DIRECTIONS: There are two passages in this test. The passage is accompanied by several questions. After reading the passages, choose the best answer to each question. You may refer to the passages as often as necessary.
PASSAGE A
The Supreme Court ruled that video games should be considered an art form, as deserving of First Amendment safeguards as “the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them.” Chris Melissinos reached that opinion some 30 years earlier, as a teenager plugging away at King’s Quest on a neighbor’s PC.
The game’s hand-drawn animation and two-word commands seem crude now, but “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is a fairy tale come to life,’” Melissinos says. He still gets goose bumps remembering hidden warp zones in the first Super Mario Brothers.
Now Melissinos is the guest curator of “The Art of Video Games,” an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that celebrates 40 years of the genre, from Pac-man to Minecraft. The show will include video-game screen shots, videotaped interviews with game designers, vintage consoles from Melissinos’s personal collection (“I’m having a bit of separation anxiety,” he says) and several opportunities for visitors to seize the arcade joystick or PlayStation controls themselves.
Not all of the 80 featured games recall classic film or literature. Attack of the Mutant Camels, for example, stars fireball-spitting dromedaries. Nonetheless, the exhibition contends that games offer much more than a chance to mow down armies and plunder cars. Gamers can till fields, build hospitals, steer the wind. They can be inspired to feel guilt or joy or moral ambiguity. They can be transformed instead of just distracted.
Indeed, video games may be the most immersive medium of all, in Melissinos’s estimation. “In books everything is laid before you,” he says. “There is nothing left for you to discover. Video games are the only forms of artistic expression that allow the authoritative voice of the author to remain true while allowing the
observer to explore and experiment.”
Melissinos grew up with the first games; he later became chief gaming officer at Sun Microsystems, and he is now vice president of corporate marketing at Verisign, a network infrastructure company. He has seen the clunky aliens of Space Invaders and the twodimensional damsel in distress of Donkey Kong morph into Bioshock and Zack & Wiki. Today drops of animated rain dot computer screens, and characters leave reflections in puddles; it’s like watching cave art become Impressionism in just a few decades, he says.(3) Games are in many respects converging with movies (which, in their infancy, were also belittled as non-art, Melissinos notes). Designers employ photo-realistic environments and motion-capture technologies and commission original scores.
1. The main purpose of the third paragraph of Passage is to:
A. provide an overview of what is included in theexhibition The Art of Video Games.
B. compare different video game consoles inMelissinos’s collection.
C. establish how Melissinos decided what to includein The Art of Video Games.
D. indicate ways in which video games have changedin the past forty years.
2. The main point of the fifth paragraph of Passage is that Melissinos believes video games:
F. should be judged primarily by how much theyallow the observer to explore and experiment.
G. are created through a collaboration between authorand observer that creates a more emotional form of art.
H. could be the most immersive medium because they maintain an authorial voice while allowing the observer to explore and experiment.
J. are similar to books because both mediums emphasize the authoritative voice of the author.
3. In this Passage, the main purpose of the bolded part of the sixth paragraph is to:
A. emphasize how much more sophisticated video games have become in a few decades.
B. suggest that the technology of video games has improved while the concepts of video games have not.
C. establish how impressionist art directly influenced the visual styles used in modern video games.
D. indicate that breakthroughs in art are both derivative of prior breakthroughs and innovative in their own right.
4. The parenthetical information in sixth paragragh most strongly suggests that Melissinos believes:
F. early movies lacked the artistry of later movies.
G. eventually, video games will be as widely accepted as art as movies are today.
H. in the future, video games will emotionally resonate with observers more than movies do now.
J. video games will eventually make movies an obsolete art form.