Game Aesthetics: An introduction

There is a problem concerning videogames that seems to discredit the intelligence of human beings to understand the complexity of a platform such as video games: the question of whether or not games are consider art.

Many websites, blogs and some books even work on this question. We see gamers desperate to find a ground for asserting that the videogame is an art indeed, and people "parents.type" who use their knowledge to try to discredit the practice of gaming. But almost no one takes the question seriously. Why? Because it is absurd.

The question "Are video games art?" Is equivalent to asking if the cinema is art, or if the table (a canvas with paint on it) is an art, or ask if a block of marble manipulated by man is art. Obviously you can not answer a question like this, unless the answer is: not necessarily.

That is, if we consider these the range of possible objects created on a platform (game, film, painting, marble), we can safely say that everything made of marble can be an art, or that everything that is placed inside a wooden box on a canvas is an art, or that everything is recorded in 35mm film is art. Obviously we can not say that everything programmed to be interactive and possessing certain images to be art.

I have no doubt, however, that some games are really artistic in some different ways. What happens is that we can consider video games as a collective creation from the beginning, and in this sense, they resemble the movies in a particular quality: they have more than one item represented as art. Angel Melgar, for example, tells us that the game is definitely an art, and though "debtor of the aesthetic tradition of other arts, leverages the unique capabilities of the digital medium in which it moves to adapt to new perspectives" This is interesting also because it is an argument, a discussion that is not yet over and that not only takes into account the possibility of thinking about videogames as art, but -something happened to film theory also- seeks to define if they have autonomy with regard to other forms of art from which supposedly depends. So the question for the aesthetics of videogames, is not so much to confirm whether or not they are art, but: What kind of art occurs in the game? And beyond: Is there an art that can only happen in games?

In the coming days I'll explain a bit, with some examples, how to understand the art of videogames from different perspectives. The idea is to achieve, through small comparative studies, detaching the art of videogames dependence on cinema, his closest friend in the world of art on the screen.