Can video games be categorized as art?
On one side we have modern artists who won't
mind categorizing anything as art such as
a shark preserved in formaldehyde or cubes
filled with New York city's Garbage.
On the other hand, we have the late Roger
Ebert, the famous film critic who argued that
video games can never be art because they
are simply games, and the difference between
art and games is that you can win a game.
It has rules, points, objectives, and a clear
outcome.
Are video games games or art?
What is art and what is a game?
The Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein once
said that "although all games have overlapping
similarities, there is nothing in common between
all of them"
In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
argued that the elements of games, such as
play, rules, and competition, all fail to
adequately define what games are.
Art, games, love, stupidity, and Beauty are
all words and concepts we use in our daily
lives but we find them extremely hard to define
but that never stops us from using them and
make judgments about them.
If someone said that Da Vinci's Mona Lisa
or Vivaldi's four seasons are not works of
art we would think that that this person is
absurd.
There is an intrinsic value to these works
that makes us instantly and throughout the
centuries recognize them as works of art without
actually being able to define what that value
is, at least through words and language.
it might be beauty and pleasure as Kant and
Hume argue or something bigger than that.
The task of defining Video games as art, in
my opinion, these days is way more complicated
than any other time in history, In modern-day
people to a certain extent follow what authorities
define as a work of art.
A museum that shows Tracy Emin's bed as a
work of art is accepted by the public in that
way.
If the 
construction workers at a museum left a pile
bricks and didn't bother about them, people
won't pay any attention to the bricks but
in the 70s when they were presented as a work
of art they were accepted as that.
Two years ago a student put his glasses on
the floor of a modern art museum in the san
Francisco muesum of modern art for fifteen
minutes to see how people would react to it.
The visitors were starting to overthink the
significance and meaning of the glasses, while
the real meaning was a total mockery of modern
definitions of art and expose to the visitors
that the emperor has no clothes but no one
dares to criticise modern definitions of art
because everybody is afraid of looking less
cultured and educated by committing the crime
of not seeing any artistic value in Marcel
Duchamp's urinal or whatever Damian Hurst
is making these days.
A work of art should stand on its own regardless
of the identity of the artist or where that
work is presented.
Raphael's school of Athen will be appreciated
whether it's seen in the real world, a magazine,
on tv or anywhere.
That can't be said of Tracy Emin's bed which
I doubt that it's appreciated even in the
museum it's presented in.
The American philosopher and art critic Arthur
C. Danto very critically summarised the situation
in the last chapter of his book "what art
is" as follows:
"Today art can be made of anything.
Put together with anything, in the service
of presenting any idea whatsoever.
such a development puts great interpretive
pressures on viewers to grasp the way the
spirit of the artist undertook to present
the ideas that concerned her or him"
I think modern-day artistic authorities, represented
by critics and museum administrations have
lost the compass when it comes to defining
art and leaving the task of defining video
games as art to them is the wrong choice.
We need to accept some ideas and concept to
define games as art, like, for a medium to
be artistic it needs to provide a unique quality
unavailable in all the other mediums.
Music has melodies, poetry has words, painting
has drawings and theater plays have performances.
By using that logic we will able to conclude
that Drawing on a latte, for example, is not
a unique artistic field, it simply replaces
the canvas with a cup of coffee, the colors
with milk, and the brush with the machine.
In that sense, drawing on a lattee is not
that different than using a paper and a pencil
instead of a canvas and a brush.
Is there a unique artistic value only available
in games?
I notice that people when talking about art
in video games they usually bring the examples
of journey, flower, shadow of the Colossus
and the last of us.
Beautiful games, but what people actually
mean by artistic in these games is the representation
of objects and characters.
But these values, in these examples, do not
provide anything unique that only exists in
games as a medium.
CG movies use the same tools to achieve even
more appealing representations of the characters
and objects.
Good storytelling in games like the last of
us is a quality borrowed from literature and
beautiful environments and surroundings in
games are also not unique to games, a whole
artistic epoch in art, the romanticism devoted
most of its talents' time to draw these surroundings.
I’m not arguing that these qualities in
games are of no artistic value but that there’s
nothing about it unique to gaming as a medium.
What is unique to video games is the connection
between the viewer and the medium, the interactivity
between our feelings, emotions and saving
a loved character for example.
our ability to change the course of events
in a game is something unique to the medium.
Deciding to pull the trigger and kill the
boss in metal gear 3 is unique to this medium.
Snake would be standing there for hours waiting
for the player to pull the trigger.
This interactivity is not available in movies,
music, literature or any other work of art.
making the viewer an active member of the
experience and not simply a passive receiver
of the work is what makes some games artistically
unique.
So my answer to Roger Ebert, No, not all video
games are games.
if you simply define a game by the fact that
It has rules, points, objectives, and a clear
outcome, then you might apply that to Mario
Kart, Hearthstone and counter strike.
But how can you say that about a game like
what remains of Edith finch?
There are no rules, points or a planned outcome.
far from that, it was an experience that calms
the soul and brings us all together in appreciation
of its ability to actively connect us with
the work of the artist and making us the players
part of the work itself.
Currently, games are still taking baby steps
towards becoming an established field of art
and the interactivity we talked about here
is still limited in the vast majority of games
in one way or another to survival and killing.
games like Gone home and flower are showing
us a unique way of interactivity that we as
a gaming community should applaud and encourage.
Maybe video games won't reinvent the wheel
of art but they are definitely capable of
dipping it in gold and borrow satisfying aesthetics
from paintings, rich storytelling from literature,
powerful performances from theaters and add
to it the magical touch of interactivity between
the player and the work to create a unique
experience unavailable in any other medium.
I don't want the message and conclusion here,
to be that game developers should focus only
on interactivity and mechanics because it's
something unique to the medium and ignore
aesthetics in games.
It would be like the architectural crime of
the last century by modernist architects under
the motto - Form follows function - which
led to some of the ugliest buildings in our
cities.
Modernist focused on functionality and saw
aesthetics as something secondary to functionality.
These building stand empty today waiting to
museum reminding us that "put functionality
first and you lose both form and function,
but put beauty first and you win both"
Game developers should learn from architects
mistakes and focus on both game mechanics
and aesthetics in their creations.
otherwise, people like Roger Ebert will continue
to claim that Video games can never be art.
