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
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.
Here's a book that accompanied an exhibition in 1993 that discusses the relationship between art and games (German, sorry) https://boerverlag.de/SPIELE.html
From the article: "Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind."
Arguably, as others in this thread have said, all other art forms are transformative in the same way. As far as definitions go this is pretty much essential to any art (opposed to, say, the intentions of the artist as we kind of agree that an artist can create art even if they don't intend to).
I think the author is contrasting video game criticism (which I agree is worthless) with that of other art forms, which I would argue has just become naked promotion to the same degree.
Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever. I would love someone to prove me wrong with some blog or other media outlet that reviews classical music albums and treats them even as harshly as someone like Christgau did rock. It has led to pianists like Lang Lang that are widely reviled among the classical piano community gaining fame and success because critics are simply advertisers in the classical world. Bear in mind, this is an art form in which audiences used to be so critical that Glenn Gould was booed for playing Brahms 1 with Bernstein just because he took slow tempi!
Just look at how RT scores have inflated in film. Or the whole poptimism thing in music. Or the fact that Amanda Gorman was considered one of the best poets in the US a few years ago. There's no critical voice anymore outside of the stodgiest of academic circles.
I fundamentally disagree with the distinction the author puts out.
1. Makes a distinction that video games "transform" the player in a way other media doesn't.
I would argue that every piece of art is "active" in this way, it's just that with non-interactive art, the activity happens within your own mind.
Don't art aficionados and art students sit and stare at a piece for an hour, experiencing something within themselves that goes beyond what they see?
Doesn't reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, take time to truly engage with the writing of the author and "learn" their style in order to appreciate it on a deeper level?
In the same way, engaging with the mechanics of a game and experiencing the ludonarrative cohesion is how one engages with a game on a deeper level.
2. Most game critique is just a cliff notes or description
This is the same for all mass media. Day 1 reviews of books and movies are not intellectual thinkpieces, and with the rise of "second screen content", most tv/movies are not meant to be experienced any deeper than at 1.5x speed while you're washing dishes.
It's asinine to compare pop culture reviews for a mass audience for video games to the highest form of literary or film critique.
> Once one has learned ‘to see like a factory’, and the risks and benefits of this vision, Factorio is done as an artwork. The artwork has achieved its goal. You can keep playing, but now it is just entertainment, and a toolkit.
I think this 'artistic essence' of Factorio that makes it art and not 'just entertainment' is entirely accidental.
I like Gwern's writing otherwise, but I think that this essay is titanically wrong-headed and unconvincing. I think that Gwern takes the idea of 'art' too much for granted and tries to figure out a way to jam video games into his idea of what art is because games are 'obviously art'.
Video game reviews are so bad. But the neat thing is that they're blatantly bad and that makes me to question criticism of other art forms, which I used to subconsciously see as absolute authority over my taste.
In this regard, video game reviews have been net positive for me personally.
tetris, doom, minecraft will be remembered for centuries/millenia, unlike whatever jeff koonz or whatever his name is gets other people to make for him
The only video game where I really felt that this is more than just a game is Kentucky Route Zero. It’s an incredible experience.
As an example (no spoiler): at one point the story is about a text adventure game and its creators but the way its told is also mimicking the natural language text adventure games. [0] So it feels like you are playing the game itself (KRZ), but the game is also playing itself (the text adventure game), and you the player are also the part of this text adventure game for a time being. Very hard to explain. Like an old school choose you own adventure book but you are the book, the writer of the book, and whoever plays/reads the book too.
I have to say, this is a really beautiful website. I especially love the link previews
The interpretation of Shadow of the Colossus in the article is really poignant and reminded me once more what a beautiful experience the game was. I think the author would love Soma, although it's obviously a very different game, I think it still invokes the same type of emotion and thinking SotC does when you play it, especially when you take time.
What doesn't get talked about enough in these sorts of discussions is that the games have a certain tactile and/or rhythmic component to them that movies, music, and most other traditional art forms lack. To me, the most interesting part of any game is how the game "flows"; how snappy the controls are, how the game gives feedback to me pushing buttons on my controller. If the graphics are bad or the story is weak, the game can still be good if the gameplay feels good.
If compared to traditional arts, the closest thing to games would be dancing, because it also has an interactive/kinetic component to it like games. When someone criticizes for the lack of a mature, interesting plot or characters, it's a bit like criticizing a folk dancing performance for the same.
