Mr. Prichard has most of the bases covered but I thought I'd quickly share my very recent and personal experience in the matter.
September 18th, 2002. 9:27 am:
Payday.
I'm standing in front the office rubbing my sleepy eyes and dimly wondering why my key won't open the door. The thought that the locks have changed does not cross my sleep-addled brain. Leaning forward to find a glare less angle, I pause to consider the Kinko's-printed canvas sign leering down on me.
"Tremor Entertainment."
The logo is a dingy red Blizzard facsimile, poorly conceived and executed.
The door opens. I nearly tumble backwards in surprise. Grasping at teetering iron I manage to steady myself. The railing below has rusted out at its bases which are now milling with fire ants.
Karen, our CFO, is standing in the doorway, flanked by armed guards. She is wearing an expression of practiced concern and, oddly, poorly-masked triumph.
"There are no paychecks. The company has been shut down until the contract is renegotiated with Microsoft." Her first performance of the day.
We're told to get a few of our personal things, whatever we'll need or want while the company's on hiatus. I don't realize that I'll never see my Mr. Coffee, Thinkgeek caffeine mugs, and Rage Against the Machine CDs again. "I know it's not your fault," I tell the surly guard "but this is really insulting." He nods: a solemn, practiced, patronizing nod. Karen returns, this time demanding our now useless building keys.
"Do I have to turn in my hall pass too?" No response. The guard tells us to leave. Karen's told him we're not to touch the computers and he's getting jittery. His hand slides involuntarily to the holster on his belt. This is fucking ridiculous.
Standing in the parking lot an hour later, beer in hand, I realized that it was over.
As it turned out there were no 'renegotiations with Microsoft'. The first they heard were our frantic cell phone calls. Our Floridian CEO took the payroll money and ran. All it takes is one A-Hole.
The Tremor team included a number of brilliant, talented individuals; all of them underpaid for their dedication. The team was there for each other and for the project, not for money. This team included the Lead Designer of Starcraft, designers and artists from Warcraft 1& 2, Diablo and Sacrifice (among others.) The project, The Unseen (irony: located), was unassailably special both visually and in terms of gameplay. The contract was with Microsoft, a first-party development contract: the holy grail of game contracts. (I'll save the story of how Microsoft later rammed us in our collective cornhole with a red hot poker for tomorrow night, kiddies.)
In the end all it took was one man to destroy what so many had struggled so long to create.
Currently, the displaced employees of Tremor are involved in a civil lawsuit to recover unpaid wages. CEO Steven Oshinsky is under investigation by the FBI. He looks like Joey Buttafuco. www.tremor.net is still active, it appears.
Hah, well I guess this is going to get buried, I'll just paste the article in here and see if anyone notices it that way:
"Escaping the 'Tomb'"
Breasts. How could they turn on me like this? After all the times we've shared? Breasts are standing in the way of something important; something more important to me, a 21 year old man, than sex. Breasts are retarding the actualization of the first emerging art form of the 21st century. Upon telling the proverbial Man on the Street you're studying to enter the field of video game design you will receive one of two reactions. Anyone over the age of thirty will say "Oh, that's nice" accompanied by a condescending, vacant stare. The reaction elicited from my younger peers: an exclamatory "awesome!" and the pantomimed fondling of oversized, imaginary breasts. Having already decided to devote my life to the creation of games, these reactions can only depress and infuriate. They can only be construed as a direct result of the popularity of games like the odious Tomb Raider. The problem is clear, but what it not clear is whether gaming can ever escape this "Tomb" of juvenility and negative perception. At their heart games are an art form as viable as motion pictures or photography and are destined to be recognized as so in the near future. This form, interactive video art, will be increasingly accepted as the technology that comprises it stabilizes and as the current base of enthusiastic reviewers convert to game criticism, thereby propagating academic awards for excellence in games. It is the defining cultural phenomenon of this generation. It cannot and will not be denied its artistic merit.
In order to address games as art, we must first fashion a working definition for art. Foremost amongst artistic considerations should be aesthetics. As Berys Gaut eloquently states in Theories of Art Today, good art "possesses positive aesthetic properties such as being beautiful, graceful, or elegant (properties which ground a capacity to give sensuous pleasure"(28). In addition, good art presents a statement, imbued with the unique perspective of its creator and was intended as a piece of art. It is able to make a statement about life, society, or even about itself. It pushes the boundaries of its medium and challenges people to think about themselves and the way they relate to the world (it is edifying both generally and personally). Finally and foremost in determining games' artistic viability, good art is a compelling experience, one that can be shared and intellectualized. I've devoted myself to games because I have found their experience more compelling than any other media.
A general definition hammered out, we must now make delineation between literary, narrative-based arts and other forms of art. Games, in the form they now exist, are narrative art. In a piece of narrative art "the object is not the work. The strip of celluloid itself is not the work, any more than the paper and ink of a book is the work. With a game, the CD is not the work."(Adams) The experience is the work. As a generalization, it can then be inferred that, in narrative art, the artistic strength of the work lies in how compelling the storyline and characters are. Another important factor that must be addressed is the fact that narrative arts by definition rely on their medium's stability. Indeed, literary art forms as a whole are lacking one characteristic from our list: the pushing of their medium's boundaries. This does not, however, preclude their artistic viability. The point is that a finite degree of stability must exist in a narrative-based medium in order to maintain suspension of disbelief (how compelling the experience is). This presents a problem for games' advancement as a viable medium. Unfairly, this problem is not based on evaluation of artistic qualities, but rather on the unfamiliarity and instability of delivery platform. In this respect, the only thing holding games out of artistic actualization is a swath of negative perception, both public and academic.
The largest contributing factor in this negative perception of games is technology. The technology that powers games is unstable. According to Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder and CEO of Intel Corp., "Integration complexity doubles every three years"(4). This is known and accepted throughout the computer industry as 'Moore's Law'. Distilled, this means that central processors, essentially the brain of any computer, double in power every 18 months. To a game designer this lack of standardized delivery makes it extremely difficult to create an experience that is identical for each who partake in it (the afore-mentioned stability so vital to narrative art). This, in turn, makes it extremely difficult to accurately identify and evaluate the aesthetic (artistic) properties of a game.
