Proof that Video Games are Art

I really don't want to do a “video games as art” post. Seriously. All that will happen is I'll get really mad about dumb opinions and restate points that have been made a thousand times over. Video Games can be art OK? Just take my word for it. Also note that I said “can be”, not “are”. Just like paint can be used to change the color of a wall or to produce a beautiful picture, video games are an artistic medium, and can harbor works of art, utility programs, horrible junk, and anything in between. My point today, however, is that the fact that this argument even exists is because of the way the games industry as a whole has been treating games lately.

Now, I understand that games have to make a profit. Entertainment is an industry, and it takes a lot of money and a lot of people to keep an industry working. The genre couldn't survive if every major game could be made in a basement by one guy like Notch did with Minecraft, and that’s not how it is right? It takes studios of dozens of people literally years to put together the kind of AAA mainstream title that we come to expect. That’s just for linear shooters too, gigantic games like Skyrim or the Fallout series take even longer, and MMOs are rolled out over their entire lifecycle, in some ways they are never not being developed. These kinds of games are a massive investment of time, energy, and money, and that can’t be changed. Indie games like Minecraft must be fluke, and the product of a genius or someone with otherwise superior resources right?

Wrong.

That there is a mod for Just Cause 2, a mod that was created to fill a gap left by the original development team; the lack of a multiplayer mode. Now Just Cause 2 is a massive game, like really massive. There are games with larger maps, sure, but Just Cause 2 has a map that is fully rendered in high definition, and not at all barren, with transports, traffic, and other elements running all over the place. In the process of developing a landscape, and game, of that scale, at some point the multiplayer was dropped from development, which left its fate up to the modding community.

People have been making mods for games since the 80's, and the things that can come from the community at large are impressive to say the least. This Just Cause 2 mod though, is blowing my mind. Most games that have multiplayer have a player cap, usually an even number so there will be even teams, (16, 32, 64, etc.) but these numbers rarely hit triple digits. It was a really big deal a few years ago when MAG came out on the PlayStation 3, and offered 256 player multiplayer on a console. Even in MMO's, where a server can play host to thousands of players simultaneously, the game is sectioned off into areas, and player characters don’t really interact with each other beyond text unless they start an interaction like a party or a duel. This Just Cause 2 mod, however, supports a whopping 1800 players. Actually, is may support more than that, that’s just the highest number of people they could get online at once, and according to the developers, the server has “yet to reach any real barrier or limitation preventing us from reaching an even higher player count than the previous public tests”. Best part? It was created by five friends, in their spare time, and it only took them about “700 hours” each (or about four and a half months working at forty hours a week).

How is this even possible? This is the kind of feat that isn't even supposed to be possible, much less by a team of relative armatures, and sure, the game engine was already in place, but they had to reverse engineer the whole thing in order to figure out how to make it run anyway. If a group of dedicated friends can put out something this impressive, then why does it take the big name studios years to put out a title that barely pushes envelope of established video game standards? One word my friends: bureaucracy.

The corporate bureaucracy that enables the gigantic companies to function is ironically the thing most impeding progress. Accountants from one department will cut the budget while marketers from another department will push up the launch date, and it’s the game that suffers in the end. That’s how I know video games are art, because while they can be beautiful, innovative, deep, and amazing, in the face of a corporation that is trying to trade creativity for profit the whole process falls apart. Name me one form of art in all of human history that hasn't had a group try and fail to market it as a business, I bet you can't.