Are All Videogames Art?

Videogames are, at least mostly, considered a type of art. The question is whether all videogames are considered art or is there a distinction between them? Is it a matter of some games being art and others not, or is it merely the difference between some being better examples of art? I tend to agree with the latter. In general, they all have artistic qualities to them, whether it’s in the story or in the graphics; However, some are better examples than others. Just because a horse may not be fully healthy and may have deformities, it doesn’t mean that the horse is not a horse. What it means is that it’s not the best example of a horse.
There are some games with evident artistic intent. Games like Okami, where the art is done almost like a painting come to life, especially when the Japanese writing brush is used to alter the landscape, itself. The use of color and the overall feel draw the player in and being able to interact with the pictures on the screen reinforce this idea of playing a piece of art. Everything from the backgrounds, characters, and story were taken into account to give a beautiful and engaging piece of artistic presentation.
However, there are some games that choose between story or graphics and decide to focus on one particular part more than another. Would that make a game less artistic? Perhaps in some areas. In games that focus more on storytelling than on necessarily pretty pictures, they remind me more of novels. Some books contain pictures scattered through them and although the pictures are rarely very that awe inspiring, the focus is on the novel’s story. A lot of RPGs fall into this category, focusing more on storytelling than showing the story. For instance, recently I replayed Final Fantasy 8 for the PlayStation. At the time, the graphics were the best they could be on the technology, but replaying them nearly ten years later made it look quite poor compared to what we’re now used to. But that lack of graphics quality didn’t detract from the enjoyment of following the story laid out. The storyline was a piece of art, and that is what endures through the years and fond memories.
In contrast, there are some games that rely quite heavily on the graphics engine rather than any extensive storytelling. The example that comes to mind is the Metroid series. The newer games have been created with a lot of detail. Just some of the detail revolves around the weather effects on the visor, which can obstruct your vision as if you’re walking through fog, or water droplets obscuring your vision. However much detail was put into the graphics, there really wasn’t a lot of extensive improvements on the basic premise behind the series: get off the planet before it blows up. There’s more plot details that keep the player engaged enough to keep continuing, but the graphics is what draws the player into the environment. Once the player is engrossed in the environment and the feel for the particular level, there needs little motivation other than to get from point A to point B in order to defeat the boss.
At the bottom rung of the ladder lays a great many games that were made for the sole purpose of making money from the pure sale of the game. Granted almost all games are made with the purpose of making money, but some are put together with little thought to the artistic quality of it. More of the notorious games like this rely on marketing through the name association of the particular game, such as Batman (sans Arkham Asylum), Superman, MegaMan, and supposed sequels of older games. The graphics can be ok, but many times they’re glitchy like characters walking through walls or getting stuck within the structures. The storylines are often uninspired and are either shallow enough to be unable to support the action, or are overly complicated to the point that the player loses connection with the entire game. Does that mean that these games are not Art? Not necessarily, it just may mean it’s not very good art. It’s like a caricature: it’s made with some artistic intention but you’ll probably never expect it to be a masterpiece.
It’s not so much whether a game is art or not, but what kind of art. Just like the artist, the piece of work is often made with specific intentions and the decision is whether those intentions were successful or not. Some games will be amazing pictures of storylines or beautiful worlds we could hope to visit. It’s a lot like walking into a book store. You can find a lot of very good books but only a few are classics and a vast number of them are barely coherent. Much of art is the intention of what the artist wants to be perceived and enjoyed of any particular piece. The last little bit is the success of those intentions and how well they convey what was originally meant to be. Some are good, some are bad, but all are art.