No, it’s not the opening of a hyper-visual, surreals film experience--it’s a scene from a computer game: Peter Molyneux’s Black and White. And Molyneux presented a scene similar to this one to several hundred people gathered at this past summer’s ECTS, an electronic gaming convention in Europe. Molyneux scrolled along the landscape with a disembodied hand, cast a spell which created a huge fireball which he used to blow an unsuspecting village sky high--the villagers screamed in horror and scurried about trying to put out the blaze. Molyneux described all that he did to his audience, excitedly, he unsuspectedly joked: “you can create this huge fireballs, and use them, causing all this cataclysmic horror…which is pretty cool.” (paraphrased quote) The audience laughed in sincere amusement.

    A giant tortoise besieges a village in Peter Molyneux's Black and White

      Molyneux and his audience were very excited, as they should be--he has worked on this game for over three years…and the payoff seems just around the corner. Gamers around the world will play Black and White and become lost in its inmersive reality, with night and day cycles, even weather patterns which will be based on the gamer’s actual local weather. Seeing this presentation, I’ve realized that games, yep, computer games have arrived as an art form for the millennium.

     And why not? Video games have come a long way, baby. They’re no longer mindless one-click affairs with supremely annoying sound effects. The old ATARI days are just that--the old ATARI days. The nineties brought the Playstation with its epic Role Playing Games and chilling Horror Survival Games. Nintendo, for over two decades, has brought youngsters awe-inspiring adventure games and constantly engaging story-based games (well, except for Pokemon). The PC, unsuspecting beige box at first used for spreadsheets and word processing, now is the platform for finely detailed war simulations, massive online role playing universes, and mind-exhausting real-time strategy games. A computer game company, Origin, is getting ready to unleash Origin: Ultima Worlds Online sometime next year, and thousands will become addicted to living as magic-users in a superbly-looking world called Brittania. If you think these games are for kids, you’re sadly mistaken. As Molyneux’s Black And White demonstrates, hard-worked, focused creativity goes into the creation of video games. And with efforts by these designers to tell ever more compelling stories, games are more and more becoming an art form, like films, and novels.

     Games like Black and White promise experiences equal to those had at art museums, music concerts and movie theaters. We are looking at the rise of a very unique art form. As for me, it makes me very glad that I’m a gamer…’cause in the long run I’ll be able to say: I’m playing a piece of art, how about you?