Are video games art? Ask that of most gamers and you will hear angry rants about Roger Ebert and Clive Barker. Ask a fan of other mediums of art, and you might get a more hesitant response. Not so from the Vancouver Art Gallery, who is set to unveil this summer a groundbreaking new exhibition featuring video games.

The exhibition is titled Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art. Yes, that is a mouthful. So how do you feature an exhibit consisting of the above mediums?

Easy, you devote two floors of your museum to original sketches, notes, concept drawings, final production drawings, animation cells, three-dimensional models and published works. Included among the artists who will be featured are Maus author Art Spiegelman, The Sims creator Will Wright, comic artist Seth and animated feature film director Tim Johnson. Yes, a pretty much all-star lineup. (more…)

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Newsweek tech guru N’Gai Croal has an excerpt from his interview with Bungie writing guru Joseph Staten posed on his Levl Up blog. You may remember that Joseph Staten was recently involved with a sly reporter’s teasing of the gaming community. Now, he’s involved in another story sure to irritate the gods of gaming.

In the excerpt, Staten reveals that the on-again, off-again Halo movie was to be far less like the games that perhaps many had hoped. How so? Master Chief was to be a supporting character, and not the star of the film. Yes, that’s right, because Halo is so deep with characterization they decided not to waste an entire film on the masked man in green. Instead, the film was to apparently revolve around the characters that, umm, revolve around Master Chief.

Now, before you grab your pitchforks and go after Staten (who seems like a swell guy from interviews), understand that this was most likely the correct decision. Master Chief may be iconic to gamers, but he’s also some nameless (Chief is not a name, folks), faceless, and generally personality-less figure in the games. Sure, he has the occasional one liner, but for the most part it’s those around him who get the real meat and potatoes of personality, even including his AI companion Cortana. So how would one make a movie about a character with no emotion and personality? Cast Keanu Reeves? (more…)

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