E for All 2008: Interview with Joseph Olin, President of The AIAS

JW: There are a couple that are from the same game. Are those typically the same artist working on different aspects of a game?
JO: In some cases, it was different artists from the same team. But all the work is judged blind. So, all you know is an art number and a title. If the title refers to a game, it is taken out. Some of our curators know the artists, so they will remove themselves from voting so there are no influences. The image works on its own and conveys a certain level of technique and emotion. And again, most museum curators, professionals don’t look at 300 images, they are studying and researching a piece that they’ve heard about and they finally get to come in and look at it for a couple of days and decide. We’re asking them to evaluate a lot of art in a short amount of time. We give them the ability to annotate and make notes so that they can refer back to it and then we can get them on the phone and in person and we have lively conversation as people debate what they like.

JS: I was looking at details about the Interactive Achievement Awards and I was really curious about the Hall of Fame and Lifetime Achievement Awards, in terms of who you’ve given them out to in the past and for what?
JO: Well, let’s see…our first was Shigeru Miyamoto. It’s sort of hard not to do something and not start with Mario. Yu Suzuki, Will Wright, John Carmack, Sid Meyer, Sakaguchi, the late Danny Button, Trip Hawkins. Our Lifetime Achievement Award winners were Howard Lincoln and Nakawa-san for Nintendo. Last year we gave one to Ken Kutaragi, Father of the Playstation. Every year there’s a group of the Academy’s Board Members who debate people’s careers and achievements and we make a selection to add someone to the hall of fame who is significant.

JW: Is that part of a special ceremony?
JO: It is part of the Interactive Achievements Awards ceremony.

Piñata Cascade, by Ryan Stevenson, from Viva Piñata

JW: And there’re numerous media that come to that, not just video games. So you’re still getting their names out beyond just the games industry. That’s great. I did want to talk about games as art and where you stand with that, as it is kind of a big debate these days.
JO: I don’t know why. Truthfully, I don’t. I don’t believe that all video games are art. Probably the majority of them aren’t. They weren’t artistic endeavors even though there is a lot of art that is used to create a game, but I think that as a young medium, you know, we’re 30 years old, not particularly old relative to film or print, certainly to recorded music. Now we have a long way to go, but every year there are two are three titles that are emotionally important. They have story arc and narrative and make you think. Art is a singular expression and that’s Roger Ebert’s big thing. Well, there’s plenty of singular artists out there in the game making business so that every moment of the game is scripted and under his or her control. So I think we have some examples of that, certainly in Okami. You can be on the mechanic of using a brush in the game world. It’s the fact that its style and what it is trying to convey is really Clover’s team’s way of telling a fable and bringing it to the modern world. Certainly Kojima and Metal Gear Solid is a singular experience. Not for the faint of heart and not for the casual or newbie player because you’re never going to get anything out of the game. I think Katamari Damacy is definitely an art game. Even though it is very whimsical in terms of its nature, there is an emotional experience that happens because you’re smiling. When you go to museums, not every piece is there to make you…some of the pieces in the museum are there as historical pieces to show context to society and what people were thinking and what people’s values were. Others are there purely for the emotional moment of how you would feel.

Continued on page 4.

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