The Experience of Art

For as long as I can remember, I have loved videogames. As a kindergartner, I loved playing a Breakout knock-off on my family’s beige IBM PC. As a child, I loved every Nintendo 64 game I could get my hands on, from Goldeneye 007 to International Track and Field. As a teenager, I loved spending my summers alternating between battling my friends in Halo 3 and collaboratively making music with them in Rock Band. As an adult, I’ve loved the solitary, thought provoking experiences of games like Papers, Please and Outer Wilds.

Yet, for almost all of this time, I’ve also been agonizingly frustrated that no one, including myself, has ever been able to articulate what I love about this medium. I’ve been overwhelmed by this sense that everyone who’s ever fallen in love with videogames loves the same thing, and yet no one can explain what that thing is. It’s like we all see the same picture, but no one can find the words to describe it.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been trying to solve this conundrum. I’ve been trying to articulate this thing no one can seem to articulate, to put into words what I see when I look at videogames. Whenever I’ve scrolled through Twitter or pressed play on a YouTube video essay, I’ve felt like a student sitting in a classroom listening to my classmates discuss a topic I care deeply about, furiously tapping my heel against the floor, knowing that there’s an idea in my head that might be able to shift the conversation, but not raising my hand because I can’t put that idea into words.

But then, one day, it clicks. And I raise my hand. And I say this:

Videogames are works of art that (like all works of art) provoke responses in an audience, and the responses art provokes give it meaning.

That’s why I love videogames. That is, I truly believe, what everyone loves about videogames. And that sentence is the thing that will illuminate for anyone, regardless of their familiarity with the medium, what is truly remarkable about videogames.

And the class stares back at me blankly.

Let me explain.

We have been looking at videogames all wrong.

Allow me to demonstrate: What is a videogame?

Sure, we all know that videogames are games played on video screens. But beyond that broad definition, what are videogames? Are videogames games like chess or poker or soccer or tic-tac-toe? Or are they narrative constructions like movies or plays or novels? Are videogames simulations that comment on reality? Or are they an escape from reality? Are videogames challenges that test your abilities? Or are they merely interactive experiences? Are videogames for adults? Or are they for children? Are videogames meant to be taken seriously? Or are they baubles, trifles, toys?

The answer to all of these questions is: yes. Videogames are all of these things; they contain all these contradictory ideas.

In an effort to understand videogames, we often try to encase the entire medium in one of these concepts or another. Videogames are easily comprehensible if you think of them as “an evolution of movies'' or as “technologically advanced toys.” And some of those definitions are even pretty accurate, probably effectively describing 80% to 90% of modern videogames. For many people, these definitions probably suffice for their day-to-day needs, but they’re still only a partial understanding of the total picture. There’s only one word that accurately captures the full breadth of the medium:

Art.

That’s right: art. Are those of you who followed videogames discourse in the mid-2000s feeling a twinge of nostalgia? Or is the sensation more like PTSD? Either way, the point stands that this is, indeed, a discussion we’ve had before. 

Technically it’s a discussion that’s been happening since the invention of videogames, but things didn’t really heat up until 2005 when esteemed film critic Roger Ebert declared that videogames were incapable of being art. After writing a review of the movie Doom that seemed to hint at a dismissal of videogames as a whole, Ebert clarified his stance while responding to a reader submission in his “Movie Answer Man” Q&A column:

Ebert’s comment is perfectly reflective of his style: it’s sharp, pithy, and opinionated, but not rhetorically airtight. It’s the kind of comment that would make for entertaining conversation at a dinner party, but probably wouldn’t fly in an academic setting. I certainly don’t think that, when he wrote this comment, Ebert believed he was laying the foundation for a medium-defining debate that would spawn mountains of both colloquial and academic discourse, but that’s exactly what he was doing.

