Comparing Games to other Media

We’ve all been doing this for years, but in the last little while I’ve read at least three articles comparing games to the various other forms of artistic media. I understand why we do this, games are an emerging art form and comparing its progress to the other established forms makes sense in some ways. Also games went through a period of mimicking movies that just now seems to be starting to end.

Is comparing games really that useful though? I read this article about a year ago, essentially it says that because game technology changes so rapidly, old games like the original Super Mario are doomed to irrelevance. Any time a new game comes out with some new idea, it pushes aside the older technology and makes it obsolete. When the article was published various game related sites all exploded in fury trying to defend their medium. They claimed gamers go back all the time to experience the older games, and just like newer generations are still enjoying The Godfather, newer generations go back and play 8 and 16 bit games in some capacity. While this is true, my reaction was that games haven’t even gotten to the point where there is an accepted convention yet. When movies were first conceived they were ten minute shorts that no one today knows anything about. Even once they became feature length it took a bit before standards were established. Here is where I think the comparison of mediums can be detrimental, movies reached their established standards in a fairly short period of time. Therefore the logical conclusion has to be that the writer of this article is right and by the late ‘80s games should have too.

I see these types of arguments all the time, why do the mediums have to evolve along the same time frame as each other? Why do they have to do the same things as each other at all? We are constantly trying to tell the world why games are a unique form of expression. How they offer interactivity in a way no other medium can. Yet while making these claims we talk about how similar they are to music, movies and plays. Of course there are going to be similarities between them, and some will even be useful for exploring new ideas, but by comparing games with them we are also establishing a standard on which all media can be judged. This doesn’t make any sense because they are all so different.

I’m not saying we should stop making the comparisons altogether, we should just be aware of what we are doing and how we are doing it. Movies, music, plays, books, and games are all very different, and change over time in very different ways. We need to be well aware of how far the similarities to each actually go and where they stop, otherwise games will be judged on a playing field it isn’t a part of.