By Marc Lee
AFI FEST Daily News Editor

Saturday afternoon’s first TALK/SHOW, Gaming: Art or Commerce?, covered much more than that.

Swinging from the initial un-anwserable question to the issues of violence, gameplay, ratings and more, panelists Danny Ledonne, Mark L. Walters, Lucy Bradshaw and Jerry O’Flaherty were eager to discuss the issues of their industry.

Ledonne, who created the game Super Columbine Massacre RGP and produced and edited PLAYING COLUMBINE showing at AFI FEST, talked about the reactions to his game, which was de-selected from the Slamdance videogame festival and horribly vilified in the media.

“I put it online as a free download,” he said. “The main goal was to initiate discussion. I wasn’t thinking EA was going to call. I aspired to art. The game actually lost a lot of money as it became more and more popular because I was paying for bandwidth. I had to set up a Paypal account. I came out in the hole.”

“If we’re lucky, games as art and games as commerce are going to overlap,” he said, pointing out sites dedicated to independent game makers, such as manifestogames.com, where players can play some games free online and download others. “More and more though, it’s becoming possible for game makers to eke out a living as independent game developers.”

Walters, a cinematic director for Activision who has worked on games such as Spiderman: Web of Shadows and Tony Hawk Project 8, said the question of art vs. commerce is only an issue because of the industry’s “growing pains.”

“There have been court cases that prove that video games are the same as features and books in their position in the media,” he said. “Clearly,  games are art in the legal sense. But as a practical matter, they’re viewed as commerce. Take lawyers… it’s easy for them to say no. It’s free for them to to say no on issues of copyright. In the Spiderman video game,  the lawyers said no to having exact images of buildings in New York because of ‘archetectural copyright.’ It’s a very conservative industry.”

“But now there are games where the audience is in control of the environment; it turns the 1976 copyright act on its head. Where is that going?”

Bradshaw had some answers to that. As executive producer of The SIMS 2 and now behind the acclaimed Spore, her experience deals with game spaces and player relationships in video games.

“I’ve been making games where we give the tools to the players, and they ultimately make the content. A player could make an image just like you, and where do the legal rights stand like that?

“In the age of the internet this content gets shared. All of the sudden you have this incredible landscape where rights and images gets very confused. With Spore we had to ask, what’s the relationship with our players? We do have the rights to the players’ creations, but we wouldn’t use their creations without having a relationship with them…. It gets into tricky, cloudy areas: copyright ownership, IP ownership, art vs. product. I think it’s going to translate to film and it already has to music. It’s not unique to us.”

“Music is a great example,” interjected O’Flaherty, art director on Gears of War and director of THUNDERCATS.

“It’s a human perception issue: ‘if it’s not organic, it’s not art.’ Take techno music: it’s not very human, so people don’t look at it as artistic.”

“We wouldn’t necessarily think of a car as a piece of art, despite all that goes into it; it doesn’t tell a story or communicate anything. There’s this weird disconnect. I don’t know if we’re going to overcome that. Take the craftsmanship in video games: The creative people are all artists in their own right, but in the game as a whole… people don’t really perceive it as art.”