An example: in a film the amount of frames projected on the screen per second remains a constant 30 frames per second (fps). In a game, however, fps is constantly vacillating. In a real-time environment the current position of everything that exists within must be constantly recalculated. The efficiency of this process relies on the speed of the computer on which it's being run, which is primarily limited by the computer's central processor. Taking into account the fact that only a very small percentage of people can afford to upgrade their systems every 18 months, developers are left aiming their games at a broad range of systems, effectively preventing control of how the final piece is viewed. At this point, then, the aesthetics of their work effectively leaves their control. There is, however, an end in sight.
Moore himself, in a 1996 update to the original speech which spawned 'Moore's Law', predicts that the physical limits of silicon will only allow this phenomenon to continue for another two decades. This being said, it is clear that technological stability is close at hand. Without dismissing the possibility and drive to have their artistic viability cemented now, it can be stated with certainty that when the platform for delivery stabilizes into something that is consistent and can be experienced identically by anyone, the technology will be in place to enable games to be recognized as an art form.
Having mentioned the fact that narrative arts like film rely on stability of medium and subsequently addressing games' current lack of stability it is important to address this stability in the medium of film.
It is undisputed that "the motion pictures did not originate as an art but as machine."(Fulton 3) What is not clear, however, how this metamorphosis (from novelty to art form) occurred. It is clear, however, that this change depended principally on standardized delivery.
Thomas Edison patented the first motion picture camera in 1893. Most of the earliest moving images were non-fictional, crude, and unedited: documentary views of ordinary slices of life (street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or shots of a passing train). In the mid 1890s the Edison Company introduced the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope was a bulky, coin-operated movie peep show viewer for a single customer. Early spectators in Kinetoscope parlors were amazed by even the most mundane moving images: an approaching train or parade, women dancing, dogs terrorizing rats. This initial phenomenon quickly lost its appeal with the advent of the projector as film's primary form of delivery. People began to demand not simply a novelty but entertainment. In just a few years, one could spend an evening at the cinema for a nickel.
The first nickelodeon, a small storefront theater, opened in 1905 and became the first permanent movie theatre. A short, silent film was usually accompanied with piano playing, songs, lectures, or vaudeville-type acts. Early nickelodeon films such as The Great Train Robbery attempted to gain artistic credit both by coupling themselves with stage acts and by emulating the expressive techniques of stage acting (techniques like pantomime). The working class quickly embraced the nickelodeon as an alternative to the cost-prohibitive theater. This gave film its initial audience, one which did little to lend credibility to public perception film's artistic aspects. Spurred by racist sentiment, anti-immigrant prejudice, and social discrimination, newspaper critics soon denounced movies as "morally objectionable and "the cause of social unrest". They called for censorship.
Games began life in much the same way, as a technological novelty, crude and unexpressive. Early games were almost totally non-graphical, non-representational. Primitive, triangular groupings of pixels were spaceships, heros, and aliens. Like the kinetoscope, the novelty initially precluded the content. People marveled simply at being able to control what was happening on the screen, in any form. In the same way film found its first audience in the poor immigrant workers, games moved into acceptance as a subcultural phenomenon with the advent of arcades, which contained games like Pong and Space Invaders. In much the same idium as film, this subculture has been attacked by the media and denigrated to by the general public. Even now games are being blamed for current trends of social violence. These are the growing pains of an emerging art form.
Film's growing pains ended in 1915 with the release of Birth of a Nation. While Birth of a Nation certainly had its share of artistic merit, the one thing that truly allowed it to be a pioneering critical and artistic success was technology.
"Technically, the film was a brilliant and stunning new cinematic work - a screen masterpiece which advanced the art of film-making to new heights, with beautifully-structured battle scenes, costuming, and compelling, revolutionary story-telling, editing and photographic techniques (dollying, masking, use of irises, flashbacks, cross-cuts and fades)."(Dirks 2)
While these advances in methodology were extremely important to the growth of film itself as a medium, Birth of a Nation could never have been successful if it had not been for the nickelodeons paving the way and establishing how a film was supposed to be viewed. Once this was established, once people accepted and understood that going to a film meant suspending disbelief, films were free to deliver their messages. Once this freedom was attained, it was only a matter of time before someone like D.W. Griffith, someone with a compelling experience to share, got behind the reins. Albiet, Griffith compelled people to see the KKK as heros, but that was irrelevant in terms of film's growth. Film as art arrived with standardized delivery.
The experience of watching a film has remained stable for almost fifty years. You go to a theater, sit in the dark facing a giant projection screen for two hours and experience whatever the film-makers intended you to experience. It's relevant to ask the question: Would you be able to have the same experience if, for some reason, the projector was focused on the ceiling of the theater? For a majority of people the answer is no, simply because they'd not be willing to make that adjustment.
Another important point to note about film, one which lends additional credibility to games as an art form, is the fact that though film is an art form, not all films are art. Today, games are not considered an art form, though some games are art. Film today is accepted as an art form, removing from consideration those films obviously making no attempt at artistic viability. Films are visually and aurally elegant, contain the unique perspectives of its creators, and often make statements about society or life. They are often intended to provoke thought or educate on a particular subject, and are an experience that can be shared and intellectualized. Most importantly, films provide a compelling experience. They arrived at this point through a painful, iterative process in which all that was weak in their medium was weeded out, each generation building on its predecessor's strengths.
The reason people are so willing to suspend disbelief for a film is not because it is a more powerful form of expression than a game, it's simply because of precedent. At its inception photography suffered the same lack of precedent. The first successful photograph was produced by a Frenchman named Niépce in July of 1827 using material that hardened when exposed to light. In 1829 Niépce entered into a partnership with Louis Daguerre, who then discovered a way of developing photographic plates, reducing the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. This was followed by the discovery that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt. In 1844, his process refined and simplified, Daguerre sold his invention to the French government, naming it the Daguerreotype. What ensued could only be described as a fad, popular culture, nothing more. Daguerreotype madness gripped France. Everyone was amazed at the simplicity of creating an image without the knowledge or skill of drawing. Photography retained this stigma of fad until the late 19th to early 20th century, fifty years later.
