Tommy Tallarico Discusses Impact of Video Games and Their Role as Art

I remember watching Tommy Tallarico and Victor Lucas review games on the Reviews on the Run television show. After he left to peruse a career in video game music, he eventually started the Video Games Live orchestrated concerts, limiting the opportunities to hear Tommy speak.

At the TEDx event, Tommy spoke at the TEDTalks video game presentation about the impact of video games on people and their role as art within the community.  

After some reminiscing about his childhood and how he grew up playing video games, he begins discussing the topic of video game violence. Looking to put the conversation to rest, he displays a graph showing the increase of video game sales year over year and the declining crime in relation. To compound the point of his argument, Tommy explores the different sensations of video game actions and real life actions. Specifically, he draws upon the differences in hitting a person with a car in real life and in video games.

For the second half of the video, Tommy begins by praising the deviantART community who create art inspired by video games and their characters. He discusses video games as art in the sense of how the community generates content for these games through YouTube channels, Twitch.tv broadcasts and even through cosplay. Of course he eventually leads to his own show, Video Games Live, and how he used a multiple methods to make an orchestrated concert exciting for a variety of audiences.

For the full presentation, the 18 minute video above will fill in the rest.