Just came across this post at the Guardian online newspaper.
To that misconception of what Videogame really are, I quote here the best reply (by someone called “pretendname”) I found in the comments section of said blogpost:
This isn’t true… You are simply not equipped with enough knowledge to effectively criticise the kind of art you are dismissing.
Let me give you a tiny insight into a world you will probably never fully appreciate..
In order to draw a circle in paint.. I dip a brush into some paint, and draw a circle on my canvas… My circle may not be quiet round, the paint might drip… but it’s a circle..
To draw a circle on the canvas of the screen, a computer programmer must first understand the mathematical functions that describe a circle… This he spent years learning..
But the circle he eventually draws will not be any old circle.. it will be a circle described to him using a storyboard, and originally drawn statically by an artist.
And the circle he draws will likely animate… Also it will occlude background elements… and so forth.. the staggering complexity of it you simply couldn’t understand.. In the head of the programmer he sees the complexity of the code like a giant charles babbage machine.. cogs whirring… In the middle of a project he awakes at night.. having had the most lucid dreams..
And he’s not alone.. there are likely hundreds of people working on a video game.. (that you’ve taken a simple still from.. so what you’re seeing there is the work of the graphical designer, not the work of the video game itself), Foley artists.. graphical designers, script editors….
There are likely hundreds of such people working on the game.
And they’re not drawing circles.. or merely people.. they are simulating gravity.. the beams of the sun through lenses.. the expressions of a human in pain.. the way a human being “rag dolls” when they fall…
Video games collate all forms of art into a single entity.. Cinematography, sculpture, music…. And add a new form of art that is imperceptible but glues the whole together .. the art of software engineering… Something you must
They are far from unworthy.. they are currently humanity’s ultimate achievement in the arts…. Billions of hours of work.. to give you the simple feeling of being alone in the dark, surrounded by zombies… or really diving out of an aeroplane over a drop zone.. Not the voyeurism of a film.. but an immersive… feeling.. and isn’t art simply about inciting emotion?
You… are the worst sort of ignoramus.