Art and Gaming

Before determining whether or not games should be considered "art", we first need to identify the established arts which gaming will be classified alongside. Music, theater, literature, film, and painting/visual still-art are the major mediums, and within these forms, it can be said that there is no "better" amongst them. Any judgment is left strictly to opinion, because no form of art is intrinsically better than the others.

The purposes of art are massively varied; it can relay a story, invoke emotional responses, exist as a social or political commentary, or even serve to critique art itself. Once it is established that the function of music, theater, literature, film, and visual arts is to fulfill these purposes, we can argue that games can and do satisfy the requirements to be considered "art".

With most games, gameplay is the same from person to person, hour to hour. Every person that plays Half Life 2 must solve the same puzzles, defeat the same foes, and aquire the same weapons and vehicles to proceed toward the end. This applies to a large portion games throughout history- Super Mario Brothers, Mega Man, Goldeneye 007, Bioshock, and many others. In the same breath, though, most other art forms use the same formula- everyone reads the same words in a novel, sees the same colors in a painting, hears the same notes in a symphony. It's a matter of storytelling done on scales ranging from the simple to the complex. Haiku to novel, Warhol to DeVinci, Fugazi to Beethoven, Mario to Bioshock. With gaming done in this style, a story is being conveyed along the lines of an interactive element. The same story could easily be put in the form of a directly written narrative and still be considered original art, so to argue that an interactively-progressed story isn't art would be absurd.

The other half of the gaming world has a much less direct approach to telling a story; such games fall under the categories of real-time strategies and role-playing games. With these modes, no two people will experience the game the same way. The writers of the game provide an environment, some tools, some boundaries, and launch you headfirst into it (quite literally in the case of Fallout 3). From then on, all gameplay choices are left up to the discretion of the player. In some cases, there isn't even a story present- for example, in Age of Empires II, you can pit the Celts against the Aztecs in an online free-for-all. Even if a story-mode is selected, the choices are so vast that a map never plays out the same way twice, in a very similar fashion to a game of chess. With a first-person RPG like Fallout 3, the possibilities are equally endless. You can spend hours finding every enemy and weapon in the game, or you can trounce through the main plot quickly and only use what you need to complete the main storyline. With games like these, gameplay is three-dimensional as opposed to the linear-style games mentioned above. This format places the "art" in the hands of both the creator and player, as the author of the game will compose a world and and some rules, while the player decides what happens from that point forward.

Besides being a work of art in and of themselves, games provide a means of employing several art forms through a single medium. A higher-end game's musical score and voice acting play a major role in the perceieved effect, as do the visual elements and (possibly) intended realism. By looking at it this way, video games combine all of the art forms described earlier into a single compelling experience. Narrative, theater, music, and visual art are all equally important to a game released today. However, while this characteristic makes a game more viable on today's market, that in no way means that older, less aesthetically-appealing games aren't art. They were cutting edge for the time, and although things have improved they're still a solid piece of art. Some of those 8-bit music scores are nothing to scoff at!

Games are the next big push into the field of widely-accepted art, whether people like it or not. While many may consider gaming "low art" or even trash, one must consider the amount of dishonest, unoriginal trash found in the realms of music, film, and literature. Does said trash negate the entire field to which it belongs? Certainly not. With gaming, it's simply a newcomer to the world of art, and it's biggest challenge is to break through the notion of simply being entertainment into being culturally equal to film, music, etc. Games have already reached a point of being able to tug on emotions, tell stories, and critique society and the world. The point of breakthrough has come, and it's high time for gaming to leave its niche and find its way to the rest of the non-gaming world.