Let's take the definition of "video-game art" as the art of defining interactive experiences that open themselves up upon mastery.
This is the original definition of what video-games were at the start (Pac-Man, Space Invaders).
The mastery takes effort to learn; the game, to incentivize this effort, rewards the player when they do well, and punish them when they don't.
The almost immediate nature of the feedback loop makes learning faster than almost any other human activity.
Given the nature of the medium, you can tackle a theme (space invaders), and even a story on top of it.
This is good for critics; they know stories, they know that books are the highest form of art for intellectuals.
The currency of critics in the system (media/advertisement/entertainment industry loop) is credentialism -- except for purely independent critics you have their own platform and exist through a complex bidirectional relationship with their audience.
However, the story is almost always at odds with gameplay.
A story limits the freedom the gameplay system can respond to the player by railroading certain outcomes.
Often, adapting a story implies different scenes that cannot fit into a game genre, so it's more appropriate to a collection of mini-games rather than what people generally consider to be a game.
Video-game stories tend towards tropes that don't cause such problems for itself, such as the 'big tournament' arc.
Of course, certain genres have much more freedom (RPGs), but still a definite story means certain characters can't or have to die, etc, which remove the meaning of player choices.
The mastery approach hasn't gone away. But critics hate it; the general philosophy of the industry is inclusivity, which is at direct odds with a competitive direct ranking of players according to skills. It requires effort, and rewards innate ability -- reflex, memory, ability to make mental computations, ... are all advantages that generally directly translate into in-game advantages. So the critics industry had been relentless at disparaging the games that directly emphasized mastery (arcade designs, the infamous 'God Hand' review) and elevate what are generally called 'movie-games' that have worked at eliminating these aspects ('Last of Us', later 'God of war') to let all players experience the story fully without interacting with the gameplay in any meaningful manner.
They had to compromise because of the success of Dark Souls that brought mastery back to the forefront, but this is where the total incompetence of mainstream critics is truly glaring (see the infamous 'Cuphead' journalist moment). As a result, their critiques are rarely anything more than press releases with a final score based on production value and not based on any insight into the depth of game mechanics and systems.
I'm surprised not to see Chris Crawford mentioned, as The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) makes the central point of this article at the very beginning, and is a primary source of video-game critique.
I think games, via player agency, have the potential to one day be more profound than any other existing medium, but we're also hamstrung by the fact that providing player agency requires being able to simulate how the world changes in response to that agency, which we're still very limited in our ability to do.
As for critical analysis - I don't see why it can't be done for games as for any other artform - at the end of the day all such analysis, including of more passive artforms, really boils down to 'did you enjoy it, and are others likely to enjoy it as well?'.
Tolstoy defines art as that which conveys emotion. Video games convey emotion. I don't understand why an article arguing why video games are art spends so much time on the state of video game criticism. The only two parties involved in a work of art are the creator and the viewer. Why do we need third parties to verify a work of art is legitimate or not? If it conveys the emotion of the creator to the viewer, then it's art.
I really appreciate this article. It continues some series of introspection [1] that emphasizes a part of game that's ironically very underrated, gameplay. A game can be good not (just) because of its visuals (you can just see paintings), not because of its plot (you can just read books), not even because of both (you can just watch movies). But it's the interactivity that can elevate a game beyond the sum of its parts, and it can be done despite mediocre visual or plot.
Realizing this, it can be very disappointing that some discussion about video game art do only emphasize plot or visual, because that's what we understand as art. In this way, Roger Ebert is right, video game can only be art the more it resembles movie or book. But I hope not, and in time, this discourse can be moved especially when there will be more interactive medium out there to be invented (somehow). The treasure is the journey afterall.
Video games are far too derivative to be taken seriously as art. People saying that with a straight face are suffering some serious Dunning-Kruger. Video games at least ought to produce examples of great design, but even those examples are few and far between.
The games industry is an aesthetic wasteland, and like many genre ghettoes, it is bound by negative feedback loops between an uninformed consumers and uncaring producers.
Video game curation is broken, reviews can't be trusted, and decidated gamers are far too inured to eating shit for their opinions to mean much.
> Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind.
But transforming the viewer is how i would define all art.
When we judge a movie, a novel or even a painting, its about what it made us feel. I don't see how a video game is any different.
