One of the questions that seems to be coming up a lot in the past few years is the question “Are games art?” or “Can games be art?” I have to admit that it’s not really a question I’m all that interested in. I like games. I enjoy games. That’s enough for me. It seemed to me like the “games are art” people were looking to get more respect for games by getting them classified as “art”. On the other side were people looking down on games, and dismissing them as “not art”. It’s almost as if people are looking to gain respect or denigrate games based on whether or not they can successfully categorize them as “art”. My own feeling on this is that games can be art, and there are some existing games that could be classified as art, but, at the same time, it seems like we’re raising the status of some existing games to higher respect than they deserve by calling games “art”. I also hate the whole mind-game of saying X is in category Y, and objects in category Y should be treated with [ respect / disdain / insert whatever emotion you want ].
Nevertheless, here’s an interesting talk by Kellee Santiago, of thatgamecompany giving a pretty good TED talk:
( via PennyArcade )