Video Games as Art

Summary

Video games are art. But they are a strange art. They are an art without good art criticism, and they occupy a peculiar position in popular culture: universal and dominant, and yet almost invisible outside their medium, unable to escape (compare movie adaptations of books vs games). Why? 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. Such transformations cannot be written down or filmed; if they could, they wouldn’t need to be a video game. So video game criticism, and broader pop culture use of video games, is hamstrung. Criticism is often limited to serving as advertising, a finger pointing to the moon in hinting at the transformation, exegesis, parasocial gossip, or technical critique of the craft. Roger Ebert once claimed that video games cannot be art. At this point, most people, including myself, disagree: it is simply obvious that they can be. But what kind of art are they? At the risk of seeming to say something hopelessly obvious, the distinctive feature of video game art is that it is interactive rather than passive. For all the 10-hour-long YouTube explainers or blog posts or endless Let’s-play or the rise of the streaming industry (based largely on video game as filler) or meritorious attempts at creating an academic literature around games (eg. Well Played) or celebrity critics like Yahtzee Croshaw, I find no form of criticism as unsatisfactory as video game criticism. 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. Even a psychedelic trip report or a music album review is more interesting and gives one more insight. At this point, we can’t blame the immaturity of the form. Video games have been one of the largest media in the wo...