Structurally speaking, they are more like Shyamalan than like Rothko and Marcus, the latter two artists having struggled to find their respective styles outside of the certainty of commercial success. These styles evolved over decades, and they did so in the arms of financial success and corporate underwriting. Will Wright's discovery and later mastery of the software toy simulation, from SimCity to SimEarth to The Sims or John Carmack and John Romero's revolutionary exploitation of new powers in real-time 2d and 3d graphics in Commander Keen, Doom, and Quake or Hideo Kojima's development and refinement of the stealth action games of the Metal Gear series, characterized by solitude, initial weakness, cinematic cut-scenes, and self-referential commentary. Where there are game makers with a style, it has often evolved over long durations. And in part, it's because games are so tightly coupled to consumer electronics that technical progress outstrips aesthetic progress in the public imagination. In part, it's because games are more highly industrialized even than film, and aesthetic headway is often curtailed by commercial necessity. In part, this is because game makers tend to have less longevity than other sorts of artists. In videogames, it's far less common to see a creator's work evolve in this way. This perception of creative progress is a part of the pleasure of art, whether through the joy of growth or the schadenfreude of decay. Archivists or scholars might dig into a creator's sketchbooks or retrieve early works, but such museum work is not required for the ordinary viewer or reader to grasp the changes and refinements of work over time. In painting, literature, and film the public can see an artist's work evolve (or devolve) because that work is accessible to audiences in their native forms.
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