On video games as art: A contribution to an ongoing debate.
Are video games art? This question first began to be seriously debated in the 2000’s. Since then the medium has matured, but the question of its artistic merits remains as salient as ever.
Some art critics deny this possibility. They have said that video games are little more than a playground, a realm of immaturity and unseriousness and mere physiological necessity as play is, and thus cannot be considered art. They compare video games to physical games, such as chess: saying that because of their rules-bound and objective-oriented nature, they are games like chess, and because such games aren’t considered art, therefore video games aren’t art, either. Most of all, they claim that video games are incapable of the emotional complexity evident in other established forms, such as film or symphony, and therefore aren’t art.
Assertions like these make me wonder if any of these art critics have bothered to play any video game beyond Pong when it was still a novelty. Even a cursory look at the state of video games now reveals a medium much more developed and complex than anything a playground or a chess board could offer. Assertions like these also provoke profound emotions in me related to resistance, urging me to stand up and shout NO! Perhaps this visceral response is normal for anyone who finds deeply cherished experiences dismissed and invalidated without due consideration. I find these critiques most bothersome, the product of snobbish and sophisticated carelessness.
I do not argue that all video games are art-- simply because Dostoevsky’s masterworks exist does not mean that dime novels are art, even though both share the same medium and many of the same elements, such as plot or character development. Many video games are simply fun. I do not watch YouTubers playing the Call of Duty mod Prop Hunt or Yeet Smash’s compilations of goofy ahh Smash Bros moments looking for art-- I’m looking for a laugh, I’m looking for silliness, I’m looking for play for its own sake.
(Here is a screenshot from Smash Bros Ultimate, a fighting game with a multiplayer emphasis renowned for its references to many other video games.)
So why, then, aren’t I classifying Prop Hunt or Smash Bros as “art?” What sets them apart from other video games that could be so classified?
Such questions beg the more fundamental question of what art is to begin with. Why would I want to read Dostoevsky over a dime novel? In other words what does the experience of art inculcate, that makes the embodied experience of it unique from other, similar media?
I remember well the first time I read The Brothers Karamazov. I don’t recall exactly how the story ended, but I do remember what and how it made me feel: triumphance, acceptance, and connection with a higher reality existing alongside this muddy world-- experiences I doubt a dime novel would have the capacity to invoke.
As well, I remember the visceral experience I had the first time I listened to Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, via an excellent recording I still reference on YouTube from time to time. I was simultaneously overwhelmed and buoyed up, as if stably floating on the most serene pool in existence, a moment that induced a lifelong love affair with Vaughan William’s music. This contrasts with my experiences in clubs-- the bops usually provide rhythms to dance to, and little else.
I don’t mean to bash club bops, dime novels or Smash Bros; I enjoy these things immensely. Nevertheless, I do not seek them out for anything beyond the playful, socially connective, silly diversions they offer. That, they offer in abundance-- that’s why they have value. I don’t wish to understate that value, but I also don’t expect them to do what they do not have the capacity to do. I play Smash Bros for the comedy, the competition and the friendship, and that’s all I will find. I will not find profound joy, transcendent insight, or meaningful commentary on the human condition-- it is chess with voice acting.
So if a video game was art, what would set it apart from chess with voice acting? What would make it different?
In essence, they would have the same capacities that The Brothers Karamazov or Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis have: to inculcate triumph, acceptance, and connection with a higher reality. To overwhelm and buoy up. To provide profound joy, transcendent insight, and meaningful commentary on the human condition. In other words, art is art because of its capacity to move: To fear, to joy, to anger, to sorrow, to hope, to contemplation, to insight, to transcendence. Video games, with their numerous artistic elements woven together into a seamless, structurally immersive experience, are amply able to provide this. Indeed, with their interactive nature, they may be uniquely suited to do so. I offer three experiences of mine to illustrate video games’ capacity to move-- and therefore its viability as an art form.
One of my first experiences of being moved by any medium occurred through a video game. It happened when I was a young teen, playing through the entirety of Star Fox 64 on my Nintendo 64. I made it all the way to the final level on the hardest difficulty, which I accomplished, with the reward being to watch the ghost of Fox’s deceased father guide him out of a collapsing space station, offering praise and words of love and advice along the way. This immense closure at the end of a difficult video game journey prompted sobs, along with much embarrassment. At the time, I wondered how a silly sci-fi adventure featuring an anthropomorphic cartoon fox could induce so many tears; I was very grateful I was alone when it happened. Twenty years later, I ask: how could a video game prompt such a response, if it were not art?
