Video Games as Art
gwern.net
gwern.net
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Basically, the article is "other kinds of art have property A while video games have property B" over and over by cherry-picking examples and ignoring the multitude counter-examples.
1. You can't criticize a game without actually playing it. Or even review it for that matter <looks at modern game reviews>.
2. It reminded me why I refuse to try Factorio :)
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.
There is interactive art, but it's usually a very soft limited interaction. "Soul City" would be an example. There was a pyramid of oranges, in fact if you arrive when the work has been re-created there is, in fact, a pyramid of oranges, you can take one. That's nice, I've done that. That's the interaction. My sister's performance of "Fragment of a Dress" (as opposed to its static exhibit which I have seen) was interactive, it was also short and had a relatively tiny audience because the act of cutting the dress apart with scissors doesn't take long.
Video game interactions can go way deeper. A Tale In The Desert had long complicated story arcs which were entirely player generated drama. Is this guy cornering the market in a key resource because it is to everybody's benefit that it's controlled or are they just a megalomaniac? This player seems to be a vandal, we should kick them out, or, wait, maybe we're being manipulated to perceive their actions as vandalism and actually the push to vote one person out of the game is a wedge to drive us apart.
I enjoy watching people play video games and playing video games myself, and these are distinct activities, you shouldn't mistake how you feel about other people's play for how you would feel as a player. Some exercises, many of them at GDC are like the 100m sprint, you would need a lot of training to get even half as good as the people you've watched and maybe it's not worth it. But other parts of video games are also interesting experiences even though you are not an elite player. Rolling Credits ("Bequest%") in Blue Prince is a very different experience as a player, than as a viewer, I can assure you having been both.
I disagree.
Consider what it's like for a non-native speaker to read a novel. Yes, the novel that they're reading, all the words on all the pages, are identical to what a native speaker sees. But they might lack basic vocabulary to get all the meaning. They might lack cultural context to get all the idioms. The artifact is the same, but the experience each reader has is different.
Now consider someone who's a fluent speaker, but who's new to the genre. They possess the vocabulary of the language but they lack the vocabulary of the genre, so they won't understand when the author deliberately plays with tropes, subverts them, etc. Compared to someone who's genre-savvy, the experience each reader has is different.
Now consider someone who's both a fluent speaker and genre-savvy, but who is jumping into a work in a long-running universe with decades of history, e.g. Star Wars or Star Trek or any comic book superhero. They won't get the deliberate references or callbacks, so again the experience the reader has will differ.
And of course there are a million other ways by which interpretations of a novel will differ, based on the life experience of the reader. There's a reason that it's common for people to argue about the interpretation of even straightforward books, well before you get to something like Joyce's Ulysses.
So while it may be true that the words of a novel are all delivered in the same order to all readers, which isn't analogously true for the experience of a video game, that doesn't really set video games apart as a medium. All art is interactive.
Reading "Blue Prince" [if you're thinking "the book is actually named Red Prince in the game" and you are still playing stop reading this, right now, I'm serious] is a very different experience for a new parent than someone like me. But that's just a variation in interpretation.
In contrast Ascending is a different experience if you've half-arsed it - maybe even somewhat without quite realising what you're doing, versus if you've meticulously planned (as I did) or again if it all came together by chance on the day. A movie could have attempted this pay off but it doesn't land the same as for those three different experiences.
I think you participate in all art. There are novels where you have to bring a lot of yourself to the table to form meaning. There are video games where you may superficially control the character on the screen, but your participation doesn't significantly alter the meaning. E.g. i think super mario brothers is less participatory than most novels because despite controlling mario there is really very little of yourself you are bringing to the game.
Its all on a spectrum and i dont think video games are necessarily any more participatory than any other medium. Some are more and some are less. Interaction and participation aren't the same thing.
late edit: to give an example, take a game like doki doki literature club. This is probably on the extreme end of interaction in a video game, you make almost no choices and those you do largely don't matter, and yet it feels (or at least felt to me) very participatory much more so than your average game where you do get to make choices that do matter. I guess i would say you participate in making the experience what it is to you.
I am aware of Doki Doki Literature Club but have never played it, however I have played SMB and several related Mario games. And I think actually tiny ways in which you do make a difference as the protagonist in SMB actually did draw me into that more than say, "My Cousin Rachel".
I am not a plumber, I do not inhabit the mushroom kingdom and AFAIK I am not engaged in rescuing a princess. Nor am I a wealthy young orphan (I was older and poorer than the protagonist decades ago when I first read "My Cousin Rachel") who is infatuated with a woman who may or may not have poisoned another cousin of his. Nevertheless, I am playing Mario. The choice to jump on a Goomba is mine and mine alone, whereas Philip is going to sleep with Rachel even when I think, as I turn the page, that this is an extremely unwise course of action. [Spoilers but, like, she wrote that novel a long time ago, you should have read it, it's pretty good]
I don't so much like video games where I periodically lose control so that the story the creator wanted to tell happens anyway. In a Metal Gear Solid game for example I find it annoying that I know Snake shouldn't pull the lever or whatever but the moment I lose control of him Snake is going to pull that lever. But I see this loss of control as a betrayal of the central idea. If Kojima wanted to make a movie about this idiot who follows orders from people who obviously are lying to him, he can do so - that shouldn't be a video game IMO. On the other hand, when I'm given narrative choices, even if they don't matter to the big picture story, they do matter to me. It is not important that I do not control their ultimate consequences, after all that's not how choices work IRL either.
