When exactly does a video game become art?
By Andy McDonald // 大象传媒 The Social contributor // 4 August 2021
Art is an infamously difficult thing to define. It instantly brings to mind paintings and other such crafts, and the term is even extended to more intangible and ephemeral creations like music and even food. Do video games belong under the same ambiguous umbrella? Is Mario comparable to Monet?
The Art of Gaming
A detailed look at why video games should be considered art
While you aren’t likely to see The Last of Us or Breath of the Wild lining the walls of the National Gallery among the Canalettos any time soon, the question of whether games are art or not is one that’s decades old and has been the subject of everything from informal debates to court cases.
The earliest rumblings stem from the early 1980s, when a New York restaurant was prohibited from having arcade machines on the premises. The owner claimed in court that this breached their First Amendment right to freedom of expression, but the judge thought otherwise, finding that games didn’t merit artistic defence. This, coupled with a moral panic about the corrosive effect of electronic entertainment on the youth, seemed to establish the tenet that games weren’t art, both legally and societally.
However, some begged to differ. In their 1983 Golden Joystick Awards, Video Games Player magazine proudly proclaimed that certain games combined “graphics, playability and fun to capture players’ hearts” and were therefore deserving of artistic veneration akin to the Oscars and the Grammys. As games have evolved through the years since, so too has this passionate perspective. To completely write off games as art comes across as being uninitiated - if not a little ignorant - as to what they can achieve but, nonetheless, it remains a contentious issue.
The debate partially stems from a more fundamental disagreement about what art actually is. Art is inherently functionless while games are tactile, malleable and subject to different play styles. This has led some to believe that they’re not a form of art as they can be modified from the creator’s original vision. Conversely, others argue that this interactivity and open-ended interpretation makes games more like art.
The earliest rumblings stem from the early 1980s, when a New York restaurant was prohibited from having arcade machines on the premises. The owner claimed in court that this breached their First Amendment right to freedom of expression, but the judge thought otherwise, finding that games didn鈥檛 merit artistic defence.
Notable figures from both in and outside the world of gaming have varying perspectives on this. Mario mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto considers himself a designer rather than an artist, while Hideo Kojima - the man behind Metal Gear and Death Stranding - sees games as more of a service that strives for complete customer satisfaction, something antithetical to the idea of art.
But as much as Miyamoto might not see himself as an artist, others certainly do - no less the French Ministry of Culture, who made him a Chevalier dans l’Orde des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, alongside Rayman’s Michel Ancel and Frédérick Raynal, known for influential horror series Alone In The Dark. During his acceptance speech, Miyamoto even cited French Impressionism as an influence on his own work.
Another example of official verification came in 2018, when the German software ratings board allowed the sale of video games containing Nazi imagery on a case-by-case basis. Such materials are only permitted in Germany for instructive purposes like art and education; lifting the censorship on titles like WWII-inspired shooter Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a tacit, legal implication that games have artistic merit.
So what exactly qualifies a game as such? Like art as a whole, it’s open to interpretation, but there are several titles widely considered artistic. Sometimes this is purely based on their visual flair, yet it’s often for more abstract concepts including immersive gameplay and evocative storytelling. The former includes Gris, a platformer in which a young woman restores watercolour to an otherwise grey landscape. Similarly, Limbo’s striking, desaturated aesthetic contrasts blacks and whites to conjure a haunting, phantasmagorical world, lauded for being reminiscent of German Expressionism.
Horror classic Silent Hill 2, meanwhile, deals in a more literary form of art. The twisted, monstrous denizens that haunt the titular town aren’t just enemies for target practice; their designs represent the psyches of the main characters to symbolically frame a harrowing tale of abuse and murder.
The artistic style of minimalism also creeps into many games, such as Firewatch, a gameplay-light “walking simulator” featuring a broken man working in the wilderness of an American national park. It’s certainly pretty to look at, but its true effectiveness lies in the way the walkie-talkie dialogue between the isolated park ranger and his unseen supervisor changes depending on your decisions in order to inspire a feeling of unease and paranoia in the player.
You might notice that a lot of these are indie titles; games created by independent development teams. They might not have the support of big-name studios, but the silver lining is that they also don’t have the commercial pressures and restrictions of such, which tends to allow for a greater degree of expressive freedom.
This means that indies are often more of a blank canvas for interesting ideas, compared to triple-A monoliths that have to stick to a level of predictability and safety to shift units in time for Christmas. This Yin and Yang of profitability and artistry exists in all forms of media but, painting in broad strokes, the potential for a game to be art is always somewhere within its layers.
