This is a philosophical experiment. I’m not going to try to prove that games are art, or defend the medium against its critics, or to compile a list of games that deserve to hang in the Louvre. I want to hold games up to the light, turn them slowly, and see what the examination reveals. About games. About art. About how we treat both.
This one is likely to be a bit rambling so I apologize ahead of time.
How Has Art Been Made
For most of human history, art didn’t exist in the way we think of it today. There was no gallery. There was no market. There was no critic with a star rating system and a subscription count in the millions.
There was a patron.
The patron model is older than the Renaissance but the Renaissance is where most people know it from — the Medici family funding Michelangelo, the Church commissioning Raphael, wealthy aristocrats paying for portraits that would hang in their homes and signal their status to those who entered. Art was made because someone with resources wanted something made. The artist largely served the vision of the patron, with some caveats, and produced work that was simultaneously personal expression and functional object. A ceiling fresco was also theology. A portrait was also propaganda. A cathedral was also architecture.
The gallery came later — the idea that art could exist for its own sake, on a wall, available to whoever came through the door. The museum as we know it is a relatively recent invention. The notion that a work of art could be separated from its function, its patron, its original context, and presented purely as an object of contemplation — now that’s modern. It created a new kind of art and a new kind of audience.
Then came the commercial model. Film. Music. Television. Art produced at scale, distributed widely, consumed by millions, funded by the expectation of return. The commercial model didn’t kill art — it produced some of the most significant cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. But it introduced a pressure that the patron model and the gallery model largely didn’t have: the work had to perform. It had to sell. It had to reach enough people to justify its cost.
Games live almost entirely inside the commercial model. They are funded by publishers or investors who expect a return. They are sold as products. They are reviewed and rated and recommended or dismissed based on how many people enjoyed them. The patron exists — sometimes — in the form of an indie developer’s crowdfunding campaign or a studio’s creative autonomy on a passion project. The gallery exists — sometimes — in the form of a game that gets preserved, studied, written about seriously. But mostly, games are commercial objects. And that shapes everything about how they get made, how they get marketed, and how they get received.
What’s interesting is that this isn’t entirely unlike how most art has worked throughout history. The Sistine Chapel was commissioned. Shakespeare wrote for a paying audience. Beethoven had patrons. The commercial pressure on art is not new — what’s new is the scale of it, and the speed at which a game’s commercial performance is used to determine its artistic merit.
What Actually Is Art
Aristotle wrote that the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Sit with that for a moment in the context of games.
The outward appearance of a game is its graphics, its mechanics, its genre, its runtime. The inward significance is what it’s actually about — what it makes you feel, what it asks you to consider, what it leaves behind after you’ve finished playing. By Aristotle’s definition, a game that makes you feel the weight of a moral decision is art. A game that makes you understand grief through play is art. A game that builds a world so specific and so human that you miss it when you leave is art.
Games attempt this. Many fail. Some succeed in ways that are extraordinary. The definition doesn’t exclude them. It just holds them to the same standard as everything else.
Then there’s Kandinsky: “There is no ‘must’ in art, because art is free.”
To me, this is the one that matters most for how games get treated — by players, by critics, by the industry itself. There is a persistent expectation that a game must be considered good by the majority of players to be taken seriously as art. A game that divides opinion, that frustrates as many people as it moves, that prioritizes expression over accessibility — that game tends to get dismissed. Not enough people liked it. Metacritic score too low. User reviews too split. Marketing so small people might not even know it exists.
No other medium operates this way. Citizen Kane is considered one of the greatest films ever made and most people find it slow. Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels ever written and almost nobody finishes it. Andy Warhol’s work is in every major museum in the world and a significant portion of the people who encounter it think it looks like something they could have done on a Tuesday afternoon. None of that disqualifies it. Art is free. It doesn’t require a majority verdict.
Games, somehow, do. Or at least they’re expected to. And that expectation — more than any question of whether games can be art — might be what’s actually limiting the medium.
There’s the Roger Ebert quote. The film critic wrote in 2010 that “video games can never be art” and that “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.” He later half-retracted, admitting he should not have written about something he had so little experience with — though he added, in the same breath, “I still believe this, but I should never have said so.” Which is its own kind of fascinating. The most prominent critic of his time to weigh in on this question ended up apologizing for saying something he still believed.
Ebert’s argument rested largely on interactivity — the idea that because the player controls the outcome, the work can’t be art in the way a film or a novel is art. But interactivity is what makes games unprecedented as a medium, not what disqualifies them from it. A jazz musician improvising within a structure is interactive. A theatre audience that laughs at different moments changes the performance. The participation of the audience in the experience of a work is not new. Games just make it explicit.
How We Actually Treat Them
Here’s where the experiment gets, interesting, and maybe uncomfortable.
If games are art — and I believe they are, or can be, or regularly are whether we call them that or not — then the way the industry treats them is often a strange way to treat art.
Games get marketed almost exclusively on their spectacle. The trailer is a reel of the most visually impressive moments, the most explosive sequences, the features most likely to generate a pre-order. The inward significance — what Aristotle was talking about — is almost never the selling point. You rarely see a game marketed on what it will make you feel, on the questions it will leave you sitting with, on the experience of having played it rather than the experience of watching it being played in a highly edited two minute video.
Games also have a preservation problem that no other major art form has at this scale. Films get restored. Books get reprinted. Music gets remastered. Games go offline, lose server support, become unplayable on modern hardware, disappear from digital storefronts without notice. The industry has only recently begun to take seriously the idea that its own history is worth keeping. That’s not how you treat art. That’s how you treat inventory.
The discourse around games — both inside and outside the industry — tends to collapse the artistic and the commercial into a single question: was it good? Good meaning enjoyable, good meaning worth the money, good meaning recommended. Which is a fine question for a product. It’s an insufficient question for art. We don’t ask whether Pollock was enjoyable. We ask what it means, what it does, what it leaves behind.
And developers — the people actually making the things — often don’t talk about their work as art either. Not in public. Not in press releases. The language tends toward feature sets and innovation and player experience. The artistic ambition, when it exists, tends to be buried under the commercial necessity of communicating what the game is and why someone should buy it. Which is understandable.
Art Is Never Finished
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
Leonardo da Vinci almost certainly never said this. The quote is attributed to him constantly and the attribution is almost certainly wrong — it’s the kind of thing that gets attached to a famous person because it sounds like something a famous person would say, and then the attribution is broadcast into received wisdom and nobody checks.
Which is, if you think about it, a very game development thing. Games ship with known bugs. Features get cut in the final weeks. The version that reaches players is almost never the version the team imagined at the start — it’s the version that existed when the deadline arrived and the money ran out. The game gets abandoned in a very specific sense: not because it’s finished, but because it has to be.
The quote, whoever said it, describes the experience of making games more accurately than almost anything I’ve read about the medium. Every game is a negotiation between the vision and the possible. Every shipped game is a compromise. And every compromise contains, somewhere inside it, the shape of something that was trying to be art — whether or not anyone called it that.
Maybe that’s the most honest thing to say at the end of this experiment. Games are art the way most art is art — imperfect, incomplete, under constraints that the finished work doesn’t fully reveal. The question isn’t whether they qualify. The question is whether we’re willing to look at them that way. And whether the people making them are willing to say so out loud.