Lyric Suite said:
-Pavlos- said:
I do. Tell me, what, exactly, is stopping a video game from having these qualities?
There's no such thing as art, only genius, and there's no genius in the video game industry (or anything else anymore). That's all there is to it.
Actually, come to think of it, you're making an understatement.
Even genius implies the presence of actual talent. Talent, as far presentation in gaming goes, is not at all present.
We often say that a game has good music, but that music will only be good by the standard of gaming. In actuality, the music will be quite mediocre. The person composing it will barely qualify as a composer.
But there have been instances where people with actual talent worked on a game. A while back, we were discussing what a great composer Stephane Picq was. That's because Stephane Picq was a real and a trained composer, and not just some videogame riffraff. And he is considered to be possibly the best game composer out there. But that's only because he was a composer at all.
And even as a composer, Stephane Picq's music might be characterized as decent or average. Just listen to this music from a Stephane Picq game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Z75Bcima4
It starts out so promising, and yet falls apart very badly early on. We are just too forgiving towards videogame talent. About the best videogame composer himself was not that great, and he was only working on games years ago. Yeah, he actually had talent, but not an ounce of genius.
Games are better off focusing on the actual core game, and not waste their time on arbitraries like music, writing, and other presentation.