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 Clive Barker, a renowned director and writer of horror flick "Hellraiser", keynoted the recent Hollywood & Games Summit 2007 (henceforth to be known as H&G 07) on games and movies as art in likeness and in difference. Though an icon of significant extent in a medium of entertainment so well-matured, his views on "games as art" appear as untainted as ever.
A couple of months earlier, a debate was roused to tackle if games could be considered art. The debate was highlighted by a single iconic movie critic, Roger Ebert, who claimed that the fact that games are "played" removes the primordial element of art: authorial control.
In an onstage interview at the summit held at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, Barker was asked by The Hollywood Reporter's Gina McIntyre what his views were on games being works of art, as compared to movies. With Ebert's claims mentioned, Barker had this to say:
That's [crazy]. This is a medium that’s barely 2 decades old, and [Ebert] is saying "Oh, there’s no 'War And Peace' yet" – of course there isn’t! You have to come at it with an open heart... Roger Ebert obviously had a narrow vision of what the medium is, or can be. It seems so high-handed. A lot of very very smart people, here in this room, are working to make these experiences extraordinary.
We can debate what art is, we can debate it forever. But if the experience moves you, some way or another, even if it just moves your bowels, I think it’s worthy of some serious study... Games mean something to a lot of people. ... Games aren’t about reviewers, they’re about players.
Clive Barker is currently working with Codemasters - the guys behind the well-received DiRT and Overlord - to create the horror title Jericho, after a previous game development experience with Electronic Arts' Undying. According to him, Jericho may have well been another novel to add to his resume, except for one thing: it would have been a really bad novel. He thought real hard about it, but eventually, Jericho just screamed game. Barker added:
It would make a ... terrible novel. It really would, it doesn’t
work! It screams out to be something other. Maybe if games hadn’t
existed, I would’ve made it a movie. But I much prefer the idea of
having twenty hours to play this world, to enter this labyrinth than
the two hours or the way movies are going now. I don’t know what it is
with people, my bum gets sore! I like pirates and all, but jeez!
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