Video Games Deserve Better

Most of the times I hear "X isn't art" or "X can't be art" what they really mean is "X isn't the art I want, or would make if I could." and that's really all there is to it.

I often find that when people talk about games being art, they either talk about subversive and innovative indie titles or big budget storytelling epics. They praise these games for their similarities to already respected forms of art, such as films or books. But to me this still doesn't acknowledge the level of craft and artistic intent that goes into the many aspects of games which are dissimilar from other mediums.

I wanted to offer one comparison: Folktales and mythology. These have changed depending upon who is telling the tale. Local “flavor” is often baked into the telling, and for many there is no definitive version. There’s even a video game about this called “Where the Water Tastes Like Wine” in which you travel america listening to folktales, which you then hear again later in a different location, with a different local flavor.

Taking advantage of the medium is something I want to see more often from developers. It's one of the reasons I've gotten so fond of directors like Yoko Taro and Kojima. The games don't always prioritize fun, but they always take advantage of the medium in really strange ways.

Surprised you haven't mentioned anything like pathologic or the void. Pathologic in particular is one of the most reoccurring names of the discussion of games as an art form.

As a video game director who vastly values the medium as an art form… I love you and your content! Thank you for seeing this beautiful form the same way I do. I think this art form is very young. Which is exciting, but also frustrating. We still have yet to standardize the unique potential of digital interactivity. Game makers need to begin to use the unique tools of this medium (game design, mechanics, systems, level design, etc.) in the same way that filmmakers utilized the unique tools of their own medium (cinematography & editing etc.). All art forms have their own unique language. Film has the cinematic language and video games have an interactive language. However, both mediums are multi-media (incorporating all other art forms) which can lead to an identity crisis, where the unique language is sacrificed by relying too heavily on the languages of other mediums. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe film went through a similar phase in the beginning, using the languages of theater and literature as a crutch (in the same way many video games have used the cinematic language as a crutch in the past 10-20 years). It was only when certain pioneers came along and produced groundbreaking work that utilized the unique poetics of cinema to express themselves that other filmmakers began to rethink how they made films. The same has been true for video games, with certain games being artistically far ahead of their time. I believe as long as we continue to experiment with the art form and expressive ourselves with the unique poetics of our own medium, the same evolution will happen to video games. When interactive language becomes standard practice for developers, more people will play truly groundbreaking work and will begin to treat games as art. Edit: I loved the video, but one thing I disagree on is the notion of video games as a “malleable” medium or the idea of the “player being more in charge of the experience than the artist”. I have heard these kinds of sentiments before but they always ignore one fundamental fact: video games are not malleable. Even with the most open-ended game, every permutation and every possibility has already been designed, programmed, modeled, textured, animated, given sounds/music, and tested endlessly. You talk about experience being prioritized over the design, but your mistake is that the experience IS the design. The closest equivalent to video games that existed before them were choose your own adventure novels. With a choose your own adventure novel, everything that can happen and every possible way any of the events can be experienced is already determined by the writer beforehand. It is like a pre-determined multiverse where readers play out one of the many many different permutations that the writer created. Video games are the same thing, but on a much much bigger scale. Instead of making one decision every couple of pages, players will make several decisions every single second. But make no mistake, the player did not create any of these permutations (in the same way a reader does not create any of the pages). Like any other art form, everything has been created by the artist and presented to the audience for them to experience. That is why video games have limits. You state the difficulty of analyzing video games artistically due to their subjective nature. But video games are no more subjective than any other medium. The difference is that traditional arts require the artist to render a universe, whereas video games require the artist to render a multiverse. You talk about procedural generation and systemic design allowing for possibilities that the artist never could have foreseen, but even Dwarf Fortress has been carefully curated so that the only possibilities are the ones within the intended experience of the piece. Video games CAN be analyzed objectively, you just have to look at the entire multiverse that the artist has created as a whole. You have to broaden your understanding of the piece to all possible experiences and not just your own (which is why all good video game analysts replay the game they are reviewing many many times). Think of the intended experience for a video game as an umbrella rather than a line. Regardless of the difference in its shape, the intended experience for a game still has to be tightly crafted, same as any other kind of art. Because every aspect of a video game is determined by the artist, it does not pose a threat to the artist’s voice in the same way it would for a board game (where players are free to add, remove, and change rules however they like). This non-malleability makes video games distinctly different from any other type of game. Because in reality, video games are not truly games, they are simulations. The best way to define video games is to say that they are “simulation as art form”. Any tool can be used to create a piece of art, and video games are what you get when simulation technology is used to create art. That is the one thing that defines and unites all video games. It is also helpful for discussing them artistically because every aspect of a simulation has to be… well, simulated… by its creators (in other words, rendered/programmed by the developers).

The simple fact that a medium less than 50 years old can compete with mediums much older is a testament to the strength of interactive artforms.