In the months and years after making these comments, Ebert received pushback from dozens of different sources. Clive Barker, a horror film director who had also created videogames, argued that videogames are art by stating that “if the experience moves you in some way or another…even if it moves your bowels…I think it is worthy of some serious study." Chris Baker, an editor for Wired, pointed out in a blog post that Ebert’s current stance seemed like an about-face after he published a glowing review of a videogame roughly a decade before this fracas. Keeley Santiago, a game designer with ThatGameCompany, gave a TED Talk (made famous on YouTube) that directly refuted Ebert’s claims. And, all the while, hundreds of readers wrote to Ebert suggesting games they thought might be comparable to great works of the past and pressing him to share why videogames weren’t compatible with his definition of art.

Ebert’s website encouraged the debate by publishing compilations of some of the messages he received, but the only thing that seemed to really get under the critic’s skin was the repeated suggestion that he should watch Keeley Santiago’s TED Talk. In 2010, after acquiescing and watching the lecture, he responded with a piece titled “Videogames Can Never Be Art” which further clarified his stance by stating,

Then, three months and 5000 website comments later, Ebert called for a truce. He published a piece titled “Okay, kids, play on my lawn” in which he admitted that, although his opinion hadn’t changed, he never should have brought up videogames because he was simply unwilling to play them. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen.” he wrote, “Yet I declared as an axiom that videogames can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.” The essay was Ebert’s final word on the matter before he passed away in 2013.

In subsequent years the debate quieted down, but it never fully went away. Even today there’s plenty of evidence that we are still searching for what Ebert was searching for: something that definitively confirms whether videogames are or are not art.

Just months before I wrote this essay, the editors of a literary anthology about videogames explained in an interview that they wanted to avoid the question of whether videogames are art while creating their book, saying, “They are art. We’re not debating that. ‘Are video games art?’ is a question that reminds me of the literary-versus-genre question. And I fucking hate [that] conversation, it makes me crazy. It’s such a non-issue, it feels exhausting to have it over and over again because it’s settled…We assume video games are art. We know they are.”

But if it really were settled, why is such a vociferous avoidance of the question needed? This assertion that the question is settled is perhaps the best evidence that it’s not. If the question were settled, no one would need to justify the act of not asking.

A similar thing happened earlier in 2023 when HBO released the television adaptation of the videogame The Last of Us. Audiences that were wowed by the show’s quality seemed shocked that its source material was a videogame. The situation was best summed up in a tweet from Stephen Hilger, host of the videogame podcast Into The Aether, that read, “I’m disappointed that so much of [the] buzz around the series ends up saying something like “games are a waste of time, but The Last of Us is art!” I thought we were like ten years [past] the “are games art?” debate” Apparently not.

This ambiguity around the artistic status of videogames isn’t just limited to fans either, it’s also seen in those working on videogames. In 2019 the Washington Post asked a series of videogame creators if videogames are art and their responses varied from, “Absolutely. Without hesitation.” (Kareem Ettouney, Art Director and co-founder of Media Molecule) to “​​I don't even know how important that is. I'm not sure what extra kind of criteria that is super valuable that needs to be brought to that conversation.” (Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games and creative director on No Man’s Sky.)

In 2017’s Bit by Bit Andrew Ervin asked the same question to a different series of developers and mostly received deflections. Rob Pardo, former Chief Creative Office for Blizzard Entertainment, said, “In a lot of ways, I feel like it’s a silly conversation…[it] gets down to this definition of commercial art versus fine art, which is another interesting debate even within the art world.” Creator of Gravity Ghost, Erin Robinson Swink, said “I don’t generally like arguing about definitions—other people seem to really love that sort of thing. I leave it to them.” Most flippantly, an entry on Double Fine’s website attributed to founder Tim Schafer simply reads, “Q: Are games art? A: Zzzzzz. Oh, sorry, could you repeat the question? I fell asleep.”

So to sum up today’s popular consensus: Either you believe that videogames are art (which, apparently, everyone does), or you don’t believe videogames are art, in which case the question is stupid and irrelevant and not worth asking, so please don’t bring it up. This absurd state of affairs reflects the harsh truth that, despite decades of arguing, when it comes to videogames, we, as a culture in 2024, can not find a definition of art that satisfies us.

