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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Games
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Yes, and your position is the position of the article.
My "position" is that the article shouldn't exist at all.
did you read the article
Oh boy.
Video Games are containers for art, but at the end of the day they tend to be a commodity.
I appreciate the serious response, but I was just being silly and parroting what everyone else was doing, because you clearly had already read the article.
So are movies not art, because most are just a commodity?
Music? Books?
Like how does that not apply to every art form in late stage capitalism?
It does, that's the point. "Games" as a concept aren't art, they are a medium that contains art, or facilitates art. Games, movies, and books are all the same, with just different levels of abstraction from the base art.
I think the whole argument here is that the commodity form of art should not be considered art because it is the reification of the artistic labor it contains that has taken the commodity form.
I think the whole "games are art" argument of that era was flawed, and there was a point to be made there, since that position was ignoring the specific individual artistic labor that goes into them.
Stuff like shader authoring, texture optimization, sound engineering, writing, voice acting, etc. are all unique forms of art that come together in a gallery that is a game. You don't call a gallery art.
But a video game is a whole. It’s surely made of many many small parts, that are artistic in their own right. But only the finished, whole, piece is the art.
And being more or less commercial isn’t what makes art art.
Art is the way to communicate an abstraction, and transport the viewer to it. It’s an exercise in empathy, of the artist to communicate it and the audience to experience it.
a gallery certainly can itself be art, either on its own or in conjunction, but "lol we hung some paintings up in a room", like some of the exhibitions i've been to, definitely isn't art by default.
Agreed, but it doesn't have to be. That's how I see games and movies (books are a bit more difficult since they tend to be a single author and not a cooperative effort of thousands of artists).
Saying that games or movies as a commodity form is art is nonsense to me because it's always case by case. Hell, even the most capitalist form can contain art, Blender exists because the creators made it for an advertisement back in the 90s. That advertisement wasn't art, but the system used to make it became art.
Basically the whole argument is pointless and you don't need to be all or nothing since each work can be approached piecemeal as well as on its whole.
A factory making cars isn't making art, but the component parts of that process contain art. Because art is a very individual thing, and can only be collectively meaningful as art when the participants in the project are operating outside framework of capitalist labor relations. Specifically because at all stages of that capitalist process, the art of individual contributors is reified and killed to construct the commodity.