A Spotlight on the Art of Video Games

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Next month, it will be 30 years since the movie was filmed. It almost feels quaint to look back on that arcade game. The fighting is cartoonish. The eye in a violence-in-video- games storm was that of Mortal Kombat, but many don't remember. The creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which puts content and age ratings on games, was made possible by its spine-ripping gore. The debate about video-game violence is often seen as too much hand-wringing.

A curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art thinks about this a lot. What purpose does violence in art serve? There is an exhibit on video games and interactive design at the museum this weekend. She wanted a Beretta gun to be part of the design collection when she was at MoMA. Some people at MoMA didn't like the idea. Why don't we have a gun in the collection? It was thought that a depiction of a gun in a painting or sculpture would be an endorsement of its function. The principle of applying the same is applied to video games. There was a lot of discussion about violence.

This War of mine, a game from the perspective of a civilian trying to survive conflict, is included in Never Alone. It is described as an incredibly violent game, but that is not the point. He says that some of the most interesting games deal with the issue of violence in a way that moves us forward.

Video games are cultural artifacts that need to be discussed. The exhibit is meant to give games a more prominent artistic platform as people have been discussing them for a long time. The way people interact with games isn't all that different from the way they interact with art, that's why it's important to show that

The title of the exhibit is never alone. It is a testament to the fact that video games can be community-building that it is derived from the game of the same name. This has become even more true in the past few years. It was easy to see this when I walked around MoMA's exhibit last week. The games are on display. There are many tools of interactive design, like the first- generation iPod and Susan Kare's sketchbook of icons for the original Apple Macintosh. The point is to show that the art is created when a player interacts with a designer. The turns are unique.