This scenario is really no different than the one Ebert found himself in almost fifteen years ago.

Although many viewed the “Okay Kids play on my lawn” essay from 2010 as either a victory or a defeat for their respective allegiance, the piece is really a confession of confusion. Despite a lifetime spent criticizing it, Ebert could not settle on a definition for “art.” He explains that he thought back on the works that had moved him most deeply and recalled how they engaged his empathy and taught him lessons that could make his life “more deep, full and rewarding.” But he also realized that this definition's emphasis on meaning or message conflicted with the reality that music or other abstract mediums are also art, saying (emphasis mine), “It's not what it's about, but how it's about it. As Archibald MacLeish wrote: A poem should not mean, but be.” Ebert finishes his final piece on the matter by writing,

The irony is that, in this paragraph, Ebert did it. He hit upon the definition of art he was searching for — a definition of art that, I believe, everyone could embrace and endorse. In his essay arguing that he didn’t know how to prove that videogames are not art, Ebert had perfectly demonstrated how to prove that videogames are art.

The problem with the “are videogames art?” debate is that, even outside the context of videogames, art is nearly impossible to define.

When Sarah Urst Green and the team behind the YouTube series The Art Assignment tried to define “art”, they argued that the best definition was found in the satirical Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierse: “art, n. This word has no definition.” It’s a witty sentiment, but it doesn’t exactly ring true. We all know art means something, it’s just that, like Ebert, we rarely think about what it means, and even more rarely do we challenge our own ideas. In a sense, defining art is a lot like asking what videogames are — we all have assumptions we reference that are 80% or 90% accurate but don’t cover everything.

In college, I asked my classmates to define art as part of a survey for my senior thesis. The most common response was that art expressed something: a truth or an idea or the artist themself. Other common responses mentioned skillful design, the intention of a work to be perceived as art, or the evoking of emotion.

These amateur definitions aren’t too far off from those of the experts. Going back thousands of years, Aristotle described art as a reflection of nature. Historical definitions (the ones that give us the terms “fine arts” and “liberal arts”) focus on the skill and craftsmanship involved in producing a work. The idea of evoking emotion took hold in the 20th century when concepts like affect theory emerged. Today, other theories focus on the role of institutions in determining what makes something art.

Interestingly, throwing videogames into this mix reveals a series of second-order assumptions about what art is. In 2018, Dr. Felan Parker, a Ph.D. in Communication & Culture and assistant professor of media studies at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, published an article exploring the debate that Roger Ebert’s comments on videogames sparked. He argued that the debate focused on whether or not videogames should be “legitimized” as art, and summarized the arguments on either side into a few categories.

Arguments in favor of legitimating videogames as art involved strategies like “alignment with established forms” (eg: videogames games are art because they are similar to existing art forms), “appeals to medium specificity” (videogames are art but not in the way that other mediums are like art)  “the identification of author figures” (videogames are art because they are authored works) “the notion that games are a synthesis of many art forms” (videogames are art because they are built out of multiple other forms of art) and “populist arguments that position games against high art” (videogames are “real” art because they are popular.)

The arguments against legitimating videogames as art fell into the categories of “most games are commercial mass culture” (videogames are not art because they are designed to make money), “the perceived frivolity of the pleasure and entertainment derived from games,” (videogames are not art because they are just pointless fun), “the association of games with children and the associated moral panic about media effects” (videogames are not art because they are for kids and also they are “bad” for you) and “their interactivity and nonlinearity as works” (videogames are not art because the player can affect and/or change them).