The Pictorialist movement, considered the first artistic movement of photography, did for photography what Birth of a Nation did for film. By emulating existing works of art, specifically romantic and realist paintings, works like Alfred Stieglitz' Mountain and Sky bridged the gap between photography and representational painting. By emulating established works of art, the Pictorialists grounded their work in established aesthetics. Considerations like composition, framing, and use of light came into play. The point was to establish that photography can and does possesses all the necessary components to be considered art. It is beautiful and elegant in the same way that representational painting is. It is literally the view of its creator, since a photograph is essentially what the artist was seeing the moment he took it. Also, as in painting, statements are easily made by photographs simply through choice of subject matter. Finally, photographs can be intellectualized, the experience of viewing them shared. That photography possessed these qualities was not asserted for many years. In fact, photography initially met with violent opposition.
Before the middle of the 19th century, art was representational, attempting to recreate the human figure and natural scenes perfectly and accurately. When photography was invented it was considered something of a fraud by established painters and was nearly squelched out of existence. Existing artists were afraid that it would impinge on their livelihood. There was heated debate and vocal artistic outcry that lasted decades. In the end, however, it was conceded that photography possessed the necessary characteristics to assert its claim as an art form. In fact, photography benefited art greatly by freeing it to no longer be purely representational. Unshackled by this historical crux, art was liberated to advance as a medium into realms like Dada and abstract expressionism.
Like games, both photography and film possessed undeniable artistic qualities that, at first, lacked clear definition. Through social perseverance and through the essential and intrinsic strengths of their mediums, photography and film were actualized as true forms of art. One thing that precluded these assertions, however, was the establishment of functioning critical base for both media.
In professional criticism lies the largest influence over public perception. Criticism stems from the need to intellectualize and qualify comparative experience. This need allows critics, effectively and comparatively a very small group of people, to sway the entire public opinion.
When a medium develops what is essentially a subculture of people whose entire purpose is to evaluate pieces of that medium based on a certain criteria, whatever that criteria might be, it lends an artistic viability to that medium that no single artist can hope to achieve. The other function professional criticism serves is to educate. People read criticism because they themselves have only a finite amount of time to devote to leisure activities. Reading critical analysis by people whose entire job is to evaluate pieces allows the public a way to presort their choices, hopefully in order to allow them not to waste their precious time. Therefore they rely on critics to be intelligent, well informed, and to have an excellent grasp on the established language of criticism. A change must be made, then, from today's insubstantial game reviewer
The enormous volume of gaming review websites and publications must make the subtle but vital change from strict review to actual criticism. A game critic must be lucid, well informed, and intelligent. He must evaluate games with respect not only to other games, but with respect to film, literature, and other arts. He must to evaluate games with respect to games as a medium and to how well the game manipulates or uses the medium. Finally, a game critic must adhere to criteria of evaluation more or less agreed on by his peers. There is very little, if any, criticism in the gaming world. There is review. It is extremely important to make this distinction. There is a voluminous cornucopia of publications, on and offline, which deal with game review. People play games then they say whether or not they liked them and why. The problem inherent here is that these reviewers think only in the context of other games, and lack the abstraction necessary to form real, concrete criteria for judging a medium. Observe:
"So upon opening up the thing, we found a nifty Max Payne mousepad and a DVD case (similiar to PS2 game cases) holding the actual game. Weird...yes, but hell, i'm a fan of boxes so it certainly suffices. Now one problem i did have from the start is that in the instruction booklet, Max Payne claims to be the first game ever to feature slo-mo effects in a game. Now, Hitman Codename 47 wasn't shipped with the slo-mo option, but days after its release, there was a patch that featured it for those 'matrix' type bullet exchanges. So, i've got to say, Hitman has stolen some of Max Payne's thunder in a lot of respects. Nit picks aside, i can honestly say that while not being a perfect game and even missing features that Hitman had (not including slo-mo) Max Payne looks like it will be up there as one of the best action games of all time. Now although we haven't played enough for a review yet, i'm not going to claim that it IS the best action game of all time...but...sometimes first impressions last. We'll see." (Tillesburg)
This is a typical online review for a recently released game called Max Payne. The first thing that should become obvious is the almost nonsensically blasé style of writing. The juvenility of the colloquialisms used is overshadowed only by the heinous grammatical and spelling errors. It's apparent that the writer made no attempt to present information in a reasonable, educated manner. Another factor miring publications of this type is the afore-mentioned context. To truly provide criticism, one must review a piece in terms of both its peers (of the same medium) and of other media. There is very little attempt to evaluate the aesthetic qualities of the game, at least no intelligible one. The author is obviously not interested in any thought the creators of Max Payne intended to provoke in him. In addition, it should be taken into consideration what the creator of the piece intended to say about society, life, and the world with his or her piece. Anyone reading this review would be forced to think that it was, in fact, impossible to make intelligent criticisms about Max Payne because there was inherently nothing intelligent about it. This is untrue and is both a disservice and a discredit to the creators of the game.
Max Payne is game noir, elegant and sophisticated. From a narrative standpoint, Payne is modeled after Shakespeare's epic tragedy MacBeth. As MacBeth opens three witches set the scene, a horrendous storm "In thunder, lightening, or in rain..."(Shakespeare) and in their rhetoric bring out the theme that will shape the play "Fair is foul, foul is fair: Hover through the fog an filthy air". Instantly, the witches fade, to the middle of a battle, a characteristic opening for a Shakespearian tragedy: starting in the midst of the action. As Max Payne begins the stage is set: New York during the worst blizzard of the century, the game's theme stated from beginning just as in MacBeth. "They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger, and it was over". (Max Payne) Max's voice over takes the place of the three witches, preparing the story's unraveling. Instantly you are dropped into game play, effectively living a flashback; you battle helplessly on your bedroom door as your wife and child are murdered in the next room. By emulating an established work of art in the same way the Pictorialist movement emulated classical paintings, Max Payne asserts itself as a piece of art.
That being said, Shakespeare Max Payne is not. However, its story certainly leaves 'Large Breasted Woman with big Guns Raids Ancient Treasure' hanging its head in shame. The more compelling the narrative the better the art. Max Payne is compelling, if not great, narrative.
From an aesthetic standpoint, Max Payne excels. Its artists have created the best faux realistic environment yet created in a game, using detailed photographs to cover the geometry that comprises their 3d world instead of hand-painted textures (the normal approach). By pushing the boundaries of the medium in this way the creators of Max Payne have not only created a compelling piece, they have advanced both games' credibility and their own. The result is a very believable, wholly engrossing, visually pleasing, compelling experience. In its cinematic passages the game displays the creators' nuanced understanding of cinematographic principals such as shot continuity and framing as well as the excellent consideration given to light placement.