After my teens years, I went through a period where I did not play games. In the mid 2010’s, however, I returned to the medium. One of the first I managed to beat was the game Ori and the Blind Forest. Accompanied by Gareth Coker’s soaring soundtrack and bathed in the beauty of the visuals, I still remember clearly participating in redeeming the wounded owl Kuro from her darkness as she, to save the forest and the last of her progeny, sacrificed her life. I still listen to Coker’s incredible soundtrack, which has been a light in many low moments, and recall Ori’s courage as a point of inspiration.
Lastly, I reference the video game Subnautica, which I beat in the summer of 2018: one of my proudest gaming achievements. One character, an alien being facing her impending mortality, muses:
“What will it be like, I wonder, to go to sleep and never wake up? Perhaps next we meet I will be an ocean current, carrying seeds to a new land... Or a creature so small it sees the gaps between the grains of sand. Farewell, friend.”
Upon successfully leaving the alien planet, a vision of the same being occurs, greeting the player with these words:
“What is a wave without the ocean? A beginning without an end? They are different, but they go together. Now you go among the stars, and I fall among the sand. We are different. But we go... together.”
These are words I could see engraved on my epitaph, a brief but powerful meditation on the nature of being, the interconnectedness of the universe and our embeddedness in it, and how we continue to exist beyond death through this fabric of being. It is a reflection of the same insight expressed by Clare Harner in this famous poem:
But Unlike Harner’s words, Subnautica delivers these insights with a force only made possible by amassing hours facing an alien water world’s terrifying threats in an attempt to find a cure to a mysterious disease. It rewards them to the player who has triumphed over it all. Perhaps a bug, perhaps a feature, but video games nonetheless cement their insights by making the player work for them.
These video games are just a few of many that I have experienced that have moved me: to terror, to triumph, to utter joy, to ravenous sorrow, to hope, to pity. They have granted me a light onto corners of my humanity that I would have never touched without them. If art is marked by its capacity to move, then indeed all these video games and many others are tremendous examples of it.
Even with all this said, those critics may be right. Video games may still indeed not be art-- that would depend on one’s perspective, and there’s room for the belief they are not, as much as I might disagree with it. But these experiences have looked like art. They have sounded like art. They have told stories like art, have made me feel like art makes me feel, and inspired and awed me in turn.
Video games may not be art.
If so, then they have profoundly deceived me.
Some art critics deny this possibility. They have said that video games are little more than a playground, a realm of immaturity and unseriousness and mere physiological necessity as play is, and thus cannot be considered art. They compare video games to physical games, such as chess: saying that because of their rules-bound and objective-oriented nature, they are games like chess, and because such games aren’t considered art, therefore video games aren’t art, either. Most of all, they claim that video games are incapable of the emotional complexity evident in other established forms, such as film or symphony, and therefore aren’t art.
Assertions like these make me wonder if any of these art critics have bothered to play any video game beyond Pong when it was still a novelty. Even a cursory look at the state of video games now reveals a medium much more developed and complex than anything a playground or a chess board could offer. Assertions like these also provoke profound emotions in me related to resistance, urging me to stand up and shout NO! Perhaps this visceral response is normal for anyone who finds deeply cherished experiences dismissed and invalidated without due consideration. I find these critiques most bothersome, the product of snobbish and sophisticated carelessness.
I do not argue that all video games are art-- simply because Dostoevsky’s masterworks exist does not mean that dime novels are art, even though both share the same medium and many of the same elements, such as plot or character development. Many video games are simply fun. I do not watch YouTubers playing the Call of Duty mod Prop Hunt or Yeet Smash’s compilations of goofy ahh Smash Bros moments looking for art-- I’m looking for a laugh, I’m looking for silliness, I’m looking for play for its own sake.
So why, then, aren’t I classifying Prop Hunt or Smash Bros as “art?” What sets them apart from other video games that could be so classified?
Such questions beg the more fundamental question of what art is to begin with. Why would I want to read Dostoevsky over a dime novel? In other words what does the experience of art inculcate, that makes the embodied experience of it unique from other, similar media?
I remember well the first time I read The Brothers Karamazov. I don’t recall exactly how the story ended, but I do remember what and how it made me feel: triumphance, acceptance, and connection with a higher reality existing alongside this muddy world-- experiences I doubt a dime novel would have the capacity to invoke.
As well, I remember the visceral experience I had the first time I listened to Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, via an excellent recording I still reference on YouTube from time to time. I was simultaneously overwhelmed and buoyed up, as if stably floating on the most serene pool in existence, a moment that induced a lifelong love affair with Vaughan William’s music. This contrasts with my experiences in clubs-- the bops usually provide rhythms to dance to, and little else.