These theories seem to cut through specific definitions of art and get at the heart of what many implicitly believe. In this debate, we see that for something to be considered art it must be serious, it must be for adults, it must be the work of a single author, it must be linear and unchanging, it must be part of a larger historical tradition, it must make us, as Ebert said, “more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

These implicit and often contradictory beliefs reflect how there’s something intangible about art that seems to evade description. Even Ambrose Bierse didn’t leave his satirical definition at simply, “This word has no definition.” He also included a poem by the fictional Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J. explaining the origin of the word:

So yes, art has no definition. But art is also something that seems to transcend nature — works that are “two half-hairs / joined so and so (as Art can do) / Have sweeter values and a grace more fit / Than Nature’s hairs that have never been split.”

All of these definitions, from Ambrose Bierse to the comment section philosophers on Roger Ebert’s website, capture part of what makes something art. But what all these definitions miss — what keeps us locked in this never ending debate — is the idea that what defines art is inherent in the work itself. That’s wrong. The thing that unites all art is separate from its content or form. The thing that unites all art, of all kinds, is its effect on those that consume it. The thing that unites all art is, to use Ebert’s term, the experience of art.

I first became interested in the question of what makes something “art” and whether videogames are art in 2008 when I attended a summer filmmaking program for high school students at the North Carolina School of the Arts. On the morning of the first day of the program, the class of about fifty students gathered in a small teaching theater to listen to a lecture from the professor in charge of the program on the artistic fundamentals of filmmaking.

One of the professor’s points was that cinema is the ultimate art form because it contains all other art forms. Photography, writing, music, dance, acting, theater, architecture, and more are all contained within cinema. Therefore, because cinema can leverage all these other art forms at once, it is the ultimate art form — the most powerful art form in the world. 

Although I generally agreed with this idea (it was the whole reason I was studying film) I also realized that, according to this logic, videogames might actually supersede cinema as the most powerful art form in existence. As my mind drifted away from the lecture, I thought about how videogames leverage all the same tools that cinema does while also leveraging the relatively new element of computer-enabled interactivity. So if, essentially, videogames = cinema + interactivity, doesn’t that mean that, because it contains one extra element, videogames are the most powerful art form in existence?

I thought back on some of the videogames I had played throughout my life and I suddenly became certain that all of these things were art. I suddenly became absolutely sure that videogames were art — and, yes, maybe even the most powerful art form in the world.

But I was equally sure that the core reason videogames are such a powerful art form was not because they are merely cinema plus interactivity. I knew there was something deeper that connected videogames to all other forms of art, but I couldn’t articulate what that was.

Finding that connection became an obsession for me. Researching and pondering the nature of videogames and art became my primary hobby. Occasionally this obsession and my professional life intertwined (like with my senior thesis in college), but since there were no jobs where someone could fruitlessly ponder a kernel of an idea they had as a teenager, most of my work on this front was a nights and weekends thing.

After spending fifteen years playing videogames, reading commentary, pondering theories, and not seeming to get anywhere, I was ready to give up. I was ready to fall in with the crowd and embrace the “this irrelevant question isn’t worth asking” mentality. But then something began to click when I read the following passage in a book called A Swim In A Pond In The Rain by author and professor George Saunders:

I began turning over this passage in my mind. “If criticism is a process of noticing ourselves responding to a work of art and articulating that response,” I asked myself, “then is the thing that makes something a work of art its ability to provoke that response inside of us?” Or, to put it in a simpler way, “Is art anything that creates a response inside of us?”

Ever since I had that thought, I’ve been testing this theory every time I’ve watched a movie, or played a videogame, or listened to a song, or examined a painting, or read a piece of literature. And ever since I’ve had this thought, all of them have passed the test. All of these things generated a response inside of me.

This, I realized, is the key. This is what I had noticed while listening to the professor speak about the power of cinema. I had noticed that my response to works of cinema was the same type of response I had while playing videogames—and that those responses were also the same responses I had to songs and paintings and literature and everything called “art”. All of these works and mediums are wildly different, but I now realized that they were all doing the same thing. They were all generating a response inside me.

I realized my epiphany could be condensed into this simple theory:

A.) Art is any creative work that generates a response in an audience.

B.) Videogames are creative works that generate a response in an audience.