In terms of interactive video art, Max Payne breaks new ground and makes excellent use of the medium. The most obviously interesting manipulation of medium is the use of "bullet time" as a gameplay modifier. It's been taken for granted that all games are either real-time or turn-based. Max Payne plays with the notion that a game must be one or the other by enabling the player to go into a slow motion mode at his discretion. This adds a new feel of control and depth to a tried and true gameplay mechanic, leaving a fresh new way of experiencing action. Granted, in this case the concept is used only to enhance the player's ability to dish out violence, but the addition of the concept of time manipulation is one that advances the medium and pushes it to new heights.
In addition to this advancement, the game is aware of its status as a game and plays with that fact. In one particularly poignant passage, Max is rendered unconscious and drugged. When he comes to, the game has taken on a green haze, the aperture of the view has been skewed, and everything has slowed to half-time. Moving causes everything to swim and the sound effects are hollow and surreal. A phone on a desk in the center of the room rings. Picking it up you hear your own voice telling you that you're in a computer game. The phone turns into a gun. The narrative over-voice interacts with the voice on the phone, musing "This whole thing...a computer game? Running around in slow motion to show off my moves? The feeling of my every move being controlled... Normally funny to consider, but just now it was the most horrible thing I could imagine..."(Max Payne) This is a highly sophisticated and artistic manipulation of interactive medium, giving it cognizance of itself. By becoming aware of itself as a medium and manipulating that fact, Max Payne is a pioneering work of interactive video art.
The above is an example of how games can be critiqued in terms of narrative, aesthetics, and interactive effectiveness. If a critical basis could be established based on these characteristics, games as a medium could begin to be understood not purely for their entertainment value, but for their artistic value. Certainly this was the progression followed by film, from nickelodeons to full-fledged theaters. There are currently very loose criteria by which games are evaluated, based solely on their entertainment-enhancing properties. "Graphics, Control, Sound, and Fun-Factor" seem to be common elements in review today. These are idiotic, and must be thrown out. What is necessary for a functioning critical base is an established set of criteria that take into consideration all the factors mentioned above. These criteria must be dictated and revised by critics until there is a consensus. The product of critical consensus: academic awards for excellence, the next step in solidifying a medium's status as an art.
Film has the Oscars, based on artistic principles such as Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. Photography has the Infinity Awards, based on artistic principles such as Best Applied Photography and Best Design. These clearly defined criteria that constitute excellence is what games need, not "Fun Factor". Something more along the lines of Best Original Game Concept, Best Adapted Game Concept, Best Interactive Experience, Best Visual Experience, and Best Sound Experience would be far more appropriate. These are obviously not the breadth of all awards that could stem from the production of a single game, nor are they what a critical consensus would likely constitute, but they are far more academic and pertinent than "Fun-Factor". Perhaps the first game that deserves to win an 'Oscar' is Peter Molyneux's acclaimed, financially successful opus, Black and White.
Whether or not it was intended, Black and White makes a statement. Essentially, Black and White is a morality test. Graphically and conceptually, Black and White places you in the role of a god, ruler of a tiny island populated by complicated, AI-driven villagers, who worship you. Your advancement in the game is based on your ability to garner belief in yourself as a god. The test of morality comes into play through the different methods available for collecting belief. You are presented with many situations that can be resolved however you choose. The unique perspective of the game's creator first surfaces here, in the situations you are presented with: the situations form the framework of a specific belief system, that of Molyneux himself.
For example, at one point a woman prays at the altar in the center of the village, humbly begging you to save her sick brother who has in his illness wandered off, no where to be found. Dutifully, you scour the island for her missing brother. The real test of your mettle begins as she consistently continues revisiting the altar, which automatically snaps you back to the center of town, effectively inhibiting your ability to locate her missing brother. Do you ignore the annoying interruptions and continue to search? Abandon the search? Drop a rock on the impudent mortal? Locate her brother only so you can sacrifice him to teach her a lesson? The point is that you can be a malicious, vengeful god or you can be a benevolent, helping god. Both approaches advance you equally towards completion of the game, essentially leaving you to do things your way. Feedback alerting you as to whether you're a good or evil god comes in the form of subtle visual clues. If you consistently do evil things to gain belief, such as hurling huge boulders at villages or raining fire from the sky, your tiny island world begins to darken, the trees disappear leaving spiny, foreboding bramble, even the sky turns a dark and murky blood color. This type of visual execution is both unprecedented and brilliant. What other medium can create a world that changes as you change, as your very mood changes?
Essentially, Black and White is a beautifully executed, AI-driven Rorschach test, created to tell you about yourself. Instead of creating a painting or film that tells you his view of society or life, Molyneux has created a game that tells you about yourself through his eyes. This is something that cannot be achieved in any other medium, but is an undeniably compelling and artistic experience. Black and White is part of the new generation of games, games that can be evaluated in terms of other forms of art and in terms of society as a whole and their statement about it.
By drawing parallels to the aforementioned arts it is clear that in games we are not dealing with a novelty or fad, but with an art form in its infancy. Precedents have been set for both art forms that require great investments of time and money (motion pictures) and those are mass-produced (photography). Even now all three major limiting factors inhibiting games from their artistic actualization are waning. The technology that powers games is stabilizing, the critical criteria necessary to define them is being fleshed out, leading to the academic awards for excellence so sorely needed. All of these inexorably encroaching factors point to the fact that games will soon be properly recognized as an art form. Fundamentally, though, it is impossible to deny games' artistic properties.
Games can be aesthetically pleasing: graceful, beautiful, and elegant. Games can present a statement, imbued with the unique perspective of their creator. Games can be created with the intention that they be considered art. Games are able to make a statement about life, society, or themselves. Games can push the boundaries of their own medium and challenge people to think about what they've experienced. Games can be a shared and intellectualized experience. Nothing that can create as compelling an expericence as Max Payne or Black and White can remain unrecognized as an art form for long. Games can and will escape this temporary, flimsy "Tomb".
Wonderful that this is being considered by SFMOMA, I will certainly go down there and lobby for it all I can. Asserting games as art has been a vocation of mine for some time. Here's a rather extensive article I wrote about why games are art and why they are inexorably set on the path to being recognized as so.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Prichard has most of the bases covered but I thought I'd quickly share my very recent and personal experience in the matter.
