Art is being applied to video games?

An interesting point that had been brewing in my head for awhile, without the means to articulate it effectively, was essentially video games are starting to develop into an art form. One of the biggest obstacles that video games as a whole needed to overcome, however, are the ridiculous things that video games have come to embody in the past two decades.




First I'll mention Mirror's Edge, having only played the very short demo, I can't speak to the overall quality of the game. But someone got downright analytical about it, and what I thought was an interesting and fairly well executed idea, let alone how gorgeous and fluid it looked, turns out to be a great representation of an art form akin with martial arts. Some of the stuff went over my head so I read it twice.


Next is Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, which was featured in an interview with it's creator on 1up.com yesterday, interview is here. David Cage more or less sums up what I think I've been trying to say is the biggest hindrance in video games being accepted as an art form:

We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers. This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories.

So as I wait for Indigo Prophecy to drop on XBox Live Arcade so I can finally try a game my friend upon its release said was worth picking up and now eat my words what like three or four years later? Sounds like the same thing that happened with Beyond Good & Evil, which is still the only game that makes me feel like I was ever at one point ahead of the curve.