, opera, or rock and roll either. He’s a reviewer of a niche artform, and an extremely mainstream one at that. Ebert can only appreciate art forms that lay themselves out before him, and not ones that allow a user to interact and test the scenery. There are games like “Metal Gear Solid: 2″ that present a storyline that draws the user in and challenges the viewers’ expectations in ways that M. Night Shamalan could only dream of. Games like “Silent Hill” will thrill users more than any horror movie, as the user is forced to assume the role of the main character, down to feeling her heartbeat in the controller vibration. In its relatively short lifetime, the video game industry has already crafted works that are unarguably artistic in nature, and have the capacity to surpass movies or books as captivating storytelling tools.

However, I ultimately have to agree with Ebert at some level. Although he fails to mention it, there is a serious difference between video games and more persistent artworks like literature, music and even movies. Video games are linked to video game systems, which compete with each other for market share and are obsoleted and replaced every five years or so. While certain titles have been “ported” to many platforms, most video games can only be enjoyed by maybe half of the video gaming at any given time, and will not have replay value five years down the line. While my Dad and I can sit down and enjoy a Clint Eastwood movie, it is unlikely that I will be able to recommend “Chrono Trigger” to my own children. I’m not saying that the ephemeral nature of video games invalidates it at an artform, but i do think that there is a fundamental technological problem that needs to be solved in order for video games to be respectable as a persistent work of art that can stand the test of time.