After ducking out of work early last Thursday for the evening panels, I spent Friday and Saturday of last week at the Art History of Games symposium. Scholars, game designers, architects, museum curators and the like got together to talk about how — or in some cases, whether — games have a place in the world of art. Here’s a video that’ll give you a sense of what the conversation was like (although it doesn’t convey a sense of how tall independent game artist Jason Rohrer is, which became its own Twitter hashtag during the conference).

It was a densely packed weekend, and I’ll probably write more than one post about it this week. I’d planned to kick off the series with a look at the introductory panel, “What is an Art History of Games?” in which Ian Bogost, Michael Nitsche and John Sharp talked about aspects of video games that might be considered art. Is the art in the game’s visual components? How about its design? Its storytelling? Its use of technology? The players’ interactions with the game?

Michael Fahey already wrote that exact post over at Kotaku, though, so I’m moving on to the opening keynote by John Romero. Romero is a game designer and programmer best known for his work on games like “Wolfenstein 3D,” “Doom” and “Quake.”His keynote, “Masters Among Us,” looked at the great masters of the early days of the video game world — Kotaku has also already delved into who they are and what they did. Romero’s point was that today’s developers need to look back to the early game development pioneers and learn from them.

Two of Romero’s points really struck me. The first is that it has gotten harder, not easier, to make video games. It seems like the game creators who were working in that early world of 2-D pixels and tinny sound had a lot of constraints. Processor speeds in the average gaming machine were measured in megahertz, not gigahertz. And RAM came in kilobytes, not gigabytes. The idea of creating a playable, or even good, game with such comparatively weak technology seems daunting.

But, in some ways, today’s developers have more constraints. The early coders had direct access to the hardware they were coding for, and they could put pixels wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, as long as the processor could handle it. Today, game developers have to work within the constraints of application programming interfaces (APIs), and they’re working with polygons, not pixels.  The rise of game genres made it easy for gamers to shop for games, but it made it harder for developers to break new ground — at least, if they wanted to sell their games. On top of that, the current trend is to make games faster with more detailed visuals rather than revolutionizing the way people play them.

The other point was that a game I loved to play as a kid, which I’d never thought of as more than a fun way to spend some time after school, was really groundbreaking.  One of the masters Romero mentioned was Bill Williams, and one of the games he spoke about as groundbreaking was Williams’ “Alley Cat.” In it, you control a cat that uses trash cans and clotheslines to scale a building, entering windows to solve the mini-games inside. It was an innovative structure for a game in its day, and as my brother and I could tell you, most of the mini-games were really fun to play. As a kid, I never would have guessed that one day that game would be pointed out as an example of notably innovative game development. Here’s a video to give you a better sense of what it was like.

A prevailing theme in much of the conference, not just Romero’s keynote, is that today’s world of mainstream games doesn’t have a lot of room for real creativity. I haven’t decided whether I agree, but it’s a theme I may be exploring more later in the week. What do you think?