Are Video Games Art?

maybe if you weren’t an artless person you wouldn’t need to ask the question

For the record my answer is yes. Maybe I’m the wrong person to ask, because I think fanfiction and Mr. Beast videos are art, but in my eyes, culture that makes you feel something is art. Video games make people feel things, sometimes. 

What makes video games special as a medium is interactivity, the ability to take user input and make that happen on the screen. Interactivity is fun, but it’s not art. Interactive games with no substance to speak of like Bejeweled or Subway Surfers are delightful to watch when splitscreened with a Family Guy funny clip, and fun to play when you’re on a Zoom call or watching a movie. It’s something to do with your hands or your brain. These are video games as toys. Practically all video games are a toy in some ways. These games that don’t move far beyond the toy are what people first point to when they make the case against video games as art. 

Where video games can use their interactivity to create art is in the fulfillment of fantasies. Within the fantasy there are interactive toys which make the fantasy fun, but there is also imaginative fantasy. In interactive video game fantasies players feel agency and ownership over the fantasy world that they create together with the video game, and players feel the tense moments of the fantasy by being responsible for their outcomes. To me, games that openly let people achieve fantasies like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto and Animal Crossing are the strongest examples of video games as art. People deeply care about the fantasies of these games, so these games are art.

Do these games belong in a museum now? Probably not. But museums don’t have exclusive ownership on art. You couldn’t really play a video game in a museum anyways because they take way too long. Are these fantasy video games relevant to understanding the values of our society or whatever other utility you ascribe to art? I reject the terms of the question, but I think the answer is yes. 

People care about other types of video games too. Apart from games as toys and games as fantasy, there are also games as competition. Here, digital interactivity is not used to fulfill a fantasy, but to pit humans against each other to see who is better at using the toy. Fortnite, League of Legends, and CS:GO are what I’m talking about here. These games are still toys, and they’re still fantasies, but they’re also like chess, pure competition between humans. Competition has dignity the way art has dignity, but competition can be opposed to art, because true desire to win at all costs has no regard for beauty in its methods.

Unlike chess, in competitive video games there is a fantasy present as a narrative frame for the competition, which makes this more complicated. People write fanfiction about League of Legends characters and Bladee samples CS:GO sounds, which proves that these games make people feel something. I don’t think these are feelings prompted by the competitive game, but rather feelings about the bits of traditional art that surround the game, like sound effects and written background lore. The sound effects and lore alone are not enough to prompt imagination, because they’re pretty unremarkable, but when placed alongside competition they become art people care about. Are these games art? No, but there’s art around the competition in the same way the “NFL on Fox” theme song is art and the way a basketball jersey is art. The competition itself is not art, but the competition is so important that it merits art around it to give it the dignity it deserves.

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When people argue that video games are art, they usually don’t bring up these video games that people actually play. The more common example is low budget indie games where the enemies are a metaphor for depression. The hope is that by exploration of serious topics and subversion of their own medium, certain video games are touching artistic heights that others do not. 

Art games tend to be small and silly moral stories that fail as toys and fail as art. A Rubik’s cube where all the colors are gray, to let you know that the world is sad. It’s art if it makes you feel something, but I don’t believe you if you say it does. If it really sincerely does, I don’t believe you’ve tried enough other art to ask me the original question.

The other bad argument for video games as art is narrative. Books and movies are built on narrative, so because video games have narrative too, they must be art. Hungry Hungry Hippos has a narrative too. The hippos are hungry. Most video games do have a narrative, which is art, but usually it’s not a very good narrative. Video game narratives are small stories to give context and shape to the toy or fantasy or competition. There are rare exceptions where video games can tell a powerful narrative, where they get close to the narrative quality of books and movies. I don’t think this is common, but it can be done. Nothing prevents it.

