The reason videogames aren’t art is because they’re not produced by the Art World and don’t engage with Art History (i.e. the history of the Art World). But this is a good thing.
Yep, we have magic and miracles for 70+ since the creating of video games. We can build a whole direct democratic simulated multiverse and solve AI safety. No kidding, we shared the full proposal with UIs and more
Video games are not art, they are artisanry. True art (high art) uses technical mastery to transmit a unique and authentic emotional experience to the perceiver. Artisanry simply uses technical mastery to create a high quality object, usually with aesthetic appeal. You can compare Michelangelo's La Pieta to ornately carved ornamental stonework. They are both beautiful, but La Pieta has emotional resonance that non-figurative stonework - no matter how intricate - could never hope to have. An artisan may have the technical skill to carve masterful stonework, but lack the artistic talent to carve La Pieta.
Modernism as a movement is about stripping away (or deliberately violating) technical standards and seeing what can be produced in their absence. It is not impossible for the result to be art, but since the intent is as a game or challenge for the artisan, it very rarely is. Postmodernism is just taking modernism and making it self-referential in some way. Again, it is artisanry, not art (employing effectfulness and diversion, to take terms from Tolstoy's What Is Art?)
Game designers are artisans of interactive entertainment experiences. However they are rarely ever true artists. Balatro is enormously fun, but it is not emotionally infectious in any way. I have not played a video game that got anywhere close to the emotional notes of 19th century literature. Video games can have artistic elements, like the soundtracks from Supergiant Games' Bastion and Transistor, or Elden Ring's art and world design, or The Last of Us's story, but the defining feature of a video game is that it is an interactive experience composed of game design elements, and these cannot be art. There is no combination of shop mechanics, RNG, character stats, i-frames, or boss HP that produces a true artistic experience. Therefore while video games can contain elements that are worthy of being called art, the game itself, as a game, is not art. While musicians, writers, and visual artists have the potential to create art, game designers are operating at the level of entertainment artisanry.
The other thing is that art is not inherently accessible - it requires aesthetic sensibilities that take effort to attain. Appreciating high art requires a depth of feeling that many people are simply incapable of. The number of people who can honestly appreciate a Caravaggio, or a violin concerto, or Anna Karenina is much smaller than the number of people who can beat Balatro or even Dark Souls. If video games required as much from the player as real art does, they would have as large an audience as classical opera does today (which is not large).
I feel like this perspective on art had already lost its purchase by the time conceptual art appeared. I see works in contemporary galleries all the time that aren't formally distinguishable from video games, including works that comment explicitly on video games.
And even if I didn't, I see no fundamental distinction between using an interactive game to "transmit a unique and authentic emotional experience" and doing so through some more traditional object. If video games are failing to do this, then they may simply be bad art. If those experiences take on different forms than in other artistic media, then that's okay, because there's no law about which experiences are "artistic" and which aren't.
I also dislike the elitism: art doesn't need to be for everybody, but you don't get bonus points for inaccessibility. Literature is the best counterexample here: popular serials that are retrospectively considered great works.
Well that makes sense, because I don't consider conceptual art real art. It is doing something entirely different from what classical art did. It is more of an attack on classical art by deliberately trying to deconstruct its foundations, and then saying that it is just as much art as classical art is. This is why I made the point about modernism.
Video games are engaging the dopamine system through novelty or hijacking incentive reward. Classical art has never done this. I have yet to play a video game that creates the same emotional resonance as Anna's suicide or Vronsky getting on the train to Serbia. Do you have any examples that do this, without leveraging human reward systems?
You don't get bonus points for inaccessibility, but great works are inherently inaccessible. If they were vulgar and plebeian they wouldn't be great. Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov were widely read as serials by the Russian intelligensia, but that was maybe 0.1% of Russia's population. Even The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most popular novels of the 19th century, was read by maybe 2% of France's population.
This article makes many good points, but you are taking an aspect that classic roguelikes often do not have and make it into the most important thing.
