The save you couldn’t make
Near the end of Baldur’s Gate 3 — the game that swept the 2023 awards — a companion you have traveled with for a hundred hours asks you to do something you know is wrong, and the game lets you, or lets you refuse, and either way it remembers. Players have described sitting frozen at that prompt longer than they have sat over decisions in their own lives. The feeling did not come from watching a character choose. It came from being the one who had to.
That experience sits at the center of a question that sounds settled and isn’t: are video games art? A form that can implicate you, not merely move you, still gets shelved by serious institutions as something adjacent — interaction design, entertainment, a toy that learned to talk.
Four ways to take the question
The medium advocates say the answer is obvious and overdue: a form that produces grief, awe, and moral vertigo is art by any definition worth keeping, and the people withholding the word are guarding a border, not a standard. The formalists — heirs to a real aesthetic tradition that runs through critics like Roger Scruton — answer just as seriously that art requires an authored vision the audience receives, and that a work a player can wander out of, grind through, or break has traded authorship for agency and called the trade a triumph. They are not philistines. They are asking what is lost when no one is quite holding the wheel.
A third camp finds the whole argument quaint. The ludologists — the game-studies scholars who coined the term — say games keep losing the is it art
contest because it is the wrong contest: games are a distinct form built from rules, systems, and play, and judging them against the novel is like judging jazz by the rules of ballet. And the folk-culture defenders point at what everyone misses while arguing about museums: games are the most participatory creative medium in history, where a teenager mods a world, a two-person studio ships a masterpiece, and millions build inside Minecraft and Roblox. The art is not only in the finished object. It is in the making, handed to more people than any prior medium allowed.
The narrow crux
Nobody actually disputes that games can move people, or that they make money. The crux is tighter than that. Is interactivity a new road to authored meaning, a dilution of it, a separate art form entirely, or the return of art to amateur hands? The institutions are catching up either way. The open question is whether they are catching up to art, or to something the word was never built to hold.
Near the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, a companion asks you to do something wrong, the game lets you, and it remembers. No film can implicate you like that. Maybe are games art
is the wrong question — maybe it’s a new art the old word was never built to hold.
Perspectives:
- Medium advocates
- Formalists
- Ludologists
- Folk-culture defenders