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Aug. 12th, 2008 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusI finished Psychonauts today. Brilliant game, and very much deserving of its reputation -- or its reputation among the few people who've played it.
Poor Tim Schafer. He writes brilliant, funny, intelligent games that everyone likes, but no one hears about them because he doesn't have the serious marketing machine the big game companies have. He broke away from LucasArts to have some creative control, and even in his LucasArt days he was churning out wonderful little creations that no one would ever hear about.
Psychonauts is art -- not high art, because comedy needs a good two centuries of respectability behind it before anyone will dare classify it as such -- but art nonetheless. I'm putting it with Final Fantasy VII, Planescape: Torment, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri as proof that video games can be (in the words of indy Canadian programmer Denis Dyack) the "eighth art."
But only if it chooses to be. And if people support the good ones when they come out, and not just the overhyped games.
Poor Tim Schafer. He writes brilliant, funny, intelligent games that everyone likes, but no one hears about them because he doesn't have the serious marketing machine the big game companies have. He broke away from LucasArts to have some creative control, and even in his LucasArt days he was churning out wonderful little creations that no one would ever hear about.
Psychonauts is art -- not high art, because comedy needs a good two centuries of respectability behind it before anyone will dare classify it as such -- but art nonetheless. I'm putting it with Final Fantasy VII, Planescape: Torment, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri as proof that video games can be (in the words of indy Canadian programmer Denis Dyack) the "eighth art."
But only if it chooses to be. And if people support the good ones when they come out, and not just the overhyped games.