Having finally landed a position within the game industry, I can absolutely affirm that there are a great number of strong similarities between the production of a film and the production of a video game. More importantly, there are significant differences. While films are the result of a great number of uniquely-skilled people working towards a common purpose, video game production is much more of a collaborative effort of people working towards individual purposes; even if there’s a creative director guiding the overall story and theme, individual designers often retain a great deal of control over their particular levels and quests. On top of that, instead of simply being screened once a cut has been made after months of shooting and editing (as would be the case with a film), a video game is “screened” almost immediately as it goes through the QA process. The feedback is direct, individualized and usually results in quick turnaround on necessary changes to improve the quality of the content. This happens dozens of times in the production cycle prior to release.

Interactivity being the key distinguishing characteristic of video games versus other visual media, the player’s experience is a huge focus in development. An open-world role-playing game can provide the player with a seemingly limitless set of choices that allow them to participate in the creation of a world that can reflect their personal values or unfulfilled desires. For every player, the experience of that story will be entirely unique in a way that is unmatched (perhaps even unmatchable) by other visual formats.

When you consider these things, perhaps that’s the reason that video games receive such puzzling and frustrating scrutiny from critics of other art forms; it’s so new and so incredibly different from anything we’ve experienced before – not to mention still being in its adolescence – that no one really knows how to structure criticisms in a way that accurately reflects those distinctions. We’ve simply adapted our techniques for commenting on other formats and modified them for gaming, which unfortunately doesn’t allow us to probe the depths of what games have to offer as an art form.