Art is Video Games

In a Newsweek article from March of 2000, Jack Kroll argues that "games can be fun and rewarding in many ways, but they can't transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art."[1] Kroll's article sparked a series of angry replies, mostly from gamers writing for industry magazines on the web,[2] but the controversy was not confined to fan culture and journalism. In an article published in MIT's Technology Review called "Art Form for the Digital Age," film scholar Henry Jenkins criticized Kroll for dramatically underestimating the potential of video games.[3] Outside of academia, Kroll's article was also cited in an amicus brief advising the Seventhth Circuit Court of Appeals on a case regarding an Indiana video game censorship law.[4] The extent and diversity of the response indicates that Kroll hit a nerve, and it is worthwhile to dig a little deeper into the issue.

Despite the cultural prominence of video games and technology-based art, philosophical aesthetics has completely ignored the area. Scholars in other disciplines, such as film, have taken the lead in the conceptual debate. This is unfortunate, since seldom are there questions in the philosophy of art that have direct, real world consequences. Philosophical inattention to video games has a de facto effect on the multi-billion dollar industry by inadvertently making hasty censorship attempts easier. The fact that philosophers have not raised the question of whether video games can be art lends credence to the assumption that they are not.

In this paper I argue thatby any major definition of art many modern video gamesshould be considered art.[5] Typically, one advances the art status of a purported art form in a deductive fashion, by first picking a favored definition of art, then demonstrating that the candidate satisfies the sufficient conditions for art according to that definition, and finally concluding that the art form in question is art. Rather than defining art and defending video games based on a single contentious definition, I offer reasons for thinking that video games can be art according to historical, aesthetic, institutional, representational and expressive theories of art. If we can agree that all these theories generally track our intuitions about what should be considered art, then when they are all in agreement we have good reason to think that we have successfully picked out an art form.

My argument proceeds in three major steps: I begin with a brief description of three recent games that have received extensive praise from gamers and game reviewers. I then attempt to situate video games with respect to larger issues about art and games by assessing the relevance of arguments about the aesthetics of sport and chess. Finally, I offer a host of reasons why some video games should be considered art according to several major theories of art. Overall, I argue that while many video games probably should not be considered art, there are good reasons to think that some video games should be classified as art.