By KEVIN KAUMANS, Assistant Editor
Last week I had a conversation with some of the editors at Northwestern News about whether or not video games could be considered a form of art on the same level as books and movies. Books have been around since ancient times, while movies have existed since the late 1800s. Video games–on the other hand–were popularized barely 50 or 40 years ago. I have never understood why the older generation of our kind see playing video games for more than three hours a week as a waste of time yet will gladly sit down on a weekend and watch television for ten hours straight.
We judge the quality of books and movies based on how good the plot, characters, and themes are, yet we don’t seem to hold video games to the same standard. Why is that? It can’t be because video games can’t make good stories; in fact, I’ve played video games that had better and more interesting narratives than most of what Hollywood’s been churning out recently. Take “Red Dead Redemption 2” for example, which is one of my most favorite games of all time and probably will be till the day I die.
The game is about a gang of outlaws at the end of the wild west era trying to escape lawmen hunting them down after a bank robbery gone wrong. Despite the simple premise, “Red Dead Redemption 2” has one of the most mature themes and realistic graphics that I have ever seen in any form of media, movies or otherwise. The main character, Arthur Morgan, is a cruel yet extremely sympathetic character despite being an outlaw most of his life. Once he contracts a deadly illness around the third act and realizes he probably isn’t going to be alive for much longer, Arthur does everything in his power to set things right before he dies, as well as making sure the people he cares about in the gang have good lives after he’s gone.
The gang of “Red Dead Redemption 2” is full of likable and interesting characters that, despite them being criminal, you can’t help but hope that (almost) everyone makes it to the end of the story without dying. The main villains of the game are sadistically vindictive yet still manage to be charming. By the end of the game, you may begin to feel heartbroken as you watch what remains of the gang slowly crumble under the weight of every mistake they’ve ever made throughout the story.
Yet you never see any film or art professor talking about video games on the same level they do with books and movies. My hope is that, in the future, we’ll finally start appreciating video games for what they are: A combination of pixels that, when done right, can be turned into art.
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