I don’t mean to bash club bops, dime novels or Smash Bros; I enjoy these things immensely. Nevertheless, I do not seek them out for anything beyond the playful, socially connective, silly diversions they offer. That, they offer in abundance-- that’s why they have value. I don’t wish to understate that value, but I also don’t expect them to do what they do not have the capacity to do. I play Smash Bros for the comedy, the competition and the friendship, and that’s all I will find. I will not find profound joy, transcendent insight, or meaningful commentary on the human condition-- it is chess with voice acting.
So if a video game was art, what would set it apart from chess with voice acting? What would make it different?
In essence, they would have the same capacities that The Brothers Karamazov or Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis have: to inculcate triumph, acceptance, and connection with a higher reality. To overwhelm and buoy up. To provide profound joy, transcendent insight, and meaningful commentary on the human condition. In other words, art is art because of its capacity to move: To fear, to joy, to anger, to sorrow, to hope, to contemplation, to insight, to transcendence. Video games, with their numerous artistic elements woven together into a seamless, structurally immersive experience, are amply able to provide this. Indeed, with their interactive nature, they may be uniquely suited to do so. I offer three experiences of mine to illustrate video games’ capacity to move-- and therefore its viability as an art form.
One of my first experiences of being moved by any medium occurred through a video game. It happened when I was a young teen, playing through the entirety of Star Fox 64 on my Nintendo 64. I made it all the way to the final level on the hardest difficulty, which I accomplished, with the reward being to watch the ghost of Fox’s deceased father guide him out of a collapsing space station, offering praise and words of love and advice along the way. This immense closure at the end of a difficult video game journey prompted sobs, along with much embarrassment. At the time, I wondered how a silly sci-fi adventure featuring an anthropomorphic cartoon fox could induce so many tears; I was very grateful I was alone when it happened. Twenty years later, I ask: how could a video game prompt such a response, if it were not art?
"You've become so strong, Fox."
After my teens years, I went through a period where I did not play games. In the mid 2010’s, however, I returned to the medium. One of the first I managed to beat was the game Ori and the Blind Forest. Accompanied by Gareth Coker’s soaring soundtrack and bathed in the beauty of the visuals, I still remember clearly participating in redeeming the wounded owl Kuro from her darkness as she, to save the forest and the last of her progeny, sacrificed her life. I still listen to Coker’s incredible soundtrack, which has been a light in many low moments, and recall Ori’s courage as a point of inspiration.
Thanks to Kuro's sacrifice, the Spirit Tree reawakens.
Lastly, I reference the video game Subnautica, which I beat in the summer of 2018: one of my proudest gaming achievements. One character, an alien being facing her impending mortality, muses:
“What will it be like, I wonder, to go to sleep and never wake up? Perhaps next we meet I will be an ocean current, carrying seeds to a new land... Or a creature so small it sees the gaps between the grains of sand. Farewell, friend.”
"Father and Marguerite are already a part of this incredible planet. It's reassuring to know that when I go, I'll join them."
Upon successfully leaving the alien planet, a vision of the same being occurs, greeting the player with these words:
“What is a wave without the ocean? A beginning without an end? They are different, but they go together. Now you go among the stars, and I fall among the sand. We are different. But we go... together.”
These are words I could see engraved on my epitaph, a brief but powerful meditation on the nature of being, the interconnectedness of the universe and our embeddedness in it, and how we continue to exist beyond death through this fabric of being. It is a reflection of the same insight expressed by Clare Harner in this famous poem:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a
thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight
on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the
morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I
am not there. I did not die.
But Unlike Harner’s words, Subnautica delivers these insights with a force only made possible by amassing hours facing an alien water world’s terrifying threats in an attempt to find a cure to a mysterious disease. It rewards them to the player who has triumphed over it all. Perhaps a bug, perhaps a feature, but video games nonetheless cement their insights by making the player work for them.
These video games are just a few of many that I have experienced that have moved me: to terror, to triumph, to utter joy, to ravenous sorrow, to hope, to pity. They have granted me a light onto corners of my humanity that I would have never touched without them. If art is marked by its capacity to move, then indeed all these video games and many others are tremendous examples of it.
Even with all this said, those critics may be right. Video games may still indeed not be art-- that would depend on one’s perspective, and there’s room for the belief they are not, as much as I might disagree with it. But these experiences have looked like art. They have sounded like art. They have told stories like art, have made me feel like art makes me feel, and inspired and awed me in turn.
Video games may not be art.
If so, then they have profoundly deceived me.
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