I'm not about to say that games don't occupy an interesting point in space to the degree that they invite (or require!) you to actively participate in the art rather than passively observe. But I still contend that such a stark division is artificial.
When I spent my youth running around the worlds of Mario Sunshine or The Wind Waker, whatever narrative or gameplay experience the games presented was secondary to the worlds themselves that stoked my imagination. My fondest memories were imagining myself being in those worlds, at which I spent hours upon hours, using them as a canvas for creativity well beyond what the limited game mechanics could allow. And that wasn't directionally different from how I experienced the Harry Potter series in that same era, spending countless hours daydreaming that I was in that world. It didn't matter that the latter was a book, it was interactive to me nonetheless, as well as to legions of others, as the piles upon piles of extant fanfiction can attest.
I mean, i would just disagree with that. I think its the same.
Edit: rereading im kind of unhappy with what i said here. Maybe we are just talking past each other. I agree choice in video game is what makes it relatively unique as a genre. I suppose i would say that choice/interactivity does not neccesarily translate into co-creating the artistic experience. Sometimes it can, allowing you to be part of the art. Other times the choice is superficial and does not meaningfully translate to participating in it. "Static" art can have the same effect by being ambigious and requiring you to put yourself into it to interpret it. I think all art is a mirror to some degree or another.
> I enjoy watching people play video games and playing video games myself, and these are distinct activities, you shouldn't mistake how you feel about other people's play for how you would feel as a player. Some exercises, many of them at GDC are like the 100m sprint, you would need a lot of training to get even half as good as the people you've watched and maybe it's not worth it.
The videos i was talking about are not of people playing video games, its of people analyzing artistic choices in video games. Which is a very different thing (and of course also very different from actually playing them)
Idk, maybe everything is art
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.
I would prefer to look to the democratization of art as the means and ability for individuals to produce substantial, if small, works at a pace, for an audience, for some reward determined solely by the creator.
At the end of the day, ‘what is art’ and ‘are video games art is a dated sentiment, so I agree, I was just repulsed by the suggestion that the definition/legitimacy of something as art can/should be dictated by ‘The Market’ .
I am more saying that the idea of caring about “being labeled as art” is not that important anymore. Largely because anyone can make and publish anything nowadays. So a play with 100 viewers is still art, yes, but no one really cares about getting that label.
Wow. Great way to set the mark for the rest of the article.
It's obvious they can't (right?).
In all seriousness, even for the "traditional" multimedia/interdisciplinary art the question is not settled, and it's even harder to argue for video games being art.
Using the more conservative framework it's easy to posit a game can be a vehicle for showcasing art (music, graphic, literary), but if it's not bereft of the basis of a gameplay, the end result becomes encumbered with additional purposes (like player enjoyment/subscriber's engagement/competitiveness/etc.) which dilute the intention of the object's existence and make it not art.
Whether any particular game is good art is a different question. And that's part of why review is an interesting activity, there is a tremendous amount of this art, much more than there is say, stained glass windows or towering bronze sculptures - should we try this or that - the reviewer might help us to sift.
It's catchy but unusable in any serious discussion because it's frivolously extensive and ambiguous in the "unnecessary" part.
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.
Everything you said is equally applicable to video game reviews and reviewers. Once again I am compelled to bring up Amiga Power the gaming magazine that dared, to much outrage among publishers, to give review scores lower than 7-8 on the regular. They were very pro-consumer even though in early 90's the press was already treated as ad space that pretends it's not.
Not in my country. The music critics on national radio are _extremely_ harsh on the performance ('it lacked soul and any sense of the piece, like a student forced by his professor to play scales again and again' was the last I heard, just yesterday, while I was working on installing my father's forge). Likewise, still on national radio, cinema and book critics are extremely harsh.
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).
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/
* Disco Elysium * Outer Wilds * Journey * What Remains of Edith Finch * Beeswing
All masterpieces that take various approaches to Diegetic, Non-Diegetic and meta-Diegetic storytelling aping everything from G.K. Chesterton to Mark Z. Danielewski via China Mieville.
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.
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?
Roger Ebert did not like the same movies I did, not even close - but I was able to triangulate from his perspective to know better how I might feel about the movie before I watched it, based on his brief review.
I think that in a similar respect reviews by Yahtzee Croshaw work for me. I don't experience games the same way, but I get a better idea of how I would find the game from his video review than some random game journo 4/5 stars rating.
I also used to love Zero Punctuation even though I didn't agree with half of what he said. But I got a bit fed up with how smug Yahtzee is. He can be really funny, but also way too sure of his own brilliance.
