The Art of Video Games: Milestones of the Past
By Aaron Shotwell

When most people say the word "art," they more often than not mean "craft," the article of creation or the act of its creation. And then there are more people still that have their own presumptuous definitions for it, commonly accepted as an institution of passion, self expression and appealing beauty. The truth is that art cannot truly be defined; it defies definition, and to attempt to give it one is to trivialize its real meaning.

So how does such an elusive, cryptic concept take place in our favorite pastime, video games? One undeniable truth is that, however unclear its meaning, art is a key factor in any culture, a testament to our realities and our fantasies. Every generation of every culture has had its own expression in the arts; it has always been a part of our history, from the Hellenistic art of ancient Greece, to the innovations of the Italian Renaissance, to the Film Noir and Italian Neorealism film movements of the 1920s.

Today, our world has united under a new movement more uniformly than ever before: video games. Throughout history, as we cast religious, ritualistic symbolism and the procedures of sympathetic magic from the meaning of our art, we have embraced the scientific, realistic portrayal of our world, and eventually, we sought to create our own fantasy world through the emulation of the principles of our reality.

The science of ancient Greek art gave us the perfect portrayal of the ideal human form. Artists of the Renaissance, using that Greek math, gave us developments to understand depth and perspective, allowing us to peer into a far more realistic world with the illusion of diminishing space. The invention of photography allowed us to capture moments of real life and the invention of motion pictures allowed us to recreate and record the world as we see it every day, giving us the ability to suspend disbelief with the right angles and effects, manipulating our audience with subtle visual psychology. Now, with the dawn of the video game, recent generations have been given the privilege of interactively stepping into their favorite fantasy worlds.

None of this is to speak for the art itself, but rather for the progress that gave us a more advanced and elaborate set of mental, physical and technological canvases on which to display our creations. The true essence of the art is in the fact that each of these movements became structural cornerstones

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