This time Ico, pereninnal “games as art” go-to example, has managed to snare the New Yorker’s Chris Suellentrop. While the piece is mostly a review of the rerelease of Ico and designer Fumito Ueda’s most recent game Shadow of the Colossus, Suellentrop does touch on the enduring appeal of these games. Suellentrop writes on the idea that Ico works because it aims to be art for the sake of art.  

“As video games have become more and more popular, the medium’s defenders have developed a misguided tendency to point to the ways that games are useful, practical, functional. I do not know if Ueda’s games will make you smarter, or improve your vision, or promote world peace. I very much doubt, in fact, that they will do any of those things. Emphasizing the ways that games are tools for instruction-whether intellectual, physical, or moral-is an unfortunate residue of their origins as children’s playthings. Abandoning it will be the sign, maybe the last one, that this new form of storytelling is all grown up.”

Read more here.

– Filipe Salgado