As a bit of historical background, people in 1993 wanted to group games sharing a specific, very distinct style of exploration and combat, and since it was difficult to explain it, it was called after an early game that popularized it. So essentially roguelikes are like Rogue just like FPS are like Doom and platformers are like Mario (these genres are also defined by their distinct style of exploration and combat). It was not about being ASCII, being set in dungeons (this is specifically why the genre was called "roguelike" instead of alternative suggestions such as "ASCII dungeon"), permadeath, having metaprogression or not. For clarity, I will refer to this aspect as "literal roguelike". This style can be used to create amazing single-character tactical/strategical experiences such as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and complex simulations such as Caves of Qud. This aspect of Rogue has been copied in thousands of games with millions of fans, and it is as fun as it was in the 80s, the roguelike communities still generally use some variant of this definition.
Another big innovation of Rogue was that these tactical maps are procedurally generated. Most games in the family take that element, including Minecraft and Diablo. It is a very distinct thing from "engine building" (a boardgame term for games heavily focused on synergizing upgrades): both procedural generation and engine building are used to make the game more replayable, but procedural generation generates variety in the environment, while engine building generates variety in the character.
Most modern games have some sort of upgrades, common definitions of metroidvanias and RPGs usually focus on upgrades in some way. The purpose of upgrades is to make the game more interesting during the run, so that you are not doing the same thing in late game as in early game. Roguelike started as an RPG subgenre, so they got their items/upgrades from there.
It is not true that synergizing, randomized upgrades are the point of roguelikes, any more than they are in RPGs. In most roguelikes upgrades do not really synergize (I would not say they synergize in Rogue, for example). Some roguelikes have no upgrades at all (many submissions to the 7DRL challenge are very simple roguelikes without upgrades -- but they usually do have procedural generation). In many roguelikes you have full or almost full control over your upgrades (for example in DoomRL and the most engine-buildy literal roguelike, Path of Achra, you can choose your character upgrades freely, there are also randomized items but they are less important). It is weird to focus on synergies in Caves of Qud where the great things about it are its literal roguelikeness and amazing procedural generation. A focus on synergizing upgrades is an innovation of The Binding of Isaac.
It is a bit like saying "the core aspect of real-time strategy is that you build towers to defend your base". Yeah, that is an important aspect of many RTS games, but for example, one of the genre-defining games, the original Warcraft, did not even have this aspect. It is also a very fun aspect, so fun that it has created a new genre. And Tower Defense and RTS are generally considered to be separate genres.
For some reason, people call engine-builders roguelikes, but that is really confusing for people who have played actual roguelikes -- who do not understand why games such as Vampire Survivors, Risk of Rain, or Balatro are called so (lots of sources claim "roguelike means a procedural death labyrinth now" but these games do not even have procedural generation). It must be confusing for new players too, who would either find a literal roguelike definition, or a procedural death labyrinth definition. This confusion hurts all the three genres involved. Currently lots of people are avoiding everything labeled roguelike, probably because they never know whether they would get a literal roguelike, procedural death labyrinth, engine builder, or a metaprogression-heavy game.
> I feel that most people have poor expectations about the artistic value of video games in general. Perhaps the image all the way at the top questioning whether video games are art is based on the RPG, which in many cases really aren’t much more than visual arts + music + writing + interactivity.
yea this is the compelling argument here, and actually reminds me of the treatment of "comic books" as art form until we found enough differentiating works operating within the medium that people started calling those pieces "graphic novels",, maybe there's a similar treatment with how we can relate to "video games"?
feel like a good place to orient is similar to how Eisner expanded the definition of comics as *sequential art*, we can define games as *artful agencies* (after C. Thi Nguyen)
You picked out some of my absolute favs! YU-NO's music really makes me want to play it, reminds me of how awesome chiptune can be (see also Solstice's opener: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_gObHt1uZA)
Small correction re:
"Enter: Secrets of Grindea, a game where the entire point of the plot is… grinding. It pulls a lot of the real-time mechanics from CrossCode and earlier SNES games like Secret of Mana"
While Grindea released in 2024, I can tell you I played the closed beta via Desura/IndieDB back in 2013, and the game itself, from what I can tell, started dev in 2011 (per the dev log), the same year Crosscode started dev.
PHENOMENAL piece of writing.
Does anyone think video games aren't a medium for art anymore?
