“Gameplay is not everything,” said Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness) founder and president Denis Dyack. “If you look at the most popular games today, they are far more narrative-focused.”
Dyackâs controversial message was delivered during a talk at Brighton, UK’s Develop Conference calling for games to be considered as “the Eighth Art.” He highlighted the writings of Ricciotto Canudo, an Italian author and one of the first theorists of film who considered cinema to be the Seventh Art.
“That video games are art is quite obvious to me,” he continued. “The new synthesis is interactivity and gameplay. Instead of moving pictures, that which movies brought to art, we now have interactivity as the glue that brings together all the previous artistic elements.”
Read that again. “That video games are art is quite obvious to me [...] we now have interactivity as the glue that brings together all the previous artistic elements.” Yeah, Dyack summarises it perfectly there. This is something that’s been hotly debated for a long time in the gaming world, “are video games art.” And while I’ve been a fan of Silicon Knights for a while, Denis Dyack just scored innumerable points with me personally. But I digress, read the full Gamasutra interview with Denis Dyack here.