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Comment by jorgec | Hacker News Reader

Videogames use art but its not art. Or more specifically, its not created for their artistic value. Videogames are a amusement product over an artistic product.

For example, a stunning artistic videogame but boring versus a ugly game but funny.

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This argument has been used against many media now very readily accepted as art: that they're just amusements, they're not art. They frequently come from critics of other media that don't want to expand the club, and they are invariably demonstrated to be incorrect over even the short term.

As for your example, there are boring but beautifully shot films--2001: A Space Odyssey certainly fits that bill for me. There are engaging films with crude cinematography--the original Clerks comes to mind, for a certain time and audience. You are drawing a distinction without a difference.

There are many types of videogames with many different audiences, similar to movies. You can argue that videogames aren't art by pointing to Call of Duty, just as I can argue that movies aren't art by pointing to Suicide Squad. If you argue that movies are art by pointing to Citizen Kane, I'll point to Spec Ops: The Line or the Stanley Parable.

I also think you're conflating "art" and "visual design".

Even within Call of Duty, I would certainly call the single-player campaigns, from the original game up through today, successive iterations on a presentation of a narrative message even completely divorced from the ephemera of play (which is itself artistic in nature, though less universally obviously so).

Quake would be a better example, but I'd hold, too, that the decisions and the ephemera of that are art as well. Nothing says you can't play art.

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