"Video Games Aren't Art"

A pretty interesting article on video games, and whether they are “art”..

The Last of Us is a truly great game. Many have written about it, including me. I recommend it very highly.

But here’s what bugs me. The cutscenes of The Last of Us told a very good story. Those cutscenes, all together, would make a solid B+ zombie movie. But when bloggers wrote about it, they treated the actual game part of The Last of Us as this sort of useless, irritating, vestigial limb.

Without the gameplay, the action, the battle, the fear, the dying again and again, The Last of Us is just an above-average zombie movie. The true greatness of the experience is in the sneaking and the stabbing and the shooting and the dying. (LOTS of dying.)

If one restricts “art” to what the postmodern crowd calls art these days, then yes, why would games stoop to being “art”?

I can see why Artists look down on what we do. They have no choice. They certainly can’t compete with us. What we do is irresistible. Authors and playwrights are dinosaurs, and we’re throwing the asteroids. We’ll let Film and TV survive. For now.

My biggest problem? What he describes in the article, that games provide, is art, adapted to a new medium. No, it will never be a movie or a book any more than either is a painting or a statue. But we’ve so impoverished our language by redefining things that even as he rails against art and dead mediums, what he praises is the beauty, immersion, and craft of… good art.