Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: The Toy Edition

1 467219 video View As Slideshow » The Fine Brothers: Patrick makes an eclectic mix of awesome videos, but his action figure interactives have the biggest place in our hearts. Action figures in stop motion madness that's also a game? YouTube doesn't get much better than that. Tamar Weinberg: If only my kid would (still?) do that. Meghan Peters: The FAO Schwartz scene from Big :)100 NES (Nintendo) Games in 10 Minutes! Ada Ospina: Other than NES I can only operate games such as Guitar Hero and Buzz Quiz. Jay Irani: Is this a toy commercial or a trailer for a demon-child horror movie? You decide. Karen Hartline: You are a child of the '80s if you had at least seven of these toys. Me=My Little Pony, Cabbage Patch Kid, Pound Puppy, Monchichi, Strawberry Shortcake, Jem, Care Bear, Chinese jacks, roller skates and more. But not Teddy Ruxpin. It was too scary! Stefanie Rennert: I used to watch this Penguin Race toy for hours. Penguins marching and sliding, over and over again… genius!Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Toy Commercials Ben Parr: I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I had the toys. So here's a compilation of all the toy commercials for TMNT. Erica Swallow: I feel like I was the only deranged child who collected Treasure Trolls... anyone? Looking back, they weren't so cuddly and cute after all. Something about neon hair and jeweled belly buttons just made me feel warm and fuzzy at the time. Christina Warren: I actually bought one of these off eBay for my fiance last Christmas. Josh Catone: I liked Popples when I was a kid. And I'm man enough to admit it. Adam Ostrow: A montage of Transformers, of which I had way too many as a kid. Radhika Marya: That's right. Polly Pocket, back when the name was actually appropriate. Now I'm all nostalgic for the Japanese Tea House version I had...Barbie Lamborghini Car Commercial - 1993 Brenna Ehrlich: Children mimicking adults is a little unsettling here.-- From a personal VHS TapeDecember 10, 2010 by Brenna Ehrlich

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, cglade

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Are video games art 2010 Edition

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While the role of the professional critic in the realm of books, film, music, or art is well-established, for interactive entertainment the lines are less clear. As a (relatively) young medium, questions about how to actually write about video games are still being hashed out, by consumers, fans, bloggers, established media critics, and others.

The default to date has been to consider a work of interactive entertainment as a packaged consumer product -- hence game reviews that focus on the number of levels, hours of gameplay, and other technical details. I am more inclined to consider a game as a cultural or artistic effort -- which is hopefully how even a very mainstream entertainment-minded audience sees it, consciously or not (to not do so would be akin to judging a film such as "Apocalypse Now" by the number of explosions per minute).

Over the course of this year, as part of CNET's revolving brain trust of gaming experts (typically alongside my colleagues Scott Stein and Jeff Bakalar) I've endeavored to take that broader view, looking at how these games fit into the larger cultural landscape, and hopefully providing some useful context and analysis along the way. Whether I have or not is up to you to decide, and to that end, I've collected some of the more interesting (and perhaps self-indulgent at times) excerpts of my year-long attempt to discern the artistic and cultural value, if any, of the games of 2010.

Film critic Roger Ebert has approached the issue from the other end, at first famously declaring that "video games can never be art," and later amending that to say, "in principle, video games cannot be art." Despite the torrent of replies Ebert has received, ranging from calm and rational to angry and hyperbolic, he's actually more correct than his detractors. Just because we can provide some cultural or artistic context for some games, doesn't mean the medium has done more than scratch the surface (or as Ebert describes it, these are primitive cave paintings compared to Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.)

Click through the accompanying slideshow to see the worlds of Bioshock, God of War, and Fallout filtered through Ayn Rand, Joseph Campbell, and Cormac McCarthy, then add your voice to the debate by commenting below.

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