September 18th, 2002. 9:27 am:
Payday.
I'm standing in front the office rubbing my sleepy eyes and dimly wondering why my key won't open the door. The thought that the locks have changed does not cross my sleep-addled brain. Leaning forward to find a glare less angle, I pause to consider the Kinko's-printed canvas sign leering down on me.
"Tremor Entertainment."
The logo is a dingy red Blizzard facsimile, poorly conceived and executed.
The door opens. I nearly tumble backwards in surprise. Grasping at teetering iron I manage to steady myself. The railing below has rusted out at its bases which are now milling with fire ants.
Karen, our CFO, is standing in the doorway, flanked by armed guards. She is wearing an expression of practiced concern and, oddly, poorly-masked triumph.
"There are no paychecks. The company has been shut down until the contract is renegotiated with Microsoft." Her first performance of the day.
We're told to get a few of our personal things, whatever we'll need or want while the company's on hiatus. I don't realize that I'll never see my Mr. Coffee, Thinkgeek caffeine mugs, and Rage Against the Machine CDs again. "I know it's not your fault," I tell the surly guard "but this is really insulting." He nods: a solemn, practiced, patronizing nod. Karen returns, this time demanding our now useless building keys.
"Do I have to turn in my hall pass too?" No response. The guard tells us to leave. Karen's told him we're not to touch the computers and he's getting jittery. His hand slides involuntarily to the holster on his belt. This is fucking ridiculous.
Standing in the parking lot an hour later, beer in hand, I realized that it was over.
As it turned out there were no 'renegotiations with Microsoft'. The first they heard were our frantic cell phone calls. Our Floridian CEO took the payroll money and ran. All it takes is one A-Hole.
The Tremor team included a number of brilliant, talented individuals; all of them underpaid for their dedication. The team was there for each other and for the project, not for money. This team included the Lead Designer of Starcraft, designers and artists from Warcraft 1& 2, Diablo and Sacrifice (among others.) The project, The Unseen (irony: located), was unassailably special both visually and in terms of gameplay. The contract was with Microsoft, a first-party development contract: the holy grail of game contracts. (I'll save the story of how Microsoft later rammed us in our collective cornhole with a red hot poker for tomorrow night, kiddies.)
In the end all it took was one man to destroy what so many had struggled so long to create.
Currently, the displaced employees of Tremor are involved in a civil lawsuit to recover unpaid wages. CEO Steven Oshinsky is under investigation by the FBI. He looks like Joey Buttafuco. www.tremor.net is still active, it appears.
And if a pigeon takes roost inter-beam? Highest technology foiled by lowest organisms, again?
Hah, well I guess this is going to get buried, I'll just paste the article in here and see if anyone notices it that way:
"Escaping the 'Tomb'"
Breasts. How could they turn on me like this? After all the times we've shared? Breasts are standing in the way of something important; something more important to me, a 21 year old man, than sex. Breasts are retarding the actualization of the first emerging art form of the 21st century. Upon telling the proverbial Man on the Street you're studying to enter the field of video game design you will receive one of two reactions. Anyone over the age of thirty will say "Oh, that's nice" accompanied by a condescending, vacant stare. The reaction elicited from my younger peers: an exclamatory "awesome!" and the pantomimed fondling of oversized, imaginary breasts. Having already decided to devote my life to the creation of games, these reactions can only depress and infuriate. They can only be construed as a direct result of the popularity of games like the odious Tomb Raider. The problem is clear, but what it not clear is whether gaming can ever escape this "Tomb" of juvenility and negative perception. At their heart games are an art form as viable as motion pictures or photography and are destined to be recognized as so in the near future. This form, interactive video art, will be increasingly accepted as the technology that comprises it stabilizes and as the current base of enthusiastic reviewers convert to game criticism, thereby propagating academic awards for excellence in games. It is the defining cultural phenomenon of this generation. It cannot and will not be denied its artistic merit.
In order to address games as art, we must first fashion a working definition for art. Foremost amongst artistic considerations should be aesthetics. As Berys Gaut eloquently states in Theories of Art Today, good art "possesses positive aesthetic properties such as being beautiful, graceful, or elegant (properties which ground a capacity to give sensuous pleasure"(28). In addition, good art presents a statement, imbued with the unique perspective of its creator and was intended as a piece of art. It is able to make a statement about life, society, or even about itself. It pushes the boundaries of its medium and challenges people to think about themselves and the way they relate to the world (it is edifying both generally and personally). Finally and foremost in determining games' artistic viability, good art is a compelling experience, one that can be shared and intellectualized. I've devoted myself to games because I have found their experience more compelling than any other media.
A general definition hammered out, we must now make delineation between literary, narrative-based arts and other forms of art. Games, in the form they now exist, are narrative art. In a piece of narrative art "the object is not the work. The strip of celluloid itself is not the work, any more than the paper and ink of a book is the work. With a game, the CD is not the work."(Adams) The experience is the work. As a generalization, it can then be inferred that, in narrative art, the artistic strength of the work lies in how compelling the storyline and characters are. Another important factor that must be addressed is the fact that narrative arts by definition rely on their medium's stability. Indeed, literary art forms as a whole are lacking one characteristic from our list: the pushing of their medium's boundaries. This does not, however, preclude their artistic viability. The point is that a finite degree of stability must exist in a narrative-based medium in order to maintain suspension of disbelief (how compelling the experience is). This presents a problem for games' advancement as a viable medium. Unfairly, this problem is not based on evaluation of artistic qualities, but rather on the unfamiliarity and instability of delivery platform. In this respect, the only thing holding games out of artistic actualization is a swath of negative perception, both public and academic.
The largest contributing factor in this negative perception of games is technology. The technology that powers games is unstable. According to Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder and CEO of Intel Corp., "Integration complexity doubles every three years"(4). This is known and accepted throughout the computer industry as 'Moore's Law'. Distilled, this means that central processors, essentially the brain of any computer, double in power every 18 months. To a game designer this lack of standardized delivery makes it extremely difficult to create an experience that is identical for each who partake in it (the afore-mentioned stability so vital to narrative art). This, in turn, makes it extremely difficult to accurately identify and evaluate the aesthetic (artistic) properties of a game.
