[manifestsilence]

Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A:

The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)

Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)

Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)

Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)

A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.

This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.

This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.

[voldacar]

Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.

[watwut]

Portal may be ok puzzle, but I just really fail to see that as some kind high art equivalent. I mean, it is fun for enough people for me to be sure it is something valuable, but calling it "exploring human condition" would be a massive stretch.

It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about human condition or some such.

[manifestsilence]

Yeah, that could be. It's a young genre and I think that paintings from before perspective became systematically understood are super awkward. That's a cool thought. I'm totally okay with blowing some hours to experience the Hamlet of games.

[krapp]

> I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.

But Hideo Kojima was born years ago...