I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.
Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.
Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever. I would love someone to prove me wrong with some blog or other media outlet that reviews classical music albums and treats them even as harshly as someone like Christgau did rock. It has led to pianists like Lang Lang that are widely reviled among the classical piano community gaining fame and success because critics are simply advertisers in the classical world. Bear in mind, this is an art form in which audiences used to be so critical that Glenn Gould was booed for playing Brahms 1 with Bernstein just because he took slow tempi!
Just look at how RT scores have inflated in film. Or the whole poptimism thing in music. Or the fact that Amanda Gorman was considered one of the best poets in the US a few years ago. There's no critical voice anymore outside of the stodgiest of academic circles.
> And so, good art game criticism can only be understood by those who have no need of it; a hand may point at the moon, but once you see the moon, you no longer need to look at the hand.
This seems to be the primary point of the article, rather than anything specific to video games. The author argues that art can be created in any medium, but there is a difference between whether critical analysis of the content is transformative in its own right.
> An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation.
While the author goes on to say that "passive" art forms tend not to have this property, they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
> Game art criticism only works when it conveys the transformativeness on the player (ie. reviewer/critic) ... Given the commercial realities, perhaps this cannot be fixed, and we must accept that timely reviews are ultimately the “Cliff Notes” of games.
Also true for "passive" media.
Critical analysis is not supposed to be a replacement for first-hand experience of any "art" in any medium.
> they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
Basically, the article is "other kinds of art have property A while video games have property B" over and over by cherry-picking examples and ignoring the multitude counter-examples.
I think this question feels dated because it’s not really a useful distinction anymore, and because cultural producers are no longer regulated by gatekeepers. Legitimacy increasingly just comes from the market itself, not a group of critics or institutions.
But for video games specifically it’s because they have achieved a kind of cultural respect that they didn’t have a few decades ago. The question of “are video games art?” was really more of a quest to be taken seriously as a field. And now they quite obviously are, so the goal of being labeled Art™ isn’t that important anymore.
Instead we’re just going back to the idea of Art as Craft, a particular skill. A game can be good or bad, but whether it’s Art is increasingly irrelevant.
I would prefer to look to the democratization of art as the means and ability for individuals to produce substantial, if small, works at a pace, for an audience, for some reward determined solely by the creator.
At the end of the day, ‘what is art’ and ‘are video games art is a dated sentiment, so I agree, I was just repulsed by the suggestion that the definition/legitimacy of something as art can/should be dictated by ‘The Market’ .
I am more saying that the idea of caring about “being labeled as art” is not that important anymore. Largely because anyone can make and publish anything nowadays. So a play with 100 viewers is still art, yes, but no one really cares about getting that label.
I think this 'artistic essence' of Factorio that makes it art and not 'just entertainment' is entirely accidental.
I like Gwern's writing otherwise, but I think that this essay is titanically wrong-headed and unconvincing. I think that Gwern takes the idea of 'art' too much for granted and tries to figure out a way to jam video games into his idea of what art is because games are 'obviously art'.
Here's a book that accompanied an exhibition in 1993 that discusses the relationship between art and games (German, sorry) https://boerverlag.de/SPIELE.html
From the article: "Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind."
Arguably, as others in this thread have said, all other art forms are transformative in the same way. As far as definitions go this is pretty much essential to any art (opposed to, say, the intentions of the artist as we kind of agree that an artist can create art even if they don't intend to).
1. Makes a distinction that video games "transform" the player in a way other media doesn't.
I would argue that every piece of art is "active" in this way, it's just that with non-interactive art, the activity happens within your own mind.
Don't art aficionados and art students sit and stare at a piece for an hour, experiencing something within themselves that goes beyond what they see?
Doesn't reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, take time to truly engage with the writing of the author and "learn" their style in order to appreciate it on a deeper level?
In the same way, engaging with the mechanics of a game and experiencing the ludonarrative cohesion is how one engages with a game on a deeper level.
2. Most game critique is just a cliff notes or description
This is the same for all mass media. Day 1 reviews of books and movies are not intellectual thinkpieces, and with the rise of "second screen content", most tv/movies are not meant to be experienced any deeper than at 1.5x speed while you're washing dishes.
It's asinine to compare pop culture reviews for a mass audience for video games to the highest form of literary or film critique.
That’s an odd bar to cross in order to define art, if that’s what you mean there. I’ve seen plenty of art in my life (not hard to do living in Italy) and most of it didn’t change me as a person. It was still art though.
When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.
I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.
Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?
When someone watches a movie, or engages with any other art form, are they "transformed"?
Games are certainly a unique art form, but I reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary", or that the experience of playing a game can't be discussed to just as rich a level as, say, the experience of watching a movie, or listening to a piece of music. Ultimately, to fully engage in a dialogue about a work of art, you need to experience that work in its intended form, this should be obviously true of music, movies, painting, and games. But to set games apart as somehow less able to be fully discussed is nonsense.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
Your point still stands though.