Well, I've argued to the contrary for years, and the Smithsonian is finally backing those who agree with me. Video games do constitute art. Games frequently cited to the contrary like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Gears of War, etc. are exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself. I would argue that even those constitute art, but I'll address that later. Let's take photography. That's art, is it not? Of course it is. Almost no one would argue otherwise. Film is the same. Anyone who's seen The Godfather or Sparticus knows that film is an artform. What about pornography, though? I mean straight up hardcore porn. Is that art? Because art is such an ambiguous term, there will always be those who argue that it is, but most people would say no, it's not. Porn is the exception to film and photography, not proof that those media aren't art. Video games is just another, much newer, medium of art.
If you really look at it, video games, like film, is an artform that is actually a compilation of other artforms.
The Legend of Zelda games have, in my opinion, the most remarkable, breathtaking musical scores of any game series, and it's better than most movies. The Song of Time alone proves that.
In the realm of visual art, Mass Effect 2's image of the Illusive Man at the Cerberus headquarters with the red giant out his window is a haunting but beautiful image.
The literary art portion of video games is simply telling a story. The two series I've already mentioned - Mass Effect and Legend of Zelda - do this wonderfully, but for this example, I'm going to choose a game that never got the attention it deserved and tells its story in such detail that it's almost too in-depth.
Shenmue was a Dreamcast title that, at the time of development, was the most costly video game ever produced. Its lead developer intended it to be an "interactive movie" with its depth. You can interact with almost everything, you have to wait for time to pass as it would in a real day, and there are no in-game clues or tutorials to help you solve the mystery of your father's murder. Shenmue took video game storytelling to a depth rarely seen before or since. It's a shame that America never gave it the popularity this masterpiece deserved.
Video games have also incorporated a style of art rarely ever recognized - the work of the developers. Game developers, aside from the story, graphics, and audio in a game, often do a lot of work to work around system limitations.
Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System is an early example of this. The developers of Phantasy Star, by manipulating the cartridge's capacity, were able to fit significantly more data on a single cartridge than most developers knew was possible for the Master System. Phantasy Star is the Master System game with the largest amount of data on a cartridge because of the unique solution these developers formulated.
Another example of this same sort of ingenuity, this time in the realm of graphics, is Conduit 2 for the Nintendo Wii. The Conduit, during its early alpha stages, was mistaken at E3 for an Xbox 360 game being developed. It didn't live up to its graphical hype upon release, but Conduit 2 did. Obviously, given the Wii's hardware, it was never truly possible for the finished product to resemble an Xbox 360 game, but the developers at High Voltage did more with the Wii's graphical hardware than most gamers thought possible, proving that even without powerful hardware and high definition graphics, some effort and creative thinking can still produce beautiful visuals.
Also sporting graphics that no one thought possible for the system was Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Although released for both Wii and Gamecube, the game - graphics included - were developed on and for the Gamecube. The Wii version is an exact port with added motion controls. The Gamecube, whose true capabilities were rarely used despite being the second most powerful system of its generation, went out with a bang by delivering the most beautiful graphics that the system had ever seen. Most people don't believe me when I tell them that Twilight Princess, even the Wii version, uses Gamecube graphics.
I've made my case for video games' being art. So what is art? Webster defines art as "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects." Let's take Starcraft 2 for our example this time. Starcraft was released in 1998; Starcraft 2 was released in 2010, and development began in 2003. Spending seven years developing one game? I would definitely call that "conscious use of skill and creative imagination," especially since Halo, one of the most successful FPS series, is based on Starcraft.
Art is always a subjective thing; it has no objective criteria or qualifications. What is art to one person may be garbage to another, so the question posed by the this blog is, if we want to get technical, unanswerable. If we want to get philosophical, anything man-made is art. Let's keep is less complex, though; do video games meet the basic, widely accepted definitions of art? I think I've made the case that it does. Especially since the Smithsonian has open acknowledged it as an artform, I think that this argument will soon disappear.
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