Games have had such an influence all around the world, from Oscar-worthy music to narrative mechanisms, to graphics and graphics engines (Unreal) even used to power backgrounds on loved films/series (which I guess are an art form), even at a technical level to the discovery of the fast inverse square root for Quake III Arena, to many other things. Games are more influential now than many previous art forms.
I can enjoy myself playing, these days I can enjoy seeing others play those I cannot, I can enjoy myself listening to incredible pieces of music I would NOT find anywhere else, I can enjoy some incredible drawings with all kinds of different techniques (some forced by the times, but that itself is creativity)...
I don't agree with a lot of "critics" on a lot of topics, not just gaming, because their criteria for evaluation may be flawed or outdated even, but since they have their monocles on, they know more than me. There is a reason there are critics and user ratings now. It's decadent system, but I understand its purpose, and it's helped me pick some awesome pieces of art, or games to play.
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)
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.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
Your point still stands though.
We don't conflate the game itself with it's art assets. You can play chess on a golden chess board using pieces inlaid with diamonds and rubies hand cut by Damien Hirst, and it's exactly the same game if you play it in the dirt using pieces fashioned from play-do by a 5 year old. A great chess match can be regarded as performance art, but the credit is to the players, not the inventor of the game.
The art assests themselves are inherently submissive to the game, so they themselves are not serious art. Like, if you have a great idea for a painting, or a piece of music, or a story, your first impulse isn't going to compromise it by formatting it to fit a set of game mechanics. You want it to stand on it's own.
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'.
See:
1. https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/the-philosophy-of-game...
Also, weirdly, the article references Brian Moriarty's "Who buried Paul?" but not "An Apology for Roger Ebert" which seems even more relevant :D
This quote gets trotted out all the time, and yes, he did say it at one point, but he recanted this position only a few years later:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100703023952/http://blogs.sunt...
"What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art. [...] I thought about those works of Art that had moved me most deeply. I found most of them had one thing in common: Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people. My empathy was engaged. I could use such lessons to apply to myself and my relationships with others. They could instruct me about life, love, disease and death, principles and morality, humor and tragedy. They might make my life more deep, full and rewarding. Not a bad definition, I thought. But I was unable to say how music or abstract art could perform those functions, and yet they were Art. Even narrative art didn't qualify, because I hardly look at paintings for their messages. It's not what it's about, but how it's about it. As Archibald MacLeish wrote: A poem should not mean, but be. I concluded without a definition that satisfied me. I had to be prepared to agree that gamers can have an experience that, for them, is Art. I don't know what they can learn about another human being that way, no matter how much they learn about Human Nature. I don't know if they can be inspired to transcend themselves. Perhaps they can. How can I say?"
Meanwhile, if the author is looking for video game criticism that "conveys the transformativeness on the player", they need to watch more Tim Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw
If you want to read a thoughtful, non-snobbery-based argument that video games aren't art, I recommend the GDC talk "An Apology for Roger Ebert" by Brian Moriarty (who designed a number of classic adventure games circa the late 1980s, and now teaches video game design at my alma mater, where I had the good fortune to hear him give a version of this talk).
https://web.archive.org/web/20120510115932/https://www.gamas...
I don't agree with all of it, but it's thought-provoking and I learned a lot about the history and philosophy of art.
When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.
I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.
Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?
When someone watches a movie, or engages with any other art form, are they "transformed"?
Games are certainly a unique art form, but I reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary", or that the experience of playing a game can't be discussed to just as rich a level as, say, the experience of watching a movie, or listening to a piece of music. Ultimately, to fully engage in a dialogue about a work of art, you need to experience that work in its intended form, this should be obviously true of music, movies, painting, and games. But to set games apart as somehow less able to be fully discussed is nonsense.
Anyone who witnessed a playtesting session with someone who never played video games before knows that there's a tremendous amount of shared cultural vocabulary there already.
I like the "evoke a worthwhile experience" idea.
Transformation is a bit ambigious imo. In a certain sense, every experience is at least a little transformative.
That’s an odd bar to cross in order to define art, if that’s what you mean there. I’ve seen plenty of art in my life (not hard to do living in Italy) and most of it didn’t change me as a person. It was still art though.
I haven't played those games, but, in general, I guess it depends on what kind of change do you mean? Playing first-person shooters certainly transforms your brains in some ways; you become better at tracking small objects on the screen; your spatial reasoning likely improves; the coordination between you hands and eyes develops to respond to events in the game; etc.
Disco Elysium has caused me to completely give up on video games and start reading https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1q0ggxc/disco...
Disco Elysium helped me move on from my past relationship https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1q8sx4p/disco...
The Call made me burst into tears https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1qip1yu/the_c...
In this regard, video game reviews have been net positive for me personally.
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.
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?'.
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.
I do believe games can be art, but the high-budget movie games are terrible.
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.
Even something like Europa Universalis IV? How is that derivative? I know of no other art form that will feed my fantasy of turning a no-name island in the Indian Ocean into a globe-spanning trading empire.
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.