C.) Therefore, videogames are art.

This theory is, essentially, what Ebert said all those years ago. He was prepared to accept that those who play videogames could have “an experience that, for them, is art,” he just wasn’t sure what that experience was. In the teaching theater, the things I thought back on — the things that made me realize videogames were art — were the “experiences of art” that Ebert was describing.

After making this discovery, I started to put George Saunders’s definition of criticism into action: I started playing games and attempting to articulate my response to them in the form of essays. But, although it felt revelatory to examine videogames in this way, when I sat down to write out my responses, I realized there was something missing. Videogames (and other works of art) did produce these responses in me, but they also did something deeper that wasn’t captured purely by articulating my responses to them.

Frustrated, I consulted a column that pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman wrote in 2006 where he argues that, despite videogames being a “consequential force” that’s “the cultural equivalent of rock music in 1967,” there are no writers creating videogame criticism. He conceded that there are many people writing about videogames, but he argued that the work they were creating is not criticism,

This idea of “meaning” reoccurred frequently in Klosterman’s argument. The tragedy of not having any videogame critics, he argues, is lack of meaning:

Though we could quibble with the argument that there’s no videogame criticism that fits this description (especially post-2006), on the whole Klosterman was right. Meaning is the element of art that we look to criticism to illuminate. Yes, videogames (or any type of art) create responses in the person taking in the work, but those responses also coalesce into something more significant: meaning. Meaning is what I (and most of videogames discourse) was missing.

Now, by “meaning” I don’t mean “the message or moral of a work” (although that can certainly be part of it.) My definition of meaning expands beyond the idea you’d traditionally think of when being tested in an English class. What I mean by “meaning” is more along the lines of “what you take away from a work” or “the personal significance of a work.”

Meaning is what’s created when the responses a work provokes intermingle with the mysterious, mystical part of ourselves that we think of as “self.” It is what happens when each of us, as an individual, interfaces with a work of art.

Meaning is the magic of art. It is the thing that prompts Ebert to talk about works that make us “cultured, civilized, and empathetic.” It is “two half-hairs / joined so and so.” It is the thing that makes us believe that art must be more than just fun or more than just a commercial product.

Meaning is the thing you think about long after the work of art is no longer in front of you.

This concept of meaning completed my theory, the theory I introduced to you about 4000 words ago:

Videogames are works of art that (like all works of art) provoke responses in an audience, and the responses art provokes give it meaning.

Now, obviously, there are arguments you could make against this theory.

This theory does not set any sort of threshold for quality or beauty that a work must surpass to be considered art; in fact, there is no judgment of the content of a work at all except that it must “create a response.” This definition also means that any person, of any knowledge level, can deny that any work is art if it fails to inspire a response within them. It rejects the idea that “art” is a universal definition and turns it into a personal one.

Though I agree that these scenarios open up some logical loopholes in my argument, I’m okay with these loopholes because they provoke the kind of conversation around art that I believe is productive. If a work is widely considered art but someone says it does not provoke a response in them then, sure, their one-person veto might technically make that work “not art.” And while, yes, that person could simply remain obstinate and go on with their life, wouldn’t it be more interesting for them to learn about what other people saw in the work, to learn what resonated with them? Attempting to see the work from another angle wouldn’t just show them more about the work, it would show them more about the other person. This logical loophole creates an empathetic process that brings people together. Seems like a fair trade to me.

As for individual tastes dictating the definition of art instead of an objective analysis of quality: That’s exactly what select groups have been doing forever. Although the specialized groups that control access to artistic institutions may believe that their judgements come from a place of objectivity, I’m sure that if they articulated their standards anyone would be able to find a work they’ve blessed that contradicts them. This definition simply grants individuals permission to think in the same way they do. It gives them permission to be the chair of their own, personal curation committee. I can’t imagine that simply encouraging individuals to embrace their personal taste will destroy the gatekeeping art institutions we have today.

