Video games are art, but a strange art: their essence is transformation of the player, not description to the player. This makes meaningful criticism nearly impossible—you can point at the moon, but it’s not the moon, and once someone sees it, they no longer need the pointing.
Video games are art. But they are a strange art. They are an art without good art criticism, and they occupy a peculiar position in popular culture: universal and dominant, and yet almost invisible outside their medium, unable to escape (compare movie adaptations of books vs games). Why? Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind. Such transformations cannot be written down or filmed; if they could, they wouldn’t need to be a video game. So video game criticism, and broader pop culture use of video games, is hamstrung. Criticism is often limited to serving as advertising, a finger pointing to the moon in hinting at the transformation, exegesis, parasocial gossip, or technical critique of the craft.
Roger Ebert once claimed that video games cannot be art. At this point, most people, including myself, disagree: it is simply obvious that they can be.
But what kind of art are they? At the risk of seeming to say something hopelessly obvious, the distinctive feature of video game art is that it is interactive rather than passive.
For all the 10-hour-long YouTube explainers or blog posts or endless Let’s-play or the rise of the streaming industry (based largely on video game as filler) or meritorious attempts at creating an academic literature around games (eg. Well Played) or celebrity critics like Yahtzee Croshaw, I find no form of criticism as unsatisfactory as video game criticism. To read a review or an attempted critique of a video game is scarcely more satisfying than someone telling you about a dream they had once; presenting a video of cutscene compilations or a few minutes of gameplay doesn’t add much. Even a psychedelic trip report or a music album review is more interesting and gives one more insight.
At this point, we can’t blame the immaturity of the form. Video games have been one of the largest media in the world for decades, and we are at least 3 generations into the art form, and practically every child in First World countries like the USA has played games. (M.U.L.E for example was 42 years ago, in , and Tempest 44 years ago.) Billions of man-years have been spent creating, playing, and discussing games.
So, if they are art, and we are all extremely familiar with them and have great sophistication, and some of our most gifted young people have gone into games, why is it so hard to say what art they are or discuss things like what makes some great works of art but others just well-produced entertainment?
My answer, after all these years, is that a critique of a video game is indeed like someone telling you about a dream they had: “you had to be there—and doing it, like I was.”
The critical difference between a movie, novel, album, painting, sculpture etc., and a video game (and perhaps other critically neglected art-forms, like perfume, where reviews are so mutually contradictory and our vocabulary impoverished) is that the former is something you feel or experience, while the latter is something you do or are.
An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation. (Notably, the closest ‘passive’ art-forms I can think of in this respect are also some of the most demanding of their viewers, like The Ring opera cycles, in both intensity and time. Is it an accident that reviews of escape rooms or immersive theater never seem to successfully convey why you would want to bother?)
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