The reason videogames aren’t art is because they’re not produced by the Art World and don’t engage with Art History (i.e. the history of the Art World). But this is a good thing.
Yep, we have magic and miracles for 70+ since the creating of video games. We can build a whole direct democratic simulated multiverse and solve AI safety. No kidding, we shared the full proposal with UIs and more
Video games are not art, they are artisanry. True art (high art) uses technical mastery to transmit a unique and authentic emotional experience to the perceiver. Artisanry simply uses technical mastery to create a high quality object, usually with aesthetic appeal. You can compare Michelangelo's La Pieta to ornately carved ornamental stonework. They are both beautiful, but La Pieta has emotional resonance that non-figurative stonework - no matter how intricate - could never hope to have. An artisan may have the technical skill to carve masterful stonework, but lack the artistic talent to carve La Pieta.
Modernism as a movement is about stripping away (or deliberately violating) technical standards and seeing what can be produced in their absence. It is not impossible for the result to be art, but since the intent is as a game or challenge for the artisan, it very rarely is. Postmodernism is just taking modernism and making it self-referential in some way. Again, it is artisanry, not art (employing effectfulness and diversion, to take terms from Tolstoy's What Is Art?)
Game designers are artisans of interactive entertainment experiences. However they are rarely ever true artists. Balatro is enormously fun, but it is not emotionally infectious in any way. I have not played a video game that got anywhere close to the emotional notes of 19th century literature. Video games can have artistic elements, like the soundtracks from Supergiant Games' Bastion and Transistor, or Elden Ring's art and world design, or The Last of Us's story, but the defining feature of a video game is that it is an interactive experience composed of game design elements, and these cannot be art. There is no combination of shop mechanics, RNG, character stats, i-frames, or boss HP that produces a true artistic experience. Therefore while video games can contain elements that are worthy of being called art, the game itself, as a game, is not art. While musicians, writers, and visual artists have the potential to create art, game designers are operating at the level of entertainment artisanry.
The other thing is that art is not inherently accessible - it requires aesthetic sensibilities that take effort to attain. Appreciating high art requires a depth of feeling that many people are simply incapable of. The number of people who can honestly appreciate a Caravaggio, or a violin concerto, or Anna Karenina is much smaller than the number of people who can beat Balatro or even Dark Souls. If video games required as much from the player as real art does, they would have as large an audience as classical opera does today (which is not large).
I feel like this perspective on art had already lost its purchase by the time conceptual art appeared. I see works in contemporary galleries all the time that aren't formally distinguishable from video games, including works that comment explicitly on video games.
And even if I didn't, I see no fundamental distinction between using an interactive game to "transmit a unique and authentic emotional experience" and doing so through some more traditional object. If video games are failing to do this, then they may simply be bad art. If those experiences take on different forms than in other artistic media, then that's okay, because there's no law about which experiences are "artistic" and which aren't.
I also dislike the elitism: art doesn't need to be for everybody, but you don't get bonus points for inaccessibility. Literature is the best counterexample here: popular serials that are retrospectively considered great works.
Well that makes sense, because I don't consider conceptual art real art. It is doing something entirely different from what classical art did. It is more of an attack on classical art by deliberately trying to deconstruct its foundations, and then saying that it is just as much art as classical art is. This is why I made the point about modernism.
Video games are engaging the dopamine system through novelty or hijacking incentive reward. Classical art has never done this. I have yet to play a video game that creates the same emotional resonance as Anna's suicide or Vronsky getting on the train to Serbia. Do you have any examples that do this, without leveraging human reward systems?
You don't get bonus points for inaccessibility, but great works are inherently inaccessible. If they were vulgar and plebeian they wouldn't be great. Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov were widely read as serials by the Russian intelligensia, but that was maybe 0.1% of Russia's population. Even The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most popular novels of the 19th century, was read by maybe 2% of France's population.
I have no particular stake in classical art, so I have no further comments to make on the topic.
This article makes many good points, but you are taking an aspect that classic roguelikes often do not have and make it into the most important thing.
