Though the topic is regularly beaten into the ground, the discussion whether video games are art depend on insider versus outsider relationships. People involved in the video game industry or those directly enamored by the narrative structure of video games, their stylistic choices, and their use of imagery vehemently defend the status of video games as art. In comparison, those familiar with more traditional mediums may discard the concept of video games as art.

This article is not about rehashing major, simple, used-for-Youtube arguments. This article is about thinking beyond that. This article gets into the ugly.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything other than the debate is more complex than a wikipedia entry have you think. The topic depends on semantics, works, and media portrayal, but also being lost in a lot of translation.

It’s a challenge of ontology of both art and video games, and it can get quite thorny. These are the reasons that are rarely mentioned, and even more rarely touch upon discussion in most video game media, because they’re hard questions to approach. They don’t have clear answers, but they’re crucial to evaluating the medium.

These are the complex reasons. These are the reasons you’d immediately say ‘this is stupid’, until you read a hundred books on Kazimir Malevich and think ‘wait a minute’. If there was a Professor in Video Game-ology, these are the types of arguments he’d write journals about. These are the arguments that you can confound and contest in a drunken stupor at a bar. This is the suck.