Is the Cultural Trajectory of Videogames Doomed to Parallel That of Comic Books?
N’Gai Croal, blogger and columnist for Newsweek takes on the idea that the videogame will never be a respected artistic medium the way the film or the novel is now. Part I looks at the issue of accessibility; part II compares videogames to other more respected media, especially television, pointing out that the highest-grossing examples from any medium are likely to be those with the basest appeal and (perhaps) the least artistic merit.
Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005? Does it truly matter that in aggregate television is more mass a mass medium than videogames, when on an individual level, its practitioners are faced with the same challenges that plague those who work in other media?
