Art direction is key in shipping a successful game, simply put it's how the world looks. Even for games that focus on realism over a particular art style such as the Call of Duty franchise or many new games that are going for the whole "grounded and gritty" feel such as the new Tomb Raider still require it and in many respects that may make the attention paid to the direction even more crucial. Art direction is not something exclusive to the gaming industry either, although it may be more important, it's found in films, TV, advertising, even music videos, well to an extent. What I'm trying to get at is that in any visual medium at one point during production you're gonna stumble upon it. That doesn't mean art direction for a game is exactly the same as say for a music video but the basic principles and fundamentals still apply.
To get more in depth over this lets take films and games and compare the differences between them as these two would appear to be most similar. Both are headed by an art director although in film it's more commonly referred to as a production designer but the roles and responsibilities are near identical. (In film a VFX artist is very similar although they deal more with stuff like CGI and visual effects). Anyway to put it bluntly they're behind how everything looks, from the architecture of sets or levels to the characters that inhabit them, crates, vehicles, fashion, if you can see it they influenced it. I think that the main difference though is in the scale that a art director for a game will have to deal with. The way see it a film is rather like a car journey where you're in the passenger seat, you're seeing the world outside but it's somebody else driving, somebody else is in control of your experience, directly effecting what you're able to see. Now for a game it's you behind the wheel, although the extent of your freedom depends on a number of factors, like the genre or how linear the game may be but if we take, let's say Guild Wars 2, the player has a whole world to explore and the art director has to make sure that every corner of it is populated with stuff that's not just pretty to look at but that's style is consistent throughout the world. That's a lot of things to keep on top of.
So let's solely focus on the art director for a game, we've briefly touched on their role but let's crack that can of worms right open. If we look here we can get a good overview of not just what they do as we've already lightly discussed but not the qualities that an art director needs. I'll go over that in more detail in a minute but I don't feel I've fully explained an art director's job fully, or at least my personal thoughts towards it. As I've already said above the scale of the job is immense, an art director essentially designs the world you experience, you could say they're almost playing God. And I think that's one thing the really draws me into the industry is the ability to design anything and everything. One day you'll be in charge over the look of a vehicle, the next what a species of tree is gonna look like. It's almost dizzying trying to wrap your head around the possibilities. That's probably romanticising the job, glossing over the harsh work schedule and juggling all the different art departments below me but I'm young, I still have any years for the world to jade me. Fingers crossed it won't though. Communication and managing skills once again rears it's head, now it's probably synonyms with most jobs anyway but as an art director I can imagine you'll be doing more than a few presentations to a variety of audiences. So people skills are needed then, combine that with technically sound art and design skills and you're the perfect the package it would seem, that and a hefty side portion of industry experience.
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_direction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_designer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX_Creative_Director
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020903/london_02.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050718/mencher_01.shtml
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