The Experience of Art

A new way of understanding videogames

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 and seen people talking about videogames, 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 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 is why we love this medium. That is how this medium works.

And the class stares back at me blankly.

Let me explain.

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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, that probably suffices for their needs, but it’s 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 is 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:

Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

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 debate 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 hundreds 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 referenced and 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 talk, he responded with a piece titled “Videogames Can Never Be Art” which further clarified his stance by stating,

“I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

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 has never fully gone 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.

About a year 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 2025, 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,

I concluded without a definition [for art] 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.

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.

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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 speculated that the best definition might be the one 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 theories. 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. And 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 explained 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 most of them 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:

One day a wag—what would the wretch be at?—

Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,

And said it was a god's name! Straight arose

Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,

And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,

And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)

To serve his temple and maintain the fires,

Expound the law, manipulate the wires.

Amazed, the populace the rites attend,

Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend,

And, inly edified to learn that two

Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)

Have sweeter values and a grace more fit

Than Nature's hairs that never have been split,

Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts,

And sell their garments to support the priests.

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.

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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. I recalled obscure trifles like Chex Quest, mainstream blockbusters like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and uncategorizable works like Rock Band, 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. 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, my work on this front was performed off-hours.

After spending fifteen years playing games, reading commentary, 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:

“To review: a story is a linear-temporal phenomenon.

Actually, that’s any work of art. We know what we think of a movie even a few minutes in. We step up to a painting with a blank mind, look at it, and the mind fills up. In a concert hall, we’re either riveted right away or wondering what that guy in the balcony is texting about.

A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art and (2) getting better at articulating that response.”

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.

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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 actual videogame criticism. He conceded that there are many people writing about videogames, but he argued that the work they were creating is not criticism:

“Almost without exception, it's consumer advice; it tells you what old game a new game resembles, and what the playing experience entails, and whether the game will be commercially successful. It's expository information. As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside the game itself.”

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

“If nobody ever thinks about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual, they'll all become strictly commodities, and then they'll all become boring. They'll only be games. And since we've already agreed that video games are the new rock music, we'd be facing a rather depressing scenario: This generation's single most meaningful artistic idiom will be--ultimately--meaningless.”

Though I 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, indeed, 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.

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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 is productive. If a work is widely considered art but someone says it does not provoke a response in them then, sure, they could simply remain obstinate and go on with their life. But wouldn’t it be more interesting for them to hear about what other people saw in the work and 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. It would be an empathetic process that brought people together.

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 the TV show 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 this 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 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 videogames—which constrains analysis in the same way that studying literature solely through a grammatical analysis would. It’s an important, valuable lens, but it doesn’t account for all the elements in a game that generate response.

With all that being said, 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 all of these other theories is that, though I have tried to be as academic and rigorous as possible, this is still a theory that is perhaps more personal than rhetorical, more individual than anthropological.

That’s intentional though 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—whether that place is the result of an intentional decision or simply the byproduct of an offhand comment from a high school teacher—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 to be open is personal. 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. 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.

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

Today, the collective perspective on videogames could be described as 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:

The videogame explosion is not just around the corner; it is already here. A few figures to prove it:

• Videogames sales today have reached near parity with movie ticket sales.

• Sales of game consoles and software in the United States and Europe alone are expected to generate more than $17 billion worth of business a year by 2003.

• The average child in the United States plays videogames forty-nine minutes a day, but videogames are not just for kids: 61 percent of videogamers are eighteen or over, and more than a quarter are over thirty-six.

• Videogame players are almost evenly split between men and women.

For many, videogames are still viewed as a minor form of entertainment, shallow at best, harmful at worst.

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

In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically.

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

Video games have been around for decades, but only in recent years have they gone truly mainstream. Today, the majority of American households play video games, almost half of gamers are women, and professional video game tournaments attract more viewers than the World Series. Yet we still don’t take games seriously, preferring to see them as little more than entertaining diversions, a means of making the commute go by more quickly.

Videogames are a dominant cultural medium, but they are perceived as a minor form of entertainment. Videogames are sophisticated and profitable, but we don’t know how they work. Videogames are widespread and popular, but we don’t take them seriously.

Everyone plays videogames, and no one understands them.

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 almost as if we have been looking at videogames all wrong.

And now, in 2025, it would seem that the consequences of leaving this contradiction unaddressed are beginning to appear.

