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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Games
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I actually have come around to games not being art, but my argument is very different from the vast majority of people.
Games aren't art in the same way a piano isn't art and a guitar isn't art and a paintbrush isn't art. It's an instrument to create art, and while we can engage with pedantry over whether pianos, guitars, and paintbrushes can themselves be art, nobody seriously considers them art beyond "good craftsmanship automatically becomes art." It's the music being played by the piano and the painting being painted with the paintbrush that is art.
So what is the game equivalent of music and paintings? It's essentially every single instance of the game being played by the player. That is the art. The any% speedrun is the art. The speedrunner is the artist. The actual game is the instrument in which the speedrunner the artist brings forth their art the speedrun into the world.
It's stunning how games map so well with musical instruments, especially with PC games vs pianos:
game dev = composer
game engine = physical construction of the piano
level design = sheet music
saving = playing the piece at a particular measure instead of the very beginning
mods = writing on the sheet music
speedrunning = playing the piece with a much faster tempo because you're bored playing the same piece over and over again at the same andante tempo
sound and visual from the game = sound and vibrations from the piano
keyboard and mouse = keyboard and pedal
gaming chair = piano bench
videogame player = piano player
"I play videogames" = "I play the piano"
You could probably set up a rhythm game played on a PC keyboard and a piano program also played on a PC keyboard with identical keystrokes and identical music being played. But the miscategorization would have people believe that the rhythm game itself is the art and not just an instrument like the piano program.
I think musical instruments are works of art in and of themselves.
It really doesn't map well at all and many of those things can be art. Saying composers or song writers aren't artists would certainly be a take.
if games are musical instruments then the act of playing games is musical theater. ergo its art
under that paradigm, a game isn't someone playing the game. A paint by numbers isn't a painting until you paint it.
i'm also dubious of calling the emergent thing art, we participate in games in a way that's unusual and impossible for other kinds of media. A hymn is art, singing it in the congregation of a white church doesn't feel like participating in art.
Music is art but singing as part of a larger communal experience isn't? At some point you're just idealizing art as something detached from the everyday human experience. What is it, really, that made you detract here? The lack of mystique in an everyday social environment or the baggage that made you feel the need to clarify that 'white' churches don't feel artistic?
Give it a hundred years or two and you'll have experts on the reconstruction of the tackiest most commercialized megachurches known to humanity - and it won't be just because of the historical importance involved. It will be a part of a larger attempt to understand the culture of a people, the americans of the 21st century, which will include aesthetics, musicology and so on.
it's not baggage i just didn't want to step in something or speak on what i don't directly experience. Maybe somebody with a different background feels the same way, maybe it's exotifying for me to make a definitive pronouncement.
i've done music in several other contexts. the white congregation and the ritual ingests art and spits out something else that is definitely not art.
Movies are gymnastics, Video games are parkour
https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1938/studies/ch03.htm
Would this mean chess is an artistic medium and a well played game of chess would be "art"? If so, could we extrapolate that out to board games, and if not, why not? If so, is there a limit on what kind of game could and couldn't be used to "create art" in this sense you are using the term?
no this is useless maximalism. if art is anything at all then i have no use for a category.
that doesn't mean non-art things are without merit or worth. they're just something else we could more usefully understand without cramming them into a box they don't fit.
I haven't really seen the case being made here that the category art is useful beyond being a tool of oppression.
we have to validate non-art things to break them from seeking the label as validation.
elegant game rules or an ikea table or a video poker machine not being art doesn't diminish the worth of those things, and convincing someone those things are art doesn't elevate their worth.
The designers of IKEA furniture are often pretty highly regarded. The furniture itself is like a postcard you buy from the museum gift shop.
Game rules are an interesting case because copyright protection for game mechanics is very limited. And it would be absolutely disastrous for the industry if there was strong IP protection for IP rules. This comes from ideas not being copyrightable.
Of course IP is not the same as art but I think there is enough of an overlap in how bourgeois society decides what is art and what is original work.