The comment on Dark Souls making artistic reference while other games "only refer to Dark Souls" strikes me as revealing -- you've read a lot about Miyazaki and the making of FromSoft games, but not nearly as much about the making of games by other developers. I hear and am sympathetic to the call to pretension (must video games forever be occupied with pop culture exclusively?) but it's unwise to overlook how much pop culture itself is, actually, informed by what's normally considered "high art." Sort of like how the Barbie movie can open with a 2001 homage, or drop in a Proust reference. I think the video games you seem to discount as Soulsborne clones have more in them than apparent at first blush. And i say that as someone who generally finds the acclaim for the Soulsborne genre as overstated. And also because every successive FromSoftware game seems to be a response to an earlier one -- it is, itself, referencing Dark Souls, too. They're just better at it than the copycats because its their own method that they're refining. In the many years since Demon Souls, I do wonder if Miyazaki will, at some point, do something new. The endless iterations are starting to wear thin. I am unsure where he can go past Elden Ring. I certainly appreciate the lessons it heeded from Breath of the Wild, but entering yet another overly-dour apocalyptic fantasy world, for a story that never ends well, to engage yet another series of domineering bosses that, roughly, need you to dodge the hits in the same way you time the beat in Guitar Hero, is starting to feel... well, like the million Guitar Hero games that came out ten years ago. It's wearing thin. Oh, and I think video games had its Citizen Kane. You're trying to hold them to the artistic standards of movies or novels, but it's probably better to not think of Citizen Kane not as "the aesthetically best film ever made" (because that's highly debatable, and is slowly losing that status now that the movie brats generation who originally boosted Citizen Kane to that position are dying off -- look at the rapid ascendancy of Jeanne Dielman over at Sight & Sound; the new generation cometh), but rather, how it influenced later movies and normalized the many tools that we take for granted today. Citizen Kane seems like a strangely modern movie a good 80 years later, and that's thanks to its many innovations that movies ever since have learned from. Is there a game we can look back to, that has done the same for interactive arts today? I think so. Critical of Dark Souls, I may be, it's clearly had an influence on the medium over the last ten years (for better and for worse). But there are many games far more seminal, far more influential. We just don't want to call one of them "Citizen Kane," because we haven't refined an aesthetic standard specific to gaming yet. However, we don't have to be high minded academics, nor does a game have to be as psychological as Dostoyevsky, to say it is an exemplar of the form, one that will be appreciated not only for its time, and not just for today, but also for years, decades, maybe even centuries to come. Such games already exist, if we only have the temerity to make the case.

I fully recommend watching video essays by Jacob Geller, Razbuten, and Noah Caldwell-Gervais!! They discuss video games in a way you struggled to find (:20-ish), and often have channel recommendations of their own. There's definitely a community of folks out there who give video games the attention as art that they deserve, and I really hope these channels can scratch your itch for better discourse about the medium!

To ignore the gameplay of a video game is to dismiss most of its art. It's critiquing music on lyrics and not its notes.

I think that the reason game companies in particular do NOT want their work to be seen as serious art, is the same reason they like to claim their games have "no political messages"... even though they clearly do. If games are art, then they should be preserved, curated and given deeper examinations. These are things large game publishers do not want. Specially the preservation part. They want people to throw old games away, so they can sell them new ones.

A video by someone who thinks they are very smart. Live performances, music theater or otherwise, are historically very famous for being different depending on who and when its experienced.

Well , Jacob Geller is watching this one.

This is hopefully a turning point. Good work friend.

The question of whether a medium, whether it is photography, music, film, now games. can be "Art" is mostly a facile importation of notions of a High/Low Culture divide whereby Art is defined as objects that should be seen or are intended to belong to a "High", (exalted, valuable, legitimate) class of objects most identified with the visual fine arts of Painting and Sculpture. Discourse of whether something can be "Art" is then just mere attempts to appeal the position of High culture to a particular obiect so as to appropriate a degree of prestige, legitimacy, seriousness, and status upon those creations and by proxy the people making them. The traditional class of objects "Art" in that it is becoming more associated with Esoteric self-referrentialism and financialization is also steadily losing its credibility among common people (not the ultra rich), so the appeal to identify as "Art" as opposed to just "Significant objects of popular culture" might go away eventually. Forget any discourse "Is X Art" as it can only be judged retrospectively as mass society reaches a consensus which largely ignored critics trying to force the issue.

I agree with most of the points made here, but there's one thing I find a bit odd: In my eyes, knowledge of old art is not necessary to make great art. You don't need to use Marvel heroes as an inspiration for your characters, but you also don't need to use Odysseus. Nobody grows up free from culture, so there will always be artistic influences present. At the end of the day, art is a fractured mirror of life, if you draw most of your inspiration from experiences you've had in real life and extrapolate them into artistic form, your work has a better chance of resonating, than being a copy of a copy of a copy.

1:22:21 "Maybe subjectivity is the cornerstone of video games, which makes it difficult to slot into the more objective world of art." I hate this. I genuinely appreciate this video, but something was bothering me about the way you presented certain points, and this is really the crux of it. It's pretentious, and elitest. I'm at work so I can't write a whole ass essay right now, but this legit might be the motivation for me to make my first video essay, because I feel like I've got A LOT to say here.

On the segment of this video "Video Games Need to Be Fun," I understand the perspective that intractability demands engagement and engagement primarily is derived from some value of "fun". That engagement and instructiveness is what primarily defines a video game a unique medium of art. However, I and likely other comments below this video may suggest a game called Pathologic, to illustrate the interplay between fun, gameplay, narrative, and how it all reflects upon the player. I do strongly suggest taking a look at this game, as it primarily addresses this sort of relationship between fun and engagement in the context of video game conventions.

5:17 - "So why have we yet to form a legitimate space in which video games can be spoken upon the same level as high art?" It exists, it's on YouTube with people like Max Derrat and countless other video essayists (including your later mentioned Matthew Matosis and Josesh Anderson), it's in Discord servers and forums, in peoples discussions with each other, there are even exhibits on video games, and sports from them that rule in countries like South Korea. These are all legitimate spaces that do not generally pander for or seek approval beyond the people interested in it. I would argue academia does little to determine the quality of films beyond giving talent the opportunity to practice and learn technical skills, but not what to apply it to creatively and artistically. Video games have much to learn how to technically do, but the majority of games and classics already considered high art were made by passionate innovators with no academic input or structures.

I disagree that video games are not widely accepted as an artform in academia, I am studying in art school right now and I can assure you they are taken seriously, its the whole reason I'm watching this video.