An example: in a film the amount of frames projected on the screen per second remains a constant 30 frames per second (fps). In a game, however, fps is constantly vacillating. In a real-time environment the current position of everything that exists within must be constantly recalculated. The efficiency of this process relies on the speed of the computer on which it's being run, which is primarily limited by the computer's central processor. Taking into account the fact that only a very small percentage of people can afford to upgrade their systems every 18 months, developers are left aiming their games at a broad range of systems, effectively preventing control of how the final piece is viewed. At this point, then, the aesthetics of their work effectively leaves their control. There is, however, an end in sight.
Moore himself, in a 1996 update to the original speech which spawned 'Moore's Law', predicts that the physical limits of silicon will only allow this phenomenon to continue for another two decades. This being said, it is clear that technological stability is close at hand. Without dismissing the possibility and drive to have their artistic viability cemented now, it can be stated with certainty that when the platform for delivery stabilizes into something that is consistent and can be experienced identically by anyone, the technology will be in place to enable games to be recognized as an art form.
Having mentioned the fact that narrative arts like film rely on stability of medium and subsequently addressing games' current lack of stability it is important to address this stability in the medium of film.
It is undisputed that "the motion pictures did not originate as an art but as machine."(Fulton 3) What is not clear, however, how this metamorphosis (from novelty to art form) occurred. It is clear, however, that this change depended principally on standardized delivery.
Thomas Edison patented the first motion picture camera in 1893. Most of the earliest moving images were non-fictional, crude, and unedited: documentary views of ordinary slices of life (street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or shots of a passing train). In the mid 1890s the Edison Company introduced the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope was a bulky, coin-operated movie peep show viewer for a single customer. Early spectators in Kinetoscope parlors were amazed by even the most mundane moving images: an approaching train or parade, women dancing, dogs terrorizing rats. This initial phenomenon quickly lost its appeal with the advent of the projector as film's primary form of delivery. People began to demand not simply a novelty but entertainment. In just a few years, one could spend an evening at the cinema for a nickel.
The first nickelodeon, a small storefront theater, opened in 1905 and became the first permanent movie theatre. A short, silent film was usually accompanied with piano playing, songs, lectures, or vaudeville-type acts. Early nickelodeon films such as The Great Train Robbery attempted to gain artistic credit both by coupling themselves with stage acts and by emulating the expressive techniques of stage acting (techniques like pantomime). The working class quickly embraced the nickelodeon as an alternative to the cost-prohibitive theater. This gave film its initial audience, one which did little to lend credibility to public perception film's artistic aspects. Spurred by racist sentiment, anti-immigrant prejudice, and social discrimination, newspaper critics soon denounced movies as "morally objectionable and "the cause of social unrest". They called for censorship.
Games began life in much the same way, as a technological novelty, crude and unexpressive. Early games were almost totally non-graphical, non-representational. Primitive, triangular groupings of pixels were spaceships, heros, and aliens. Like the kinetoscope, the novelty initially precluded the content. People marveled simply at being able to control what was happening on the screen, in any form. In the same way film found its first audience in the poor immigrant workers, games moved into acceptance as a subcultural phenomenon with the advent of arcades, which contained games like Pong and Space Invaders. In much the same idium as film, this subculture has been attacked by the media and denigrated to by the general public. Even now games are being blamed for current trends of social violence. These are the growing pains of an emerging art form.
Film's growing pains ended in 1915 with the release of Birth of a Nation. While Birth of a Nation certainly had its share of artistic merit, the one thing that truly allowed it to be a pioneering critical and artistic success was technology.
"Technically, the film was a brilliant and stunning new cinematic work - a screen masterpiece which advanced the art of film-making to new heights, with beautifully-structured battle scenes, costuming, and compelling, revolutionary story-telling, editing and photographic techniques (dollying, masking, use of irises, flashbacks, cross-cuts and fades)."(Dirks 2)
While these advances in methodology were extremely important to the growth of film itself as a medium, Birth of a Nation could never have been successful if it had not been for the nickelodeons paving the way and establishing how a film was supposed to be viewed. Once this was established, once people accepted and understood that going to a film meant suspending disbelief, films were free to deliver their messages. Once this freedom was attained, it was only a matter of time before someone like D.W. Griffith, someone with a compelling experience to share, got behind the reins. Albiet, Griffith compelled people to see the KKK as heros, but that was irrelevant in terms of film's growth. Film as art arrived with standardized delivery.
The experience of watching a film has remained stable for almost fifty years. You go to a theater, sit in the dark facing a giant projection screen for two hours and experience whatever the film-makers intended you to experience. It's relevant to ask the question: Would you be able to have the same experience if, for some reason, the projector was focused on the ceiling of the theater? For a majority of people the answer is no, simply because they'd not be willing to make that adjustment.
Another important point to note about film, one which lends additional credibility to games as an art form, is the fact that though film is an art form, not all films are art. Today, games are not considered an art form, though some games are art. Film today is accepted as an art form, removing from consideration those films obviously making no attempt at artistic viability. Films are visually and aurally elegant, contain the unique perspectives of its creators, and often make statements about society or life. They are often intended to provoke thought or educate on a particular subject, and are an experience that can be shared and intellectualized. Most importantly, films provide a compelling experience. They arrived at this point through a painful, iterative process in which all that was weak in their medium was weeded out, each generation building on its predecessor's strengths.
The reason people are so willing to suspend disbelief for a film is not because it is a more powerful form of expression than a game, it's simply because of precedent. At its inception photography suffered the same lack of precedent. The first successful photograph was produced by a Frenchman named Niépce in July of 1827 using material that hardened when exposed to light. In 1829 Niépce entered into a partnership with Louis Daguerre, who then discovered a way of developing photographic plates, reducing the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. This was followed by the discovery that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt. In 1844, his process refined and simplified, Daguerre sold his invention to the French government, naming it the Daguerreotype. What ensued could only be described as a fad, popular culture, nothing more. Daguerreotype madness gripped France. Everyone was amazed at the simplicity of creating an image without the knowledge or skill of drawing. Photography retained this stigma of fad until the late 19th to early 20th century, fifty years later.
