Video Games as Art

This was a really weird ramble and I find myself disagreeing completely. As a lifelong gamer, it rings false because I've read many pieces of game critique and reviews which perfectly capture a game's soul. As a game developer, I just find the perspective confused.

I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.

Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.

This article seems to be more of a rant about bad critical analysis, rather than whether video games are art. Or even a misunderstanding of the purpose of critical analysis.

> And so, good art game criticism can only be understood by those who have no need of it; a hand may point at the moon, but once you see the moon, you no longer need to look at the hand.

This seems to be the primary point of the article, rather than anything specific to video games. The author argues that art can be created in any medium, but there is a difference between whether critical analysis of the content is transformative in its own right.

> An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation.

While the author goes on to say that "passive" art forms tend not to have this property, they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.

> Game art criticism only works when it conveys the transformativeness on the player (ie. reviewer/critic) ... Given the commercial realities, perhaps this cannot be fixed, and we must accept that timely reviews are ultimately the “Cliff Notes” of games.

Also true for "passive" media.

Critical analysis is not supposed to be a replacement for first-hand experience of any "art" in any medium.

Just a meta comment: the question of whether video games are art seems really dated to me, as does the question of defining what art is in the first place. Of course this question has a long history with a variety of different answers, ranging from “art is what people in the art world say is art” to “it operates in a historical form like painting or sculpture.”

I think this question feels dated because it’s not really a useful distinction anymore, and because cultural producers are no longer regulated by gatekeepers. Legitimacy increasingly just comes from the market itself, not a group of critics or institutions.

But for video games specifically it’s because they have achieved a kind of cultural respect that they didn’t have a few decades ago. The question of “are video games art?” was really more of a quest to be taken seriously as a field. And now they quite obviously are, so the goal of being labeled Art™ isn’t that important anymore.

Instead we’re just going back to the idea of Art as Craft, a particular skill. A game can be good or bad, but whether it’s Art is increasingly irrelevant.

I think that video games can be art, but relatively few are, and most of those that do reach the bar of being considered art aren't particularly avant-garde. Like, taking a couple of artsy-ish games, how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)? Or to put it another way, there's a good number of games that are Discworlds but none that reach the level of the Lord of the Rings: a lot that have a good, concise moral that will stick with you, but none that can change an entire culture. Of course, it could just be that my definition of "art" is too narrow and too high a bar, and there's something to be said about the interactivity of games that gives them greater impact than other media

If a banana duct taped to a wall is art then so are video games.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...