I tried to broach this subject for the first time pretty soon after I got my first home console since my NES, and I think I have a different perspective now. Here's my original post from a year ago, and then I'll follow it with some thoughts that I have having done more reading and more analysis:
I got a Wii right around Christmas time, and I love it. There's a healthy mix of really easy pick-up-and-play type games that are good for showing off to your friends. There's fun multiplayer games. There's serious one player adventures like Metroid Prime 3 that have interesting stories and well conceived worlds. There's really interesting games that really wouldn't have a market outside of the Wii, like Deadly Creatures or Zack and Wiki. All in all, a great purchase and I definitely think that it's doing way more interesting things than your average HD, guns-a-blazin', Final Fantasy 29 spewin' Xbox 360s or PS3s.
And I like to read about videogames too. Roger Ebert, who is pretty much my hero, said that videogames are definitely not art in the same way that music, paintings, sculptures, films, books, performance pieces, etc. are. And I happen to agree with him.
For one, videogames are bound by their need to have utility. In a lot of ways, they're more like a toy than legitimate art.
I've always been able to define art as such: art challenges expectations, while entertainment meets them. Because all videogames have to be played on a console of some sort (I'm not going to go into PC gaming, because frankly that's even more sad – there's not a major publisher in charge of overseeing all games published on the system, yet there's very little innovation. World of Warcraft, anyone?), the console makers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) have the final say on what goes on their system. They're looking out for their bottom line, so all games that are published have to follow, more or less, the same formula that has existed for games for the last 15 or so years.
Games always have to be about "doing something." This really forces games to follow a rigid design pattern, whereas with, say a projector-based performance art piece, you could interact with it, or not and simply observe it. "Fun" also plays a factor here, because this means that expectations need, to some degree, be met for the game to be considered successful.
There is also no way to successfully "criticize" a game. Literature has literary theory, art has art history, film has film studies, but there's no such school of criticism for games. To some degree, film theory or literary theory could be applied, but in no cases are games designed to deal with this type of theory – indeed, for instance, if you were to apply Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction to any videogame, the game would seem to revel in its hierarchical imbalances. Take Mario, for example, a game that has often been used as the flagship of videogaming and due to its abstract and iconic design, the closest to "art." It LOVES that it's about good vs. evil, David vs. Goliath, males saving females, etc.
I'm going to link to an extremely interesting article on the history of racism, homophobia, and gender problems in video games here. This article is really what got me thinking about all this.
And as a final note: the general public considers a "hardcore" (read: "good") game to be one that is filled with action, gore, and a "mature" bent. But this is hardly the qualifier that any other medium would use to determine what makes it "good."
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OK, well, I was an angry young man then wasn't I? I definitely have changed my views on a few things since I wrote that post. Namely, I totally ignored indie games, which if you've read Christian's article, I absolutely should not have. Second, my description of what art is is pretty douchy. I think what I should have done is made the distinction between games that exist as products and games that consciously attempt to be art, which having played a lot more games since I wrote the article, I've found more of. I'll always consider games by, say, Suda 51, or Tim Schaeffer's Grim Fandango as art, but now more than ever I've been finding games that have been changing my perceptions on what can be considered art; games like BioShock and the Bit.Trip series (again!). I think my article The Problem of Interactivity covered a lot of ground that I tried to cover back when I wrote this article, in much more erudite form.
And apologies to Christian and Johnny about the Xbox comments. They were pretty… misinformed? Well, I still do kind of think that they're making way too many games with baditude, but you can't really write off an entire console for that.