As a bit of historical background, people in 1993 wanted to group games sharing a specific, very distinct style of exploration and combat, and since it was difficult to explain it, it was called after an early game that popularized it. So essentially roguelikes are like Rogue just like FPS are like Doom and platformers are like Mario (these genres are also defined by their distinct style of exploration and combat). It was not about being ASCII, being set in dungeons (this is specifically why the genre was called "roguelike" instead of alternative suggestions such as "ASCII dungeon"), permadeath, having metaprogression or not. For clarity, I will refer to this aspect as "literal roguelike". This style can be used to create amazing single-character tactical/strategical experiences such as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and complex simulations such as Caves of Qud. This aspect of Rogue has been copied in thousands of games with millions of fans, and it is as fun as it was in the 80s, the roguelike communities still generally use some variant of this definition.
Another big innovation of Rogue was that these tactical maps are procedurally generated. Most games in the family take that element, including Minecraft and Diablo. It is a very distinct thing from "engine building" (a boardgame term for games heavily focused on synergizing upgrades): both procedural generation and engine building are used to make the game more replayable, but procedural generation generates variety in the environment, while engine building generates variety in the character.
Most modern games have some sort of upgrades, common definitions of metroidvanias and RPGs usually focus on upgrades in some way. The purpose of upgrades is to make the game more interesting during the run, so that you are not doing the same thing in late game as in early game. Roguelike started as an RPG subgenre, so they got their items/upgrades from there.
It is not true that synergizing, randomized upgrades are the point of roguelikes, any more than they are in RPGs. In most roguelikes upgrades do not really synergize (I would not say they synergize in Rogue, for example). Some roguelikes have no upgrades at all (many submissions to the 7DRL challenge are very simple roguelikes without upgrades -- but they usually do have procedural generation). In many roguelikes you have full or almost full control over your upgrades (for example in DoomRL and the most engine-buildy literal roguelike, Path of Achra, you can choose your character upgrades freely, there are also randomized items but they are less important). It is weird to focus on synergies in Caves of Qud where the great things about it are its literal roguelikeness and amazing procedural generation. A focus on synergizing upgrades is an innovation of The Binding of Isaac.
It is a bit like saying "the core aspect of real-time strategy is that you build towers to defend your base". Yeah, that is an important aspect of many RTS games, but for example, one of the genre-defining games, the original Warcraft, did not even have this aspect. It is also a very fun aspect, so fun that it has created a new genre. And Tower Defense and RTS are generally considered to be separate genres.
For some reason, people call engine-builders roguelikes, but that is really confusing for people who have played actual roguelikes -- who do not understand why games such as Vampire Survivors, Risk of Rain, or Balatro are called so (lots of sources claim "roguelike means a procedural death labyrinth now" but these games do not even have procedural generation). It must be confusing for new players too, who would either find a literal roguelike definition, or a procedural death labyrinth definition. This confusion hurts all the three genres involved. Currently lots of people are avoiding everything labeled roguelike, probably because they never know whether they would get a literal roguelike, procedural death labyrinth, engine builder, or a metaprogression-heavy game.
> I feel that most people have poor expectations about the artistic value of video games in general. Perhaps the image all the way at the top questioning whether video games are art is based on the RPG, which in many cases really aren’t much more than visual arts + music + writing + interactivity.
yea this is the compelling argument here, and actually reminds me of the treatment of "comic books" as art form until we found enough differentiating works operating within the medium that people started calling those pieces "graphic novels",, maybe there's a similar treatment with how we can relate to "video games"?
feel like a good place to orient is similar to how Eisner expanded the definition of comics as *sequential art*, we can define games as *artful agencies* (after C. Thi Nguyen)
You picked out some of my absolute favs! YU-NO's music really makes me want to play it, reminds me of how awesome chiptune can be (see also Solstice's opener: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_gObHt1uZA)
Small correction re:
"Enter: Secrets of Grindea, a game where the entire point of the plot is… grinding. It pulls a lot of the real-time mechanics from CrossCode and earlier SNES games like Secret of Mana"
While Grindea released in 2024, I can tell you I played the closed beta via Desura/IndieDB back in 2013, and the game itself, from what I can tell, started dev in 2011 (per the dev log), the same year Crosscode started dev.
Wow! No way! Didn't know Grindea had such a long dev cycle!