Portal 2 Lab Rat is brilliant art, Valve is amazing at marketing and Here's Why

Spoiler warning! Another games are art rant incoming! Well that's not entirely true; in this case it's marketing is art. Hear me out on this one!

For me it is easy to gauge what I perceive to be good art because I have a very easy litmus test; did it place me in an uncomfortable emotional state? Whether it is the one rom com I can actually tolerate (Love Actually), a stupid movie like Dumb and Dumber or Jackass, or something truly brilliant like Gataca the common theme throughout all of the movies is that they push your emotions around like a pinball. When I play or watch a Starcraft 2 match I always feel my heart rate rise, I feel warmer, and I can feel the adrenaline start to pump. All signs of brilliant art.

I adore the contrast in tone between the Aperture Science investment ad's and the recently released Lab Rat comic. Both marketing vehicles are incredibly entertaining separately, but when taken together as a mass of propaganda for Valve's imminently released opus it could be the most effective communication of tone and theme I have ever been witness too. They are also damn well made. It is the tonal shift between comical and dark as hell; but still a little of each emotion in the other (much like a yin yang) that is really amazing. You have the uncomfortable humor of the investment videos and the dark experience of the comic.

It really seems to me that Valve is not afraid to market a new idea to the masses. It is really exciting they are not only putting out an FPS that isn't about soldiers shooting soldiers, and really isn't about shooting anyone at all, but that they are marketing it to the Madden and CODBLOPS masses (whom many of us PC Master Race look down upon and rightly so =P).

How is it that Valve, a company without a marketing department or firm, can come up with arguably the greatest campaign video game kind has ever seen and the best EA and Visceral can do is this?