The Art of the Video Game by Josh Jenisch (Quirk Books, 2008) is a handsome coffee-table book that describes itself as “the first book to celebrate an exciting new visual medium…” While this isn’t strictly true — The Art of Game Worlds (Morris and Hartas, Collins Design Books, 2006) covers similar territory with more extensive artist interviews – Jenisch’s new book is the first to contain such a rich assortment of digital artwork from a wide array of publishers, including EA, Activision, Sega, Sony, and Konami.
Every page of The Art of the Video Game is filled with game imagery, and Jenisch wisely includes a broad sampling of concept, development, and in-game art. As a result, the entire arc of the design process for selected games like Hellgate: London can be traced from early sketches through painted renderings all the way to final in-game depictions of characters, weapons, and environments.
The writing is generally illuminating, though it sometimes lapses into hyperbolic proclamations: “Not only are the (NBA Live ’08) players’ likenesses captured to the last sweaty detail, character movement is flawlessly lifelike”; Such claims aren’t always supported by their accompanying images, but overall, The Art of the Video Games offers a useful collection of observations by Jenisch and a variety of game artists and producers.
I was disappointed by the general unevenness of the coverage devoted to the games included. Some titles like Hellboy and Hellgate: London receive full developmental treatment and extensive commentary, while others like Tomb Raider Anniversary and The Sims are barely more than a collection of screenshots. Beautiful Katamari fares even worse in this regard, with meager quotes from a Gamasutra interview and some decidedly un-beautiful images from the game.
My biggest complaint is that the book’s introductory chapter, “A Brief History of Video Game Art”, functions as a condensed boilerplate chronology of video games as an industry and video games as technology but says almost nothing about video game art. Reading it, one might assume this chapter was written for another purpose and included here as a contextual primer. Small blue breakout text boxes discussing “the role of the artist” appear to have been added later, seeming to confirm the impression that the book’s subject and its opening chapter have little to do with each other.
While I might wish for a more balanced and thorough treatment of the games included in The Art of the Video Game, the book remains a valuable resource for readers interested in the artistic elements of game development. The fact that the book even exists in such a beautiful hardcover form suggests that Jenisch’s main thesis (“I’m here to make the argument that video games should be considered art”) has been proven with copious visual evidence.