It’s also easy to argue that this definition has already been put forward. I already mentioned that many people cite “emotional response” as something that defines art, and concepts like affect theory and the reader response theory of criticism may seem to already address what I’m trying to get at.

When it comes to the idea of “emotional response” defining art, I would argue that the emphasis on “emotional” makes it too limiting. There are many responses art can generate that have little or nothing to do with emotion. My favorite illustration of this is found in an episode of Mad Men where a character looks at a Rothko multiform and says “when you look at it, you feel something, right? It’s like looking into something very deep…you could fall in.” That is a perfect articulation of a deeply felt — but not necessarily emotional — response to a work of art.

I think that the “emotion does not equal response” argument could also apply to affect theory, but I’ll concede that the subject seems so broad that I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. In regards to reader response theory, the idea that the meaning of a literary work is created by the reader is obviously extremely compatible with my argument, though I’d simply point out that I’ve not seen it used as an argument as to what makes something art; I’ve only seen it implemented as a method to critique works already considered art.

There’s also scholarship within the field of games studies that hews closely to these ideas. In 2004, a collection of videogame scholars released a research paper summarizing the the Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics, or MDA, framework, a theory that posits that the output of every videogame is an emotional reaction within the player. Although I love this theory, I find this lens restrictive. Like a lot of games studies material, it focuses mostly on the interactive, competitive parts of videogames — the game parts of a videogame — which constrains analysis in the same way that studying literature solely through a grammatical analysis would. It’s an important, valuable lens, but it allow for the mystery and magic of pure response.

Regardless, I’ll admit that since I’m speaking as an autodidact on these subjects there absolutely could be additional context or scholarship that I’m not aware of here.

However, I think the main difference between my theory and any existing theory is that, though I have tried to be as academic and rigorous as possible, this is still an idea that is perhaps more personal than rhetorical, more individual than anthropological.

That’s because, ultimately, the personal is all there is. We can argue about nature and beauty and responses and meaning all we want, but the true definition of art is an amorphous conglomeration of what everyone believes art is. Those individual decisions can be (and usually are) heavily swayed by scholars or institutions or artists themselves, but where to draw that line between art and not art is still a decision all of us make, even if we often do it unconsciously.

Where each of us draws this line is important because it dictates what we allow ourselves to be open to. Though there are always works that can break through our defenses, art typically requires a context that allows you to be open to receiving it. Art requires a frame. It requires a setting — a museum or a gallery or a theater — indicating that, in this place, you are meant to be open to art. It requires an ingrained cultural consensus that activities like reading books or listening to music are things you offer this openness to.

Videogames do not have this frame. Culturally, we are not conditioned to offer videogames the openness that we offer other forms of art.

My argument is personal because, ultimately, the decision is yours. I can not force you to believe that videogames are art. I can only ask that you offer these works the same openness you grant other mediums so that you can see if they induce the experience of art in you. I can only ask that you be open to the possibility that you too might see what I see when I look at these works — what, perhaps, everyone who loves videogames sees.

Ultimately, that is why we should view videogames through the frame of art: because it’s the only way to view the medium clearly.

For at least the last twenty years, the dominant perspective on videogames has been a contradiction. It’s been the singular contradiction that encapsulates all the other contradictions I mentioned earlier. It’s been the idea that keeps the debates about the nature of videogames alive.

That contradiction is this: Everyone plays videogames, and no one understands them.

Videogames are played by billions of people around the world. The companies that make videogames earn billions of dollars. There is little doubt that videogames are now just as much a part of mainstream culture as any other media. Yet we, as a culture, don’t seem to understand videogames. The popularity of videogames feels like an unexplained phenomenon. The ubiquity of videogames does not seem to correlate to the medium’s cultural significance. 

You can see this contradiction in every general audience book published about videogames in the last twenty years. In fact, you don’t even have to open these books to see this phenomenon, you can read it right on the marketing copy:

Here’s the dust cover of Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy, published in 2000:

Here it is on the back of Tom Bissel’s Extra Lives, from 2010:

And here’s Andrew Ervin’s Bit by Bit, published in 2017:

It’s almost as if everyone who’s ever fallen in love with videogames loves the same thing, and yet no one can explain what that thing is.

