Everyone’s a maker now
In 2009 a Swedish programmer released an unfinished game about digging blocks. Minecraft has since sold more than 300 million copies, and the most remarkable things in it were built by players — the working redstone computers, the to-scale cathedrals, the kid who taught himself engineering because he wanted a roller coaster that actually ran. That’s the part of this argument nobody at the museum is having.
We think the most interesting thing about games is not whether a curator will hang one on a wall. It is that they are the most participatory creative medium in human history. A two-person studio ships something that outshines Sony’s biggest budget. A modder rebuilds a game into one its makers never imagined. Millions log into worlds where the tools of creation sit in everyone’s hands. For most of history, art was something a few people made and the rest received. Games quietly flipped that.
The formalists mourn lost authorship. We’d gently note that their golden age of the lone visionary was also an age when almost nobody else got to make anything. The medium advocates fight for the prestige object and the ludologists theorize the form, while a fourteen-year-old in her bedroom builds a world a million strangers will walk through. We keep wondering why that isn’t the headline.
Where we concede ground: Most of what gets made this way is derivative, abandoned, or junk. Folk creativity always is, and the gems are rare.
What would change our mind: If the participatory tools mostly produce consumers who feel like creators rather than any genuinely new work.
Read the full synthesis: Are video games art?