> To read a review or an attempted critique of a video game is scarcely more satisfying than someone telling you about a dream they had once; presenting a video of cutscene compilations or a few minutes of gameplay doesn’t add much
I don't really play video games, but i've recently been watching some of the videos from GDC on youtube and have found them fascinating nonetheless, so i don't think this holds up for me.
I was surprised to see no mention of C. Thi Nguyen who has a much more structured version of this thesis: games are art and the medium is human agency.
In my view, the distinction between art and slop is about their intent: Art is a medium of communication, where slop is merely entertainment. So: Video games are art if they have something to say. They capture you, they make you think, they let you try out new personalities for yourself.
On the other hand, video games that are meant to entertain, addict, and extract funds from you might contain lots of genuine art, but overall amount to mere slop.
The distiction is just as true for other media, like movies or images: images are art if they were created to communicate something that can't be directly expressed. They are slop if they are just background noise intended to keep you scrolling. Most media is somewhere in the middle, because artists need to corrupt their vision in order to feed themselves.
So much to say that some games are made as art first and games second, some games are made as games first and art second/none and some games happen to be both.
Is tennis(real, not a video game) an art? Is Quake 3 arena an art? Is super hexagon an art? Is Pathologic an art? Is Nier Automata art?
31 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadI 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.
> 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.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
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.
Here's a book that accompanied an exhibition in 1993 that discusses the relationship between art and games (German, sorry) https://boerverlag.de/SPIELE.html
From the article: "Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind."
Arguably, as others in this thread have said, all other art forms are transformative in the same way. As far as definitions go this is pretty much essential to any art (opposed to, say, the intentions of the artist as we kind of agree that an artist can create art even if they don't intend to).
Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever. I would love someone to prove me wrong with some blog or other media outlet that reviews classical music albums and treats them even as harshly as someone like Christgau did rock. It has led to pianists like Lang Lang that are widely reviled among the classical piano community gaining fame and success because critics are simply advertisers in the classical world. Bear in mind, this is an art form in which audiences used to be so critical that Glenn Gould was booed for playing Brahms 1 with Bernstein just because he took slow tempi!
Just look at how RT scores have inflated in film. Or the whole poptimism thing in music. Or the fact that Amanda Gorman was considered one of the best poets in the US a few years ago. There's no critical voice anymore outside of the stodgiest of academic circles.
1. Makes a distinction that video games "transform" the player in a way other media doesn't.
I would argue that every piece of art is "active" in this way, it's just that with non-interactive art, the activity happens within your own mind.
Don't art aficionados and art students sit and stare at a piece for an hour, experiencing something within themselves that goes beyond what they see?
Doesn't reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, take time to truly engage with the writing of the author and "learn" their style in order to appreciate it on a deeper level?
In the same way, engaging with the mechanics of a game and experiencing the ludonarrative cohesion is how one engages with a game on a deeper level.
2. Most game critique is just a cliff notes or description
This is the same for all mass media. Day 1 reviews of books and movies are not intellectual thinkpieces, and with the rise of "second screen content", most tv/movies are not meant to be experienced any deeper than at 1.5x speed while you're washing dishes.
It's asinine to compare pop culture reviews for a mass audience for video games to the highest form of literary or film critique.
I think this 'artistic essence' of Factorio that makes it art and not 'just entertainment' is entirely accidental.
I like Gwern's writing otherwise, but I think that this essay is titanically wrong-headed and unconvincing. I think that Gwern takes the idea of 'art' too much for granted and tries to figure out a way to jam video games into his idea of what art is because games are 'obviously art'.
In this regard, video game reviews have been net positive for me personally.
As an example (no spoiler): at one point the story is about a text adventure game and its creators but the way its told is also mimicking the natural language text adventure games. [0] So it feels like you are playing the game itself (KRZ), but the game is also playing itself (the text adventure game), and you the player are also the part of this text adventure game for a time being. Very hard to explain. Like an old school choose you own adventure book but you are the book, the writer of the book, and whoever plays/reads the book too.
0, imagine something like Inform https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
The interpretation of Shadow of the Colossus in the article is really poignant and reminded me once more what a beautiful experience the game was. I think the author would love Soma, although it's obviously a very different game, I think it still invokes the same type of emotion and thinking SotC does when you play it, especially when you take time.
