Why are Videogames Art?

(The featured image is a painting from canvasandpaints.blogspot.com and apparently made with Jonathan Blow’s permission for the Child’s Play auction. I’m not sure what the artist’s name is.)

If you’re visiting this site you probably agree with James Portnow’s assertion that games are an artistic medium; I’d even go so far as to say you intensely agree, as I do. We’ve played the Braids, Portals, and Deus Exs that the mainstream media isn’t capable of understanding beyond the threat they allegedly pose to the children of America. We’ve experienced the uncommunicable essence of what makes games what they are and we know, intimately, that what they contribute to our lives cannot be found anywhere else. We’re sold.

But we need to step back for a second: accepting games as an artform opens up a lot of other questions that are going to need to be addressed at some point, even if only briefly.

We share a lot in common, conceptually, with comics. That’s a medium that’s been pushing for artistic acknowledgement much longer than us and has experienced even greater levels of controversy. But I want you to think about this for a second: comics as a medium have much less diversity in their craft compared to games. I should clarify that I’m a comics fan myself and am in no way saying they are inferior to games nor any of the other negative connotations of that previous statement; I literally just mean that if you were to look at every conceivable example of what could be defined as “comic” it would be much clearer than the question of what is and isn’t considered a videogame.

For the public to acknowledge that comics are a true artform unto themselves they would have to accept that visual art and the written word — two already established artforms — become another artform when they are combined. The frustrating thing for people like Scott McCloud is how trivial this distinction would be compared to how ridiculous art critics seem to think it is.

Accepting comics as a true artform wouldn’t involve anything other than the notion that two artforms combined make another. That is the only thing they require to be invited to the party.

But what about videogames? Well that’s where we hit the crux of this article.