The wrong contest
Games keep losing the but is it art
pageant, and we would gently suggest the problem is the pageant. Our position has a name — ludology — and a lineage: Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, the scholars who argued in the early 2000s that you cannot understand a game by treating it as a broken film with a joystick taped on.
A game is built from rules, systems, feedback, and play. Its native materials are not image and sentence but constraint and consequence. Tetris has no story, no message, no character, and it is a small perfect machine for a specific joy. Chess is not a lesser novel. Asking whether games are art is asking whether jazz is any good as ballet: the categories don’t map, and forcing them only flatters the older form.
The medium advocates want games admitted to the canon. We think they are begging for a seat at a table they could simply own. The formalists are closer to right than the advocates admit — interactivity does break authored vision — they just read that as a failure rather than the whole point. A form where meaning is generated by the player’s choices is not deficient art. It is a different thing that deserves its own criticism, its own canon, its own awards not borrowed from cinema.
Where we concede ground: It’s its own form
can curdle into a dodge — a way to never have to meet any standard at all.
What would change our mind: A serious body of game criticism, built on its own terms, that turns out to just be film criticism wearing a new hat.
Read the full synthesis: Are video games art?