Here's the logic: What goes into a game? Very few don't include any visual art, music, prose, or acting (or the 3d or voice equivalent). Even that old ADVENTURE was primarily prose! So at the very least, games are made out of art. So of course games are art, right? Some will ask if there is a higher art than what is calculated from the mere components of the game, if it rather comes together to create some experience as art.
Portal is an object lesson in interactive storytelling. We in the media are so fond of shaking our heads, scratching our beards and looking for the "art" in videogames. Well it's time for us all to shut the hell up. This is it. It’s in this finely crafted, lovingly rendered piece of short-story literature.
This is from an article by Rabbit Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs. It's a good review of Portal (except I think he took the comments by GLaDOS about androids a bit too strongly — and he later almost admitted that in the comments section). But it also discusses the artiness of video games. It's pretty good. Oh yeah: I do believe in the experience-as-art.
After I mentioned Portal and HL2:EP2 on my "normal" blog, I had second thoughts about whether it should have rather been posted to Radical Ideals. It is, after all, about art. But I wanted to get across to my normal technical audience with that one; heck, not only does that blog have a far larger readership than this one, but video games are tech, right? Well, consider this post my atonement.
Half Life 2 has a much wider repertoire of artistic merit than Portal, but I think Portal much better hits one with a fist full of pure, distilled STYLE.
