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.

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with a lot of "critics" on a lot of topics, not just gaming, because their criteria for evaluation may be flawed or outdated even, but since they have their monocles on, they know more than me.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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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/

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...

2. https://academic.oup.com/book/32137

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

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?'.

I do believe games can be art, but the high-budget movie games are terrible.

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.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...

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.

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.

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.