i arrived home from new york early on monday afternoon and, to no avail, found myself bored to tears by 4:00pm. not surprising given the amount of activity i partook in the following weekend, it’s only natural that i want more once i found myself in a “doing” groove. so, rather than traipse about or complete something productive, i installed half-life 2 and played through and a good portion of it.

the name of the game (no pun intended) is immersion. personally, that’s what draws me to gaming and film. the prince of persia series revels in well-crafted story-telling, the metroid prime games replicate the feeling of physically being the main character, shadow of the colossus makes an absolute art out from it’s feelings of isolation, and half-life 2 excels at making you care about it’s supporting npcs and actually invest in their well-being. aside from great level design and well-crafted writing this can be credited to the stellar voice-acting and realistic character animation. they’re not doing anything groundbreaking in this realm, nothing that hasen’t been done before (as a committed studio of pixar or the like), but simply bringing it to an interactive realm. this is something noteworthy in and of itself. especially given that the player doesn’t simply watch these characters, but interacts with them. a wayward glance towards a “bit-part” comrade during a mission briefing for a task that will almost certainly lead to death may seem like nothing; but it’s when that no-name character matches your thoughts with the same grim tidings and shakes his head at you as if you two are actually having a moment that it becomes something more than what a film can be.

portal executed this same maneuver but on a much smaller scale, and therefore, in my opinion, became something much more. leaving holes to be filled in by the player is something they’re not used to doing. so, inherently, it’s better.

roger ebert has always stated that video games, by their nature will never be true art and always considerably inferior to film and literature because:

“by their nature [video games] require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.”

i’d rather not stray into a monologue about art being without definition, because it is. however, most consider art to be something that causes an emotional response. emotional. in film, this would be akin to crying when a character dies, or an injustice running unrequited causing anger or resentment for the antagonist. however, these exact same things can happen in a game. they just have yet to take the notice of any opinion-maker.