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Should video games be considered art?

Jeffrey R. Young, contributor


Visitors to the exhibition can play a giant game of Super Mario Brothers (Image: Nintendo of America)

Masterpiece Mario, a new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, elevates Pac-Man and other beloved games to high art

DO VIDEO games count as art? The cultural stronghold of gaming - now a $25 billion industry - is undisputed, but the earliest game creators saw themselves primarily as computer programmers or engineers. And those among them who do see their work as art are seldom exhibiting on the gallery circuit.

An exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC may change that. The pixelated realms first brought to life in dark corners of convenience stores, pubs and bowling alleys are now on display in the same building as works by artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and John Singer Sargent.

In The Art of Video Games, museumgoers can admire images from 80 of the most aesthetically ambitious games in the industry's 40-year history. Those wishing for a fuller gaming experience can play 3-metre-high projections of Pac-Man or Super Mario Brothers.

The exhibition may mark a turning point. "The art world has never figured out how to deal with interactive work," says Ian Bogost, a video-game designer and author of Persuasive Games: The expressive power of videogames. "While you have lots of exhibits that use game technology, they're not games as such." He sidesteps the question of whether video games should be considered art, arguing instead that the medium is akin to fiction writing or cinema - some works earn the distinction of art, whereas others are simply meant as popular entertainment.

Curator Chris Melissinos, former chief gaming officer for Sun Microsystems, says that the growth and innovation in video games elevates them in public perception. "I think that's important to anyone who's ever been in their bedroom writing code or designing games and helped to get a message to the world." For the exhibition, he selected a pool of games and then the final cut was made by more than 100,000 online voters.

On the opening weekend, visitors to the exhibition sounded as though they were looking through old photo albums. "I used to build these beautiful cities," one person said before a display on SimCity. Museum director Elizabeth Broun says it is this interaction that sets games apart: "The great thing about video games is that the player completes the artwork."

Twelve-year-old Josh Scott said his favourite game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is both "really fun" and a work of art. "It's a masterpiece."

The Art of Video Games, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, until 30 September

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Do some of the more unique card packs, chess sets, or Mahjong tile sets count as art?
Few would hesitate to answer yes.

How is the artwork of a game any different to these physical games?
How is the storyline any different to that of a book?
How is the underlying programming any different to that which guides different styles of painting?


You have to laugh at the fact that whenever this "is it art" debate pops up in mainstream places, you get pictures of Mario or Sonic or somesuch.

Never any pictures of Planescape, Grim Fandango, the Half-Life franchise, The Void...


And this is why computer games will never be taken seriously by the mainstream. The newer generations of gamers have been born in a world where utter Hollywood trash like Modern Warfare II are considered "Great".


Is it art if the computer, starting from physics models and genetically evolution methods applied to using the internet as a world example, ends up generating a platform game very similar to Mario, essentially from nothing?. Or can art only be created by humans, even if that human mentality in teh next decade or so, is running in silico insted of in vivo?


Why do games have to be classed as art? Should they? Its a strange argument in my opinion. And who finally decides? Are gamers so insecure about the medium that they need to finally see it elevated to a higher status? If you design a new logo for coca cola, that's commercial art. If you graffiti a wall, that's guerrilla art. If you design a new chair, that's industrial art. When you get sucked into a world created from someones imagination, whether its a book, a game or a TV show, its some kind of art.

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