The art of the matter

I considered calling this blog post "Putting the art in heart", but that's was a little too pretentious for my taste. And it doesn't precisely fit the topic

Anyway...there has been a lot of debate over whether video games are art or not. A lot of people have come out insisting that yes, they are art, while others (such as the late Roger Ebert, may he rest in peace) did not view the medium as having artistic merit. So...who is right, and who is wrong?

The answer is a lot more complicated than just "they are art" or "they aren't art".

Art, at the core, is about resonance; it evokes emotions and thought in the person who experiences the art. The best art causes those thoughts and feelings to persist long after the experience has ended. The overall artistic merit of a work can be roughly judged by how many people derived emotions and thought from it. (It's never going to be an exact science, for obvious reasons.)

Any work of fiction, in any medium, can be art, but not every work of fiction in a given medium is art. The main complexity comes from the fact that every video game can invoke one basic emotion; the sense of satisfaction upon completing part or all of it. After all, the challenge of completing a game is much more difficult than reading a book or watching a movie (not that that takes much).

The problem there is that art starts to lose value as a term if it can be applied to an entire medium. As weird as it sounds, something like art is defined as much by what doesn't fall under it as much as what does. We can't just call all video games art and call it a day; the requirements have to stretch much farther.

Which brings us back to the original statement that not all video games are art. So which ones are? There's no easy criterion here. Obviously, every game is artistic to someone, but for that art to reach wide appeal...that's a tricky thing. I do have some answers of my own.

For me, the kinds of emotions and thought are reinforced by the very nature of the medium, the interactivity that video games offer. If a game has limited interactivity - limited gameplay - then it's not doing a very good job as an artistic video game. I could easily get that from a book, song, movie, or comic...but that's not why I play video games. I play them because they are interactive, so using that is part of being the best among the best. It's part of being artistic.

I don't doubt a lot of you will disagree with me. That's fine. But video games are reaching a point where answering these questions is necessary for the medium to grow and develop. And I think we all want that, right?