Hasta La Ideas

We’ve covered a little bit of that “video games as art” movement from time to time, that desire in the industry to try to make games more emotionally touching, like films often have the ability to do. Now comes an interesting piece about Jason Rohrer, perhaps one of the most well-known of the movement thanks to Passage, the self-financed game he designed and constructed that deals with life and death (and has made a lot of people cry according to more than one blog post we’ve run across in our time — unfortunately, this writer isn’t much of a gamer, so he just found the whole thing a little boring, much like real life, we suppose). After remaining fiercely independent for years, living a very pastoral existence, Rohrer has announced that he’s signed on with an ad agency to make interactive campaigns. Again, as we aren’t really gamers, we wonder if this is like your favorite band selling out and appearing in a Noxzema commercial and all the die-hard fans suddenly turn away. Though with the gaming industry, isn’t 99.9% of it commercial and the weird thing was to turn away from that? We suppose it’s something for the collective who live and breathe games to discuss and ultimately pass judgement on. Fortunately, for the rest of us, there’s this great interview with Rohrer at Edge Online about his decisions and what exactly it means for him. Here’s a bit about the chief reasons:

I was saying “no” to most of the offers that came along, finding some ethical grounds to say that in each case. But I got to this point where I’m now thirty and I have two children. Over the past year I’ve had a patron, but he only supports people for two years, so I’ve been thinking: how am I going to pay for my children’s college and things? So I’ve switched my policy, and started saying “yes” to everything.

All in all, from an outsider looking in, it’s all very interesting and we’re curious to follow how it will all play out.