Games Are Part Of The Zeitgeist But Can't Reflect It

thegamer.com:

Out of all the mainstream mediums of media, games take the longest to develop. There are a few outliers to that fact - the whole point of game jams is to make games in a timeframe which can be as small as a few hours, while The Man Who Killed Don Quixote took Terry Gilliam 39 years to make - but for the most part, games take the longest. Most movies are shot in under 100 days (many in significantly shorter time frames), clocking in at under a year to make when you add in pre- and post- production, while most television seasons are expected to hit the same window year on year. Most bands or singers release an album every couple of years (though music is typically more eclectic in its rhythm than visual media). At the extreme end of the scale, Twitch streamers and other online content creators broadcast live for hours on end, several days a week. It's a very immediate form of media. Video games take north of three years at a triple-A level in many cases, and I have to wonder if that damages their power as an artform.

There are games that, like television shows, roll around once per year for their regularly scheduled release window. These are mostly sports and shooter games, and while the debate about whether video games are really art is tiresome at this point, it's not FIFA 22 we point to when we consider these things. We point to Red Dead Redemption 2 (on which development started eight years before launch), The Last of Us Part 2 (six years), God of War (five years), and Breath of the Wild (five years). Elden Ring, the current front runner for Game of the Year - a pathway that seems to be unopposed after Breath of the Wild 2, which has been in development for five years, delayed its launch an extra few months - was in