Video games are an art form says Dyack

Video games are an art form and have been since the very beginning believes Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack.

At the Develop Conference in Brighton today, Dyack hosted a session titled, “Design: Video Games as The Eighth Art,” so it shouldn’t come as any surprise to hear him declaring the medium an art form.

“I think they are an art form,” said Dyack. “We’ve got a lot more to go in learning how we create and what the methodologies are for creating these art forms and getting better at it, but I think from the very beginning we’ve been one.

“There are some games now that we’ll always remember and will be remembered as fantastic classic games, and probably will have the opportunity to be remade and remade and remade as we get more technology breakthroughs. We need to learn how to do it better but I think we’re an art form now.”

Questioned whether he feels there has been a Citizen Kane of video games, Dyack wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know if we have one yet,” he said. “Maybe we do, maybe it’s Mario. But I’m not sure. I think that’s a question I’d like to answer ten years from now, when I’ve seen games evolve more.

“I can pick some of my favourite video games of all time and say this is what really inspired me. Resident Evil 2 for example was really big for me, not because of the graphics or all the things they did, but the way they told the stories from different perspectives. I almost thought it was like Pulp Fiction in that way. It allowed us to experience things from different perspectives where you really couldn’t do it before. To me that was ground breaking. It was one of the games that inspired Eternal Darkness. I don’t have one of those yet but I continue to look. Maybe it’s World of Warcraft and we don’t know it yet.”

Do you feel there has been a Citizen Kane of video games? Let us know in the comments section below.