There’s been a lot of discussion about whether games are art. You can probably tell how we feel about that argument from our logo up there. To understand our position, it might help to know what we mean by art. For us, art is not about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions.

Video games allow us to look at some of our oldest questions in new ways. Bioshock used the conventions of a first-person shooter to ask questions about free will that simply couldn’t have been asked in prose or film. Shadow of the Colossus relied on third person perspective and the structure of action-adventure games to frame questions of moral consequence and introspection in ways that sculpture or photography cannot.

SRRN Games takes as axiomatic that games can be art. The question for us becomes: If games are art, then what? What does that mean for gameplay? What does it mean for narrative? Too often developers and publishers focus myopically on individual features – from frame-rates to play-time – and in doing so miss the forest for the trees. Artistic elements like narrative and character development aren’t things you can add onto a game like bolt-on upgrades.

Bricks are important for construction, but if architects never stepped back to see the bigger picture they couldn’t make art out of buildings. At SRRN, we step back from the individual components that go into game development to view the artistic whole.

It’s not just about the game. It’s about the conversations afterwards.