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I still remember sitting on my little brother’s bed when we were kids and playing the old Nintendo version of “Rampage.” The game gave two players the chance to work together to destroy a city….or the temptation to destroy each other. Each time we sat down to play, we would vow to each other that THIS time would be the time when we would work together to destroy the city. And each time we would descend into a pit of base human rage, ultimately culminating in a physical altercation that could only be ended by adult intervention.
Commercial video games have only been around for about 30 years, but their impact on our society is indisputable. And they don’t just tell a story…they put you IN the story. And like novels and films and theatre and television shows, video games offer the opportunity to escape from the tedium and occasional agony of daily life. But does that make them art? In a recent article in the New Statesman, Tom Chatfield argues that video games are indeed a form of artistic expression, and a unique one at that. But there is one major, inherent limitation that prevents video games from joining the ranks of other storytelling mediums: their lack of inevitability.
