Are Video Games Art?

I would consider video games to be a form of art. Kellee Santiago from the TED talk defines art as “the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions," a definition found on Wikipedia. By this definition, I think video games can be considered art.

In the article “Less Talk More Rock”, they show how much more we get from images than just written or spoken word. It says that written and spoken word only appeal to your intellect while an image, sound, music, etc. appeals to your whole mind. These are all components of video games so they must appeal to our whole mind. Therefore, they should be considered art.

 

 

When most people think of art, they think of paintings like the Mona Lisa by Da Vinci or Starry Night by Van Gogh. These are considered art because our culture tells us they are. But who is to say that video games aren’t art as well? Someone had to draw the characters and the backgrounds. I’m sure several teams of people spent years developing the concepts and rules and trying to animate these drawings. In the article “Less Talk More Rock”, this is the rock phase of creating a video game, the most important part of the process according to the Superbrothers.

Both Santiago and Roger Elbert compare video games to cave drawings. They call them “chicken scratch”. In other words they are saying that they are very primitive art. They think that they evolve into better art. I’m sure there is room to grow for video games but I think that most modern video games are really impressive. They are so complex in their graphics, and concepts. These two pictures are from the two most recently made video games, Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The details in the background and on the characters are so remarkable and I think it is almost an insult to suggest that they are primitive.

 

 

 

Elbert considers filmmakers, painters, and composers as makers of art. But aren’t video games just a combination of all of these types of art? They use cinema to tell the story of the game and to create objectives and obstacles, they use graphics in the background, characters, etc., and they use music to get the emotions of the game across. And I also think that the way that they combine these things can be considered an art form as well. In my opinion it takes just as much creativity to create a video game as it takes to write a novel or a song.