I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.
Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.
> And so, good art game criticism can only be understood by those who have no need of it; a hand may point at the moon, but once you see the moon, you no longer need to look at the hand.
This seems to be the primary point of the article, rather than anything specific to video games. The author argues that art can be created in any medium, but there is a difference between whether critical analysis of the content is transformative in its own right.
> An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation.
While the author goes on to say that "passive" art forms tend not to have this property, they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
> Game art criticism only works when it conveys the transformativeness on the player (ie. reviewer/critic) ... Given the commercial realities, perhaps this cannot be fixed, and we must accept that timely reviews are ultimately the “Cliff Notes” of games.
Also true for "passive" media.
Critical analysis is not supposed to be a replacement for first-hand experience of any "art" in any medium.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
Your point still stands though.
ranger207•1h ago
augusteo•52m ago
When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.
I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.
Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?
Crespyl•38m ago
When someone watches a movie, or engages with any other art form, are they "transformed"?
Games are certainly a unique art form, but I reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary", or that the experience of playing a game can't be discussed to just as rich a level as, say, the experience of watching a movie, or listening to a piece of music. Ultimately, to fully engage in a dialogue about a work of art, you need to experience that work in its intended form, this should be obviously true of music, movies, painting, and games. But to set games apart as somehow less able to be fully discussed is nonsense.
fuzzy_lumpkins•24m ago
manuelmoreale•19m ago
That’s an odd bar to cross in order to define art, if that’s what you mean there. I’ve seen plenty of art in my life (not hard to do living in Italy) and most of it didn’t change me as a person. It was still art though.