Been There, Played That

What is it about the shiny tin case, the art books, exclusive DLC items and other trinkets that clutter up our desk and shelves that make us shell out that extra $10 to $100 plus to pick up the collector’s edition of the latest game?  I will be the first to admit that I’m enticed by them and even have a few of them on my own shelf.  I have a Master Chief helmet, Dragon Age cloth map and Mass Effect 2 art book to name a few items from may latest collector’s editions purchases.

What caused me to sit back and evaluate the wisdom in it all is when I picked up the collector’s edition of Starcraft 2.  In the past I’ve only purchased the collector’s edition when it was a franchise I loved to play and I was going to start the game on release date.  In this case I picked it up just because it was “cool”.  I’ve never finished on RTS in my life and as for the original Starcraft I never got past the 6^th or 7^th mission of the Terran campaign.  I think more than anything collector’s editions awaken the geek collector in most of us who play games and developers know that.  As we progress I think they are going to become more prevalent and outlandish as development studios attempt to soak every last dollar they can out of us.  Night vision goggles or remote controlled camera car anyone?  How about a nice dagger or boomerang to go on that shelf?  I will most likely buy the collector’s edition of the next Mass Effect, Dragon Age and The Old Republic, but I think I will have to say no to Starcraft 2 and the rest of them.  Let me know what your opinion on the matter is.  All I can say is having a Thor pet in WOW would have been cool.

During my junior year in high school my class took a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art.  While walking through the halls one painting caught my eye.  It was a very large white canvas with a big black dot in the middle.  What made it even better was the name of the painting which you most likely guessed based on the title was “Black Dot on a White Canvas”.  Standing there I honestly couldn’t believe that this was hanging in a museum of art.  Looking at this thing all I could think was that a ten year old with a stencil could have created this painting and these guys were calling it fine art.

I had never thought about video games as art till Roger Ebert made his infamous statement that “Video games can never be art.”.  I honestly don’t know how this statement can be taken seriously when you look at some of the garbage that people consider to be art.  Art is so subjective that trying to classify what is and isn’t art is a pretty futile exercise.  As we have always heard “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, so how can one medium be labeled as art while another is so easily dismissed.  Mass Effect 2 stands as one of the best experiences I have ever had playing a game and was better than any movie I watched or book I read this year.  In my opinion video games stand shoulder to shoulder with books and movies and their popularity is growing everyday.  As it stands now the video game industry is bigger than Roger Ebert’s movie industry.  Overall I feel that as video games become more popular their acceptance by main stream sources will grow as well.  At the rate things are moving I doubt it will be long before video games are accepted as a true art medium.