The Pictorialist movement, considered the first artistic movement of photography, did for photography what Birth of a Nation did for film. By emulating existing works of art, specifically romantic and realist paintings, works like Alfred Stieglitz' Mountain and Sky bridged the gap between photography and representational painting. By emulating established works of art, the Pictorialists grounded their work in established aesthetics. Considerations like composition, framing, and use of light came into play. The point was to establish that photography can and does possesses all the necessary components to be considered art. It is beautiful and elegant in the same way that representational painting is. It is literally the view of its creator, since a photograph is essentially what the artist was seeing the moment he took it. Also, as in painting, statements are easily made by photographs simply through choice of subject matter. Finally, photographs can be intellectualized, the experience of viewing them shared. That photography possessed these qualities was not asserted for many years. In fact, photography initially met with violent opposition.
Before the middle of the 19th century, art was representational, attempting to recreate the human figure and natural scenes perfectly and accurately. When photography was invented it was considered something of a fraud by established painters and was nearly squelched out of existence. Existing artists were afraid that it would impinge on their livelihood. There was heated debate and vocal artistic outcry that lasted decades. In the end, however, it was conceded that photography possessed the necessary characteristics to assert its claim as an art form. In fact, photography benefited art greatly by freeing it to no longer be purely representational. Unshackled by this historical crux, art was liberated to advance as a medium into realms like Dada and abstract expressionism.
Like games, both photography and film possessed undeniable artistic qualities that, at first, lacked clear definition. Through social perseverance and through the essential and intrinsic strengths of their mediums, photography and film were actualized as true forms of art. One thing that precluded these assertions, however, was the establishment of functioning critical base for both media.
In professional criticism lies the largest influence over public perception. Criticism stems from the need to intellectualize and qualify comparative experience. This need allows critics, effectively and comparatively a very small group of people, to sway the entire public opinion.
When a medium develops what is essentially a subculture of people whose entire purpose is to evaluate pieces of that medium based on a certain criteria, whatever that criteria might be, it lends an artistic viability to that medium that no single artist can hope to achieve. The other function professional criticism serves is to educate. People read criticism because they themselves have only a finite amount of time to devote to leisure activities. Reading critical analysis by people whose entire job is to evaluate pieces allows the public a way to presort their choices, hopefully in order to allow them not to waste their precious time. Therefore they rely on critics to be intelligent, well informed, and to have an excellent grasp on the established language of criticism. A change must be made, then, from today's insubstantial game reviewer
The enormous volume of gaming review websites and publications must make the subtle but vital change from strict review to actual criticism. A game critic must be lucid, well informed, and intelligent. He must evaluate games with respect not only to other games, but with respect to film, literature, and other arts. He must to evaluate games with respect to games as a medium and to how well the game manipulates or uses the medium. Finally, a game critic must adhere to criteria of evaluation more or less agreed on by his peers. There is very little, if any, criticism in the gaming world. There is review. It is extremely important to make this distinction. There is a voluminous cornucopia of publications, on and offline, which deal with game review. People play games then they say whether or not they liked them and why. The problem inherent here is that these reviewers think only in the context of other games, and lack the abstraction necessary to form real, concrete criteria for judging a medium. Observe:
"So upon opening up the thing, we found a nifty Max Payne mousepad and a DVD case (similiar to PS2 game cases) holding the actual game. Weird...yes, but hell, i'm a fan of boxes so it certainly suffices. Now one problem i did have from the start is that in the instruction booklet, Max Payne claims to be the first game ever to feature slo-mo effects in a game. Now, Hitman Codename 47 wasn't shipped with the slo-mo option, but days after its release, there was a patch that featured it for those 'matrix' type bullet exchanges. So, i've got to say, Hitman has stolen some of Max Payne's thunder in a lot of respects. Nit picks aside, i can honestly say that while not being a perfect game and even missing features that Hitman had (not including slo-mo) Max Payne looks like it will be up there as one of the best action games of all time. Now although we haven't played enough for a review yet, i'm not going to claim that it IS the best action game of all time...but...sometimes first impressions last. We'll see." (Tillesburg)
This is a typical online review for a recently released game called Max Payne. The first thing that should become obvious is the almost nonsensically blasé style of writing. The juvenility of the colloquialisms used is overshadowed only by the heinous grammatical and spelling errors. It's apparent that the writer made no attempt to present information in a reasonable, educated manner. Another factor miring publications of this type is the afore-mentioned context. To truly provide criticism, one must review a piece in terms of both its peers (of the same medium) and of other media. There is very little attempt to evaluate the aesthetic qualities of the game, at least no intelligible one. The author is obviously not interested in any thought the creators of Max Payne intended to provoke in him. In addition, it should be taken into consideration what the creator of the piece intended to say about society, life, and the world with his or her piece. Anyone reading this review would be forced to think that it was, in fact, impossible to make intelligent criticisms about Max Payne because there was inherently nothing intelligent about it. This is untrue and is both a disservice and a discredit to the creators of the game.
Max Payne is game noir, elegant and sophisticated. From a narrative standpoint, Payne is modeled after Shakespeare's epic tragedy MacBeth. As MacBeth opens three witches set the scene, a horrendous storm "In thunder, lightening, or in rain..."(Shakespeare) and in their rhetoric bring out the theme that will shape the play "Fair is foul, foul is fair: Hover through the fog an filthy air". Instantly, the witches fade, to the middle of a battle, a characteristic opening for a Shakespearian tragedy: starting in the midst of the action. As Max Payne begins the stage is set: New York during the worst blizzard of the century, the game's theme stated from beginning just as in MacBeth. "They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger, and it was over". (Max Payne) Max's voice over takes the place of the three witches, preparing the story's unraveling. Instantly you are dropped into game play, effectively living a flashback; you battle helplessly on your bedroom door as your wife and child are murdered in the next room. By emulating an established work of art in the same way the Pictorialist movement emulated classical paintings, Max Payne asserts itself as a piece of art.
That being said, Shakespeare Max Payne is not. However, its story certainly leaves 'Large Breasted Woman with big Guns Raids Ancient Treasure' hanging its head in shame. The more compelling the narrative the better the art. Max Payne is compelling, if not great, narrative.
From an aesthetic standpoint, Max Payne excels. Its artists have created the best faux realistic environment yet created in a game, using detailed photographs to cover the geometry that comprises their 3d world instead of hand-painted textures (the normal approach). By pushing the boundaries of the medium in this way the creators of Max Payne have not only created a compelling piece, they have advanced both games' credibility and their own. The result is a very believable, wholly engrossing, visually pleasing, compelling experience. In its cinematic passages the game displays the creators' nuanced understanding of cinematographic principals such as shot continuity and framing as well as the excellent consideration given to light placement.
