Games as art

By Will Greenwald on 04 September 2007

'Bioshock'

Bioshock not only stands out as one of the best games I've played this year, but as an artistic double-whammy. On the purely aesthetic side, Bioshock presents incredibly beautiful art deco architecture and sublimely hideous character design. On the literary side, director Ken Levine presents a clever and insightful interpretation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, asking how the Objectivist writer's novel would have played out if the characters were not nigh-infallible paragons. The game also presents many interesting questions about choice and humanity, though any further details would spoil the plot.

Artistic relevance: Objectivist commentary and interpretation, art deco aesthetics
Related artists: Ayn Rand, Hector Guimard

Topics: art, games, arthouse, pictures, bioshock, relevance, artistic, related, artist, japan

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Comments (2)

  • tbone commented on 26/06/2009 11:49

    thats soooo rite barry

  • BarryJones commented on 15/10/2007 12:40

    This is the worst list I have ever seen in relation to computer games. It's like it was written by a man-boy who can't leave his limited teenage ideas behind. For god's sake, BioShock? And where the hell was the Nintendo stuff like Wind Waker. You even included a poor Zelda clone (Okami), ironically only because of it's surface level aesthetic.

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