2024 will be remembered as a year of crisis for videogames. In the last two years, around 50 videogame studios have been shut down and 15,000 industry employees have been laid off. It’s clear the tectonic plates under the videogame industry are shifting.

Edge magazine asked a series of notable industry members what they would do to fix the damage caused by these shifts and Raphael Colantoni, President and Creative Director of Wolf Eye studios, advocated for simply letting the fire burn. He explains that he that “ love[s] games still, but hate[s] the industry,” saying:

There are those [videogames] that are made because a group of people believe the world needs to see this game, out of passion and pure honesty. That doesn’t mean that all the games that are made this way will end up being good games, but I would say that all good games were made this way.

And there’s the other way to make games, which is led by business-slash-marketing-slash-sales, driven by growth and shareholders and all these things. And sadly, I think we are at the point where a majority of games are made this way. There are too many big games that are spinoffs, sequels back-to-back-to-back every year, reskins of an existing franchise that is just going to look like another game made with too many people who don’t care. It turns games into consumable commodities. Players are going to feel fatigued, and they’re not going to trust you any more, and they’re just not going to buy the next one.

So, no, I don’t think there’s anything to save. Just let it burn, and come back in a healthier way.

This rot isn’t just observed from a business perspective, though. Critic Ed Smith, writing in Unwinnable, also advocated for a cleansing destruction of what constitutes modern videogame design, arguing that the entrenched methodology “harms players’ ability to perceive reality” and “stunt[s] our soul growth.” He contends “There are ideas about what videogames should be, and what videogame mechanics should be, and what videogame aesthetics should be. Those ideas all need to be obliterated. After that obliteration, we can reconstitute a more meaningful videogame.”

So what built these structures that need to be torn down? What caused the fire? What led to the “commodification” of videogames? What allowed business-slash-marketing-slash-sales to dictate how videogames are created? What caused these obliteration-worthy design ideas that stunt our soul growth?

Could it all be that, exactly as Chuck Klosterman predicted, “If nobody ever thinks about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual, they'll all become strictly commodities, and then they'll all become boring.”?

Could it be that everyone plays videogames and yet no one—not even the boards of the companies creating them—understands them?

Could it be that all of this is happening because we have failed to acknowledge that videogames are art?

In late 2024, Frank Lantz, the founding chair of NYU gameslab and one of the world’s pre-eminent videogame philosophers, may have put it best when he wrote,

Deep down we recognize that these things are an unfinished project, and it terrifies us. Video games are technical and creative marvels, sublime and ridiculous. They are the cathedrals of the modern world. Only we don’t know what they are for. So we tell ourselves the comforting story that they are just for puppet shows and cartoons and dressing up and make-believe and playing house and playing soldier. But they are not. They are not.

With all due respect, I would say that we do know what games are for, but we have been repressing it. Lantz has, at least. In his book, “The Beauty of Games,” Lantz pushes back against referring to games as art, preferring the phrase “aesthetic form” instead.

I am using the term aesthetics partly to avoid the contentious and confrontational word art with all of its problematic associations. When you say the word “art,” some people will close their eyes in respectful reverence, others will roll their eyes in skeptical exasperation. Either way, you can be pretty sure that no one will be simply looking at whatever it is you are talking about.

I sympathize with the desire to avoid relitigating the definition of art. I have probably spent too many words explaining what an infuriating infinite loop that conversation is. But Lantz has it exactly backwards. Calling videogames art won’t cause people to avert their eyes from the medium, it will invite them to see the medium clearly.

Calling videogames art is a way of conveying what this medium and this industry is on a fundamental level.

Calling videogames art is an explanation of how they work. It’s an acknowledgement that these are creative works that generate responses in an audience and that those responses create meaning.

Calling videogames art is a way of articulating what their design should aspire to—to serve not as a tool for the soul-stunting task of maximizing user engagement, but to create meaning for an audience.

Calling videogames art is a frame—perhaps the only frame—that invites individuals to consider videogames in a critical way. It is a word that permits players to acknowledge and embrace experiences that reach beyond simple exhilaration or technical marvel.

Calling videogames art is a way of communicating why we find these things so compelling and why we love them.

What are videogames for? Videogames are for art.

Or at least, they can be, if we’re finally willing to say it with clarity and confidence and conviction: Videogames are art.