In terms of interactive video art, Max Payne breaks new ground and makes excellent use of the medium. The most obviously interesting manipulation of medium is the use of "bullet time" as a gameplay modifier. It's been taken for granted that all games are either real-time or turn-based. Max Payne plays with the notion that a game must be one or the other by enabling the player to go into a slow motion mode at his discretion. This adds a new feel of control and depth to a tried and true gameplay mechanic, leaving a fresh new way of experiencing action. Granted, in this case the concept is used only to enhance the player's ability to dish out violence, but the addition of the concept of time manipulation is one that advances the medium and pushes it to new heights.
In addition to this advancement, the game is aware of its status as a game and plays with that fact. In one particularly poignant passage, Max is rendered unconscious and drugged. When he comes to, the game has taken on a green haze, the aperture of the view has been skewed, and everything has slowed to half-time. Moving causes everything to swim and the sound effects are hollow and surreal. A phone on a desk in the center of the room rings. Picking it up you hear your own voice telling you that you're in a computer game. The phone turns into a gun. The narrative over-voice interacts with the voice on the phone, musing "This whole thing...a computer game? Running around in slow motion to show off my moves? The feeling of my every move being controlled... Normally funny to consider, but just now it was the most horrible thing I could imagine..."(Max Payne) This is a highly sophisticated and artistic manipulation of interactive medium, giving it cognizance of itself. By becoming aware of itself as a medium and manipulating that fact, Max Payne is a pioneering work of interactive video art.
The above is an example of how games can be critiqued in terms of narrative, aesthetics, and interactive effectiveness. If a critical basis could be established based on these characteristics, games as a medium could begin to be understood not purely for their entertainment value, but for their artistic value. Certainly this was the progression followed by film, from nickelodeons to full-fledged theaters. There are currently very loose criteria by which games are evaluated, based solely on their entertainment-enhancing properties. "Graphics, Control, Sound, and Fun-Factor" seem to be common elements in review today. These are idiotic, and must be thrown out. What is necessary for a functioning critical base is an established set of criteria that take into consideration all the factors mentioned above. These criteria must be dictated and revised by critics until there is a consensus. The product of critical consensus: academic awards for excellence, the next step in solidifying a medium's status as an art.
Film has the Oscars, based on artistic principles such as Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. Photography has the Infinity Awards, based on artistic principles such as Best Applied Photography and Best Design. These clearly defined criteria that constitute excellence is what games need, not "Fun Factor". Something more along the lines of Best Original Game Concept, Best Adapted Game Concept, Best Interactive Experience, Best Visual Experience, and Best Sound Experience would be far more appropriate. These are obviously not the breadth of all awards that could stem from the production of a single game, nor are they what a critical consensus would likely constitute, but they are far more academic and pertinent than "Fun-Factor". Perhaps the first game that deserves to win an 'Oscar' is Peter Molyneux's acclaimed, financially successful opus, Black and White.
Whether or not it was intended, Black and White makes a statement. Essentially, Black and White is a morality test. Graphically and conceptually, Black and White places you in the role of a god, ruler of a tiny island populated by complicated, AI-driven villagers, who worship you. Your advancement in the game is based on your ability to garner belief in yourself as a god. The test of morality comes into play through the different methods available for collecting belief. You are presented with many situations that can be resolved however you choose. The unique perspective of the game's creator first surfaces here, in the situations you are presented with: the situations form the framework of a specific belief system, that of Molyneux himself.
For example, at one point a woman prays at the altar in the center of the village, humbly begging you to save her sick brother who has in his illness wandered off, no where to be found. Dutifully, you scour the island for her missing brother. The real test of your mettle begins as she consistently continues revisiting the altar, which automatically snaps you back to the center of town, effectively inhibiting your ability to locate her missing brother. Do you ignore the annoying interruptions and continue to search? Abandon the search? Drop a rock on the impudent mortal? Locate her brother only so you can sacrifice him to teach her a lesson? The point is that you can be a malicious, vengeful god or you can be a benevolent, helping god. Both approaches advance you equally towards completion of the game, essentially leaving you to do things your way. Feedback alerting you as to whether you're a good or evil god comes in the form of subtle visual clues. If you consistently do evil things to gain belief, such as hurling huge boulders at villages or raining fire from the sky, your tiny island world begins to darken, the trees disappear leaving spiny, foreboding bramble, even the sky turns a dark and murky blood color. This type of visual execution is both unprecedented and brilliant. What other medium can create a world that changes as you change, as your very mood changes?
Essentially, Black and White is a beautifully executed, AI-driven Rorschach test, created to tell you about yourself. Instead of creating a painting or film that tells you his view of society or life, Molyneux has created a game that tells you about yourself through his eyes. This is something that cannot be achieved in any other medium, but is an undeniably compelling and artistic experience. Black and White is part of the new generation of games, games that can be evaluated in terms of other forms of art and in terms of society as a whole and their statement about it.
By drawing parallels to the aforementioned arts it is clear that in games we are not dealing with a novelty or fad, but with an art form in its infancy. Precedents have been set for both art forms that require great investments of time and money (motion pictures) and those are mass-produced (photography). Even now all three major limiting factors inhibiting games from their artistic actualization are waning. The technology that powers games is stabilizing, the critical criteria necessary to define them is being fleshed out, leading to the academic awards for excellence so sorely needed. All of these inexorably encroaching factors point to the fact that games will soon be properly recognized as an art form. Fundamentally, though, it is impossible to deny games' artistic properties.
Games can be aesthetically pleasing: graceful, beautiful, and elegant. Games can present a statement, imbued with the unique perspective of their creator. Games can be created with the intention that they be considered art. Games are able to make a statement about life, society, or themselves. Games can push the boundaries of their own medium and challenge people to think about what they've experienced. Games can be a shared and intellectualized experience. Nothing that can create as compelling an expericence as Max Payne or Black and White can remain unrecognized as an art form for long. Games can and will escape this temporary, flimsy "Tomb".
Email me at Crepusculum@portalofevil.com
Wonderful that this is being considered by SFMOMA, I will certainly go down there and lobby for it all I can. Asserting games as art has been a vocation of mine for some time. Here's a rather extensive article I wrote about why games are art and why they are inexorably set on the path to being recognized as so.
http://www.isonews.com/article.php?articleid=7