Video Games Do Guilt Better Than Any Other Art

The idea that motion pictures can be works of art has been around since the 1920s, and it hasn’t really been disputed since. It’s easy to see why—cinema shares characteristics with theater in terms of acting, direction, music, set design, narrative, and so on. Now we have whole academic departments dedicated to film appreciation, to understanding the emotional and intellectual responses—deep feelings of awe and reverence, among others—that movies can elicit.

But video games aren’t assumed to be as artistic as cinema or theater, if it all. In 2010, for instance, the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote an titled, “Video Games Can Never Be Art.” But with the increasing sophistication, and variety, of video games today, it’s becoming more and more clear that they are forms of art; or, at least, they evoke many as “artists.” (When their jobs have such titles as set and lighting design, music composition and performance, acting, animating, and painting, what else should we call them?)