The only games that I personally have on my list of admirable narratives are Bioshock and Shadow of the Colossus. I haven’t actually played Bioshock because it felt like something I could get a summary for. These are the two video games with the best narratives I’ve ever encountered, and I think their narratives are about as good as the narrative of an average A24 film. Pretty good but not transcendent. Bioshock builds an underwater Randian dystopia and has a message about agency wrapped up in interactivity. Shadow of the Colossus builds a Greek and anime crossed fantasy world with very striking colossal enemies to defeat. I personally really like Shadow of the Colossus because I like swords but I respect my biases. 

The downside is that these narratives take twelve hours of focused time in front of a screen, and probably more than that if you aren’t well-trained in the video game medium and don’t know how their toys typically work.  Imagine if to get past page 350 of Ulysses you had to solve a literary riddle and repeatedly start over from page 330 if you messed up. And much of that twelve hours is not in service to artistic narrative but rather maintaining the pace of traditional fantasy video games. Though I admire both games I can’t imagine recommending them to someone the way I recommend a book or a movie that hits on a particular idea we talked about in a conversation, because the medium of a video game is so cumbersome for transferring a narrative. You have to want to spend time with the toy or the fantasy to make even the best video game narrative art worth consuming.

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Books and movies can be toys too. When millennial parents put on Cocomelon to pacify a child it’s because the bright lights of the video are a toy, something for the kid to do with his brain, though he’s not interacting with it. Choose-your-own-adventure books are a fun toy for kids, and they certainly don’t possess any more artistic depth because they make you the reader responsible for navigating the various outcomes.

Art is a gradient, not a rigid definition by medium. Interactivity is a powerful tool fundamental to the video game medium, but it doesn’t make video games more art or less art. Other mediums can be toys and can be low art too. There are not fundamental properties of a medium that define art, but rather the content of each individual piece of art.

This is where I feel the insecurity in the original question. Video games are art, but they aren’t art in the same way that novels and films are. You wouldn’t sit down with friends and discuss a new video game release the same way people plan book club events for new books, because there’s simply not enough substance, but that’s fine. Be proud of the things that the medium uniquely achieves, don’t hold it to the standards of other mediums when it’s failing them. No one would ever spend as much time with Lord of the Rings as some people have spent on the fantasy world of World of Warcraft. This is in spite of the fact that World of Warcraft’s narrative is a lot worse than the narrative of Lord of the Rings. So many hours are spent on WoW for interactive fulfillment of fantasy and competition between players. That’s what video games succeed at.

Is it a good thing that video games allow players to interactively dive into a fantasy world over and over? Is that a healthy use of art? We’re back to ascribing utility to art. You’re always diving into a world that doesn’t really exist when you submerge yourself in art. Some art is more useful and valuable than other art, yet it’s subtle to arbitrate what specifically is good art. Games do not reach the heights of other art, but it’s a gradient. And low art has deep value to so many people. 

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We’ll end in my diary. A video game I really loved as a kid was LittleBigPlanet. In terms of gameplay, LittleBigPlanet was a toy. It was a small jumping game like Super Mario. What made LittleBigPlanet special was its level editor interface, where the player could become a creator and make gameplay for other players to jump through. The level editor was good but it had restrictions, yet the restrictions made it more fun, to see how other people worked around them. Players built beautiful backdrops and creative puzzles far better anything the original game designers made. The game was not that fun but the creativity was. This is a fourth type of video game, game as creative interface, where video games use interactivity to allow players to create more of the toy or more of the fantasy or more of the competition. Minecraft and Roblox are the most well-known examples.

Are these games themselves art? In the same sense as competitive games, there’s art adjacent to them imbued with the importance of the creativity. But what the games do that’s special is allow the players to create art.

LittleBigPlanet was fun for the same reason that Twitter is fun. All these humans making small self-expressive art for a community of other creators within a restrictive box. Twitter is not a great novel, but it’s art, or allows people to create art. Art doesn’t have to be big and dramatic, it can be small and simple.