Why Games Are Art

Every few years someone reopens the argument: are video games really art? I make game environments for a living, so my answer is obviously biased — but stick with me, because I think the question itself is more interesting than the yes/no.

The challenge that lit the fuse

In 2010 the critic Roger Ebert published an essay bluntly titled "Video games can never be art". His argument, roughly: art is authored and fixed, but games hand control to the player, have win/lose states, and are played rather than contemplated — so they can't be art the way a painting or a film is.

It stung because a lot of people admired Ebert, and because he wasn't entirely wrong about some games. But he was answering the wrong question. He treated "art" as a members-only club with a velvet rope, when the more useful question is: does this thing do what art does?

What art actually does

Strip away the gatekeeping and art is a fairly simple thing: a made object, shaped by human intention, that communicates feeling or meaning to someone else. A cave painting. A symphony. A film. A poem. It's authored, it's deliberate, and it moves you.

By that definition the "games can't be art" argument collapses almost immediately — because games are drowning in authored intention.

Everything you see was decided by an artist

Here's the part outsiders miss. A game world doesn't happen; it's built, centimetre by centimetre, by people whose entire job is aesthetic decision-making. As an environment artist I choose where the light falls, how worn a wall is, what colour the fog is at dusk, which silhouette reads against the sky. A concept artist dreamed the place first. An art director set the palette and mood. A composer scored the feeling. Animators gave weight to a footstep.

Nothing in a good game is accidental. That is the definition of authored intention — the exact thing Ebert said games lacked. When you walk into a room in a game and feel dread, or awe, or homesickness, that feeling was designed and placed there on purpose, the same way a cinematographer frames a shot.

Interactivity isn't a disqualifier — it's a new dimension

The real objection under Ebert's essay is interactivity: the player messes with it, so it isn't fixed. But that's not a flaw, it's a new artistic tool no other medium has.

Architecture is art, and you walk through it. Theatre changes a little every night. Interactive art has existed in galleries for decades. Games take authorship and let it unfold around you — the art isn't only the image on screen, it's the arc of your experience moving through an authored space. That's not "less than" a painting. It's a different, younger, and genuinely novel form.

Games like Journey, Shadow of the Colossus, Gris, Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium aren't art despite being playable — they're art that could only exist because they're playable. Loneliness you feel by actually walking a vast desert. Guilt you carry because you struck the blow. No other medium can do that.

The institutions already settled this

While the internet argued, the art world quietly moved on:

In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art acquired video games into its permanent design collection — Pac-Man, Tetris, Myst and more — and has kept adding to it.
The same year the Smithsonian American Art Museum ran "The Art of Video Games," a major exhibition treating games as a visual art form with its own history.
Games have art directors, are studied in universities, win awards judged as an art form (the BAFTA Games Awards sit alongside BAFTA's film and TV honours), and are collected, preserved and exhibited.

You don't have to like any individual game to notice that the cultural verdict has been in for over a decade.

"But games are commercial and collaborative"

The strongest remaining objection is that games are made by big teams for money, so they're products, not art. Fair — except that's true of nearly every film ever made, and cinema is uncontroversially art. Cathedrals were commissioned. The Sistine Chapel was a job. Collaboration and commerce have never disqualified anything from being art; they're just how ambitious art usually gets made. A game can be a product and a work of art at the same time, exactly like a film.

And plenty of games aren't big-budget — some of the most artful things I've played were made by one or two people pouring themselves into it.

Why it matters to me

I get to spend my days deciding how a place should feel, then building it so a stranger, years later, in another country, feels it too. That is the oldest job in art — the cave painter's job — with new tools. When someone stops in a level I helped make just to look at the view, that's the whole thing working.

So: are games art? Some are shallow, some are profound, most are somewhere in between — exactly like paintings, films and novels. The medium is capable of art, it is full of art, and the people who make it are artists. The only thing the "are games art?" debate ever really revealed is how nervous a young art form makes an old establishment.

They got over film. They got over photography. They'll get over this too — most of them already have.

Made a game world you love? Tell me about it on ArtStation or Instagram.