If compared to traditional arts, the closest thing to games would be dancing, because it also has an interactive/kinetic component to it like games. When someone criticizes for the lack of a mature, interesting plot or characters, it's a bit like criticizing a folk dancing performance for the same.
Given the nature of the medium, you can tackle a theme (space invaders), and even a story on top of it. This is good for critics; they know stories, they know that books are the highest form of art for intellectuals. The currency of critics in the system (media/advertisement/entertainment industry loop) is credentialism -- except for purely independent critics you have their own platform and exist through a complex bidirectional relationship with their audience.
However, the story is almost always at odds with gameplay. A story limits the freedom the gameplay system can respond to the player by railroading certain outcomes. Often, adapting a story implies different scenes that cannot fit into a game genre, so it's more appropriate to a collection of mini-games rather than what people generally consider to be a game. Video-game stories tend towards tropes that don't cause such problems for itself, such as the 'big tournament' arc. Of course, certain genres have much more freedom (RPGs), but still a definite story means certain characters can't or have to die, etc, which remove the meaning of player choices.
The mastery approach hasn't gone away. But critics hate it; the general philosophy of the industry is inclusivity, which is at direct odds with a competitive direct ranking of players according to skills. It requires effort, and rewards innate ability -- reflex, memory, ability to make mental computations, ... are all advantages that generally directly translate into in-game advantages. So the critics industry had been relentless at disparaging the games that directly emphasized mastery (arcade designs, the infamous 'God Hand' review) and elevate what are generally called 'movie-games' that have worked at eliminating these aspects ('Last of Us', later 'God of war') to let all players experience the story fully without interacting with the gameplay in any meaningful manner. They had to compromise because of the success of Dark Souls that brought mastery back to the forefront, but this is where the total incompetence of mainstream critics is truly glaring (see the infamous 'Cuphead' journalist moment). As a result, their critiques are rarely anything more than press releases with a final score based on production value and not based on any insight into the depth of game mechanics and systems.
I'm surprised not to see Chris Crawford mentioned, as The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) makes the central point of this article at the very beginning, and is a primary source of video-game critique.
As for critical analysis - I don't see why it can't be done for games as for any other artform - at the end of the day all such analysis, including of more passive artforms, really boils down to 'did you enjoy it, and are others likely to enjoy it as well?'.
Realizing this, it can be very disappointing that some discussion about video game art do only emphasize plot or visual, because that's what we understand as art. In this way, Roger Ebert is right, video game can only be art the more it resembles movie or book. But I hope not, and in time, this discourse can be moved especially when there will be more interactive medium out there to be invented (somehow). The treasure is the journey afterall.
[1] Ones I have seen are A Core's ["Can Game Mechanics be Art"] (https://youtu.be/a33ITEZDQwg) and the last parts of Mandalore's [Pathologic 2 Review](https://youtu.be/E7uKUgire7Y)
The games industry is an aesthetic wasteland, and like many genre ghettoes, it is bound by negative feedback loops between an uninformed consumers and uncaring producers.
Video game curation is broken, reviews can't be trusted, and decidated gamers are far too inured to eating shit for their opinions to mean much.
But transforming the viewer is how i would define all art.
When we judge a movie, a novel or even a painting, its about what it made us feel. I don't see how a video game is any different.
> To read a review or an attempted critique of a video game is scarcely more satisfying than someone telling you about a dream they had once; presenting a video of cutscene compilations or a few minutes of gameplay doesn’t add much
I don't really play video games, but i've recently been watching some of the videos from GDC on youtube and have found them fascinating nonetheless, so i don't think this holds up for me.
See:
1. https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/the-philosophy-of-game...
2. https://academic.oup.com/book/32137
On the other hand, video games that are meant to entertain, addict, and extract funds from you might contain lots of genuine art, but overall amount to mere slop.
The distiction is just as true for other media, like movies or images: images are art if they were created to communicate something that can't be directly expressed. They are slop if they are just background noise intended to keep you scrolling. Most media is somewhere in the middle, because artists need to corrupt their vision in order to feed themselves.
Is tennis(real, not a video game) an art? Is Quake 3 arena an art? Is super hexagon an art? Is Pathologic an art? Is Nier Automata art?
Also, weirdly, the article references Brian Moriarty's "Who buried Paul?" but not "An Apology for Roger Ebert" which seems even more relevant :D