It’s almost like we all see the same picture, but no one can find the words to describe it.

It’s like I said: We have been looking at videogames all wrong.

In the book Mainstreaming and Game Journalism, authors David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman explain that there are essentially two perspectives taken in media to examine videogames. These two perspectives mirror the options videogame players have once they get interested in the medium — they are the two options for looking at videogames all wrong.

One perspective is that of the mainstream press. The mainstream press is frequently fascinated by videogames but it isn’t literate in them. They see the phenomenal popularity of videogames and want to explain it, but they don’t understand the language the games communicate in. That lack of understanding leads them to retreat to general assumptions about the medium: it’s immature, it’s for children, it’s dangerous.

The other perspective is that of the enthusiast press. The enthusiast press is literate in videogames and has the ability to translate their language for a general audience, but the incentive structure that fuels the industry’s precarious existence prevents that. The need to appeal to a “core” audience means that writers in this category must adopt a different set of assumptions — a set of assumptions forged by the exclusionary nature of “gamer” culture: that videogames are only for those that already understand them, that they are only for those that are good at them, that there are certain inalienable attributes that make certain videogames “good” or “real” and others “bad” or “fake.”

Over the years, as more and more people start playing videogames, these are the two perspectives offered to them. You can either enter the culture of videogames and immerse yourself in a value system designed to create exclusion and keep videogames a small, special, niche interest. Or you can maintain the mainstream view that videogames are immature works meant for children and that your enjoyment of them is a guilty pleasure that should be kept secret.

We can continue doing this for as long as we want. We never have to, as a culture, understand this medium. The videogame industry is making money. More and more games come out every year. We can keep this contradiction alive forever. 

Or we can view videogames as art.

We can explain to those inside and outside the videogame world that the thing that makes videogames popular is no different than the thing that makes any other other artistic medium popular. We can explain that what videogame fans get out of videogames is the same thing that music fans get out of music or movie fans get out of movies. We can explain that, if you’ve ever loved a work of art, you already understand what people love about videogames.

We can explain to everyone that, deep down — even if we don’t realize it — what I, what you, what all of us love about videogames is the experience of art.

Everyone plays videogames. And, by simply shifting how we view the medium, everyone can understand them.

I truly believe this perspective has the potential to shift the conversation around videogames.

When I hear Trevor Strunk saying on the No Cartridge Podcast that “the idea of coming up with a literary critical language for games is a dead fantasy” or when I see Jacob Gellar tweet that “games marketing and PR has triumphed while any meaningful space for criticism is stomped out” or when I read Chuck Klosterman write that there are “no real videogame critics,” I can’t help but think that this perspective is part of the answer to those problems. I can’t help but think that this theory as to how and why videogames are art is the key to understanding how to discuss and criticize this medium.

This project is my attempt to prove that.

This website is a collection of game reviews I’ve written where I’m attempting to put this perspective into action. It is my variation on what George Saunders told us to do: It is me noticing my responses to the art form that is videogames, and then articulating those responses and explaining how they create meaning.

I hope that these essays back up these claims. I hope that they demonstrate that videogames are art — art that, like all art, produces responses that create meaning. I hope this place can be a guide that doesn’t just demonstrate what’s remarkable about a handful of games, but what’s remarkable about this medium as a whole. I hope that these reviews help chip away at the idea that medium of videogames is frivolous or immature by acknowledging that some games are, indeed, frivolous and immature while others are serious and measured (while most are somewhere in between.) I hope that this theory can be the thing that finally ends the “are videogames art?” debate by explaining that “art” is a matter of perspective.

But most of all, I hope that this idea brings people the sense of catharsis it brought me. Articulating this idea has been a way of squaring a circle around who I am and what I love.

My hope is that sharing this idea might provide feeling for others too.