Video Games are not art, nor should they be.

I say this in response to the whole stupid shenanigans Roger Ebert started a little while ago. Both ‘sides’ in this debate have been pissing the hell out of me, and I want to explain why.

Video Games are not art because they are more than art. I don’t mean that they’re ‘better’; they contain art, but the art itself is not the purpose of the game. And when I say they contain art, I mean the images we see, the music we hear, and the stories we experience could in one way or another be construed as artistic, but those are just segments of the game. Video games as a medium are entirely different from anything else in so many ways, and the requirements for them to be considered ‘good’ are totally different.

A good story for a game has to be told in a way that couldn’t usually work in a book or a play. Games can make a whole lot of story out of very little (Call of Duty 4, Braid, Myst), or out of a LOT (Dragon Age); stories that would fall on their face if told in any other format. Or at least, a lot of what makes those stories unique would be lost in the translation. Perhaps even more importantly, games do not necessarily need a good story to be good in themselves.

Music is art; that is something everyone can agree on. Games can have some pretty kick-ass songs in them. Does this make the games themselves art? Of course not, because the game is not the music.

Games are visual, which means that images must be created for them. Could these images be construed as art? Why wouldn’t they be? The backgrounds alone in some games, like Assassin’s Creed, could be paintings in a museum.   Does that make the game art? No, because you didn’t shell out $60 bucks to look at pretty pictures. You bought that game to experience everything it had to offer, and to enjoy every damn minute of it, art be damned.

What you want out of a game isn’t the same as what you want out of the standard art forms, so why should they be lumped together? A lot of art is meant to be enjoyed, sure, but you enjoy food, and that’s not art (well, not usually). Sex is art when I do it, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. My point is, games can’t be called art just because they contain it; any one of the things I have mentioned could be totally absent from the game, and it could still be worth your time. More importantly, games don’t need to be called art to justify their existence. They’re a whole different kind of beast, and we need to remember that.