Video Games: Art for Generation Y - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Video Games: Art for Generation Y

It’s true. Video games were being enjoyed before most of Generation Y was born and age groups much older than the Millenials have found enjoyment in interactive gaming experiences, but that isn’t the point. Generation Y has come and is coming of age in the Digital Epoch. Computer gaming, console gaming, handheld gaming, it’s all been made most advanced and accessible while my fellow teenagers and twenty-somethings have been coming of age. True, there are those who protest that video games cannot be art, but I’m going to assume they are. That’s a discussion for another day, but the real question is: what do video games say about Generation Y?

It’s not just interactivity; it’s the ability to digitize the imaginative. The choose-your-own-adventure-book is the video game’s grandfather. It’s not just a story told, but a story participated in. It’s not Frodo, but Chase. And the One Ring needn’t ever make it to Mount Doom. The video game indulges and invigorates our imaginations; it’s a mixture between escapism and recognition of the self. Immersion is the byword and absolute conflation player and protagonist is the goal.

But they’re not just imaginative exercise. Video games are a recognition of what we’ve become. Forget the violence; forget the sex, forget the Mortal Kombat. Video games are imaginative self-actualization. They’re not necessarily escape to another realm, but escape from a depressing modern world. We’re trained in contradictory impulses. On the one hand, we’re all unique and special and untouchable. On the other hand, life doesn’t always play out that way; others are often more important, more successful, and better looking. The video game is the attempt to transcend that dichotomy. No one wants to play a video game as a secondary character; even games about mundane tasks need to make them seem less banal.

That said, that doesn’t make them bad; it makes them the perfect tool for challenging the cognitive dissonance that is modern existence. Without ranting against the renewed Console Wars or the dominance of first-person shooters, the video gaming industry is in need of renewal. No serious student of the medium could disagree. But that renewal could be a move toward critique. Video games are, after all, just a medium, inherently interactive and a little self-indulgent, but a medium nonetheless. It’s a field rife to be worked with, an anti-venom to be turned on modernity itself.

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