Director: Jeremy Snead
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 0.5
Being more than a bit familiar with the history of video games, I went into this with high hopes, but aside from a few game clips, a supremely cursory history of the medium and a lot of statistics (from where, exactly?) and hyperbole, this is nothing more than Video Games: A Poorly Executed, Terribly Slight Overview. Snead, turning to Kickstarter (ugh) for funding, fast-tracks through a half-century of gaming development with some rapidly-moving graph and a few talking heads to make what amounts to a glorified advertisement for a very profitable hobby/time sink. Everyone that is interviewed seems to automatically be under the impression that video games are undoubtedly 'art' - along with literature, poetry, painting, musical composition, etc. - which is a claim so ludicrous and simple-minded it makes me want to kick a door in (even the skilled video game designer, Hideo Kojima, has said games are not art). Indie Game: The Movie is a much better film about the industry, since it shows it from the perspective of several talented outsiders (like Team Meat and Phil Fish) trying to take their little home-made efforts and compete with multi-million dollar corporations (Sony, Electronic Arts, Capcom).
