What is art?: Not high art, turbo art

Last night, I treated my artistic palette to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, now available on the Nintendo Wii. In the latest revamp of the awesomely violent yet innocently whimsical battle royale video game, there are more stages, more characters and the capability to enact turbo moves, such as terrorizing the stage with an armored tank, zooming out into missile aiming mode or merely dropping dangerous, giant bombs of energy onto the stage. What really got me excited about the game was unlocking Sonic the Hedgehog and throwing him into the mix, tailspin and all.\nSonic wasn’t just exciting because of his new, violent fighting capabilities, but also because he brought me back to an era we’ll call the ‘90s, during which Sonic the Hedgehog consumed most of my time and energy. When I was a kid, Sega Genesis games such as Sonic, Street Fighter II, and the lesser-known Kid Chameleon entranced me into a world that quickly weeded out more useless time-wasters, such as books. But it wasn’t because I was simply becoming a mindless gamer obsessed with virtual reality; it was because gaming gave me another outlet to explore worlds outside of our own.\nIt seemed to me that Sega Genesis knew that this was the way to create a successful video game. In Kid Chameleon, the player takes on the role of a boy whose head is larger than his body, who has entered an evil arcade game to stop its creator from capturing the lives of those who play it. Throughout the game, you can change forms into other entities, such as a knight, a ninja or even a fly, and can incorporate your new form’s special abilities to navigate through each new world’s challenges. Each level is something drastically different from the one before it, from an industrial waste site with navigable piping to a tropical island where giant idol heads shoot spears at you.\nOf course, some may argue that the use of video games in our culture is excessive and mindless, and therefore, not a legitimate form of art. It may be true that children should not spend more than five hours a day on the Wii, but it is also true that video games were designed with the heart and soul of a gamer, hoping to create a world for others to explore, usually connected with theme, style and function.\nWho can fail to recognize the artistry in a game like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where familiar characters such as Peach, Donkey Kong, Pikachu and Zelda can pummel each other to pieces to the ironic background music of the fancy-free Pikmin world? Video gaming in our society cannot be written off as a waste of time, but rather, should be viewed as something valuable that must be consumed in moderation. It is then that we’ll be able to step back and appreciate the artist’s world.