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It seems whenever I’m not posting my flimsy writing on this here blog, I’m talking about video games in some form or another.
And now I’m going to ramble about probably the most discussed subject in the history of America, one that many others have discussed before me and far more eloquently. Me talking about this subject is like going to be tossing a straw in a haystack while desperately hoping others consider it a needle to dig through and find.
But, what the hell. Let’s get into it.

Are games an art form?
In a word, no.

I know I probably set off a lot of alarms in your head, but listen to me. No, games are not an art in the same way children slapping crayons across paper couldn’t possibly be considered painting. Games are not an art in the same way preschoolers batting their sticks on PlaySkool xylophones couldn’t possibly be considered music. Games are not an art in the same way a toddler scribbling descriptions of his family vacation couldn’t possibly be considered writing.
What’s a similar theme with each of these examples?
All of them are mere infants hammering away like cavemen. But as these infants grow up. They can develop, learn, and grow, and the child once holding crayons now etches the next Mona Lisa. The boy that beat on his PlaySkool instrument composes his next masterpiece tediously over the piano. The girl that scribbled about her family vacations now has her novels going off eBay for over a hundred per.

Are games art? In a word, “no”. In two words, “not yet”. In numerous more words, games are not quite an artform because developers haven’t entirely grasped the concept of what makes art, art. Games are commercial first and foremost, which is all fine and dandy–but when this commercial form starts to strangle creativity and ideas in favor of churning out sequels, something is desperately wrong.
I’m looking at you, E3 2008.

CAN games be art? Most certainly. But what constitutes art?
Ah, that’s where we get a murky ground. The jury’s still out on this one. Is art something that develops the human race? There are magazines and books dedicated to this subject. Philosophers and sociologists debate endlessly as to what criteria there should be, or if there even are any.
Clarence Brown, RnB singer, once said “A lot of people play music for the wrong reasons. I never played to get women, though I had my share. I didn’t do it for the money, though it pays the bills. I realized early on that I could create something beautiful that would build love within the people who came out to hear it. Music is the best medicine in the world, man.”
Dictionary.com defines it as “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.”, among many other definitions. Wow, dictionary.com uses almost as many commas as I do!
For now, let’s give art the simple definition of media content that furthers or develops the mind or the soul, invoking emotion at its most primal. A simple and broad definition, intentionally so. But I digress.

Do games fit this definition? Several do. Whether something as simple as Mega Man 9 overriding all of your senses with utter nostalgia, or something as great as the magnum opus of Shadows of the Colossus.
But there’s several problems with this just off the top of my head:
1: Games that even TRY to be art are far and few in between (perhaps twice a year at best), as compared to movies which try to be art at almost every turn, and books which try to be art at so fast a pace you could throw a brick and hit one. And even then, games that TRY to be art aren’t always actually artistic, or good. Take a look at Postal 2, for example–the developers try to excuse all of the audacity within with just whimpers of “it’s art!”. Or perhaps I’m misremembering, give me a break.
2: Attempts at trying to be art are shunned by publishers. The current craze are “fun” games, and the current stigma is that games are still playtoys for children. Game designers with great ideas are just pushed off and told to make sequels, which is crippling for artistic creativity–and this is assuming that there’s frequent artistic creativity to begin with. Game designers and developers may have excellent ideas as to how to make gameplay fun, but they aren’t writers or artists and attempts at doing such fare little better than half the fare on fictionpress.com.
3: Attempts at selling art-games have dropped flat. This is for numerous reasons, part of which due to the increasing rise in game prices and the decline of the economy meaning less people willing to blow wads of money on strange and new things. What if it sucks? Then you’ve just wasted about 60/70 dollars and many many many places won’t let you return them for a full refund if even any at all. And, indeed, the current trend of gaming IS sucking, unlike the SNES/NES era where even many of the licensed games were gems to behold (i.e. Michael Jordan’s Chaos in the Windy City, Duck Tales). So, people go with what they know is fun…which I’ll admit is perfectly reasonable and logical, it just doesn’t bode well for art-games. Okami, Painkiller, Rez, Killer7, and Psychonauts absolutely tanked in sales. Even I myself have only played one of them, with a friend hounding me about the ear to get a certain other–Lord knows his infallible patience with my constant procrastination is clearly divine in nature.

So, where does this leave us? Not in a pretty place. Other essays would do something as simple as “GO OUT AND BUY THE ARTISTIC GAMES, YOU CONFORMIST BASTARDS. DO IT, FAGGOT!”, which while summing up the solution nicely fails to realize a gigantic hurdle.
I pointed out earlier that game prices are on the rise and the economy is on the collapse. With piracy as a hypothetical non-option, even though about 70% of this reading this (which means about three people) actively pirate games, games are EXPENSIVE. 60/70 dollars is NOT an exaggerated number, and people simply don’t have that kind of money to blow on a whim. Games ARE on a decline in quality lately as well, it seems Yahtzee wasn’t exaggerating in the least when he theorized about a “minimum shittiness quotient”–epic plays such as Metroid Prime 3, Smash Bros. Brawl, Devil May Cry 4, Gotcha Force, and No More Heroes (which apparently is an artsy game in and of itself) are bogged down by INCREDIBLY irritating flaws. Perhaps all of us are more critical than needed lately, though I moaned about that in an earlier post.
The fear of blowing money is a very real fear, and not something to be brushed aside lightly. Some people have over 500 dollars to blow on a whim! Others don’t. With movies, you can return them to get your money back. With paintings, you see what you get right away. With music, you’ve got a high chance of liking at least one song if you don’t like the five to eleven others.

Perhaps the problem doesn’t lie entirely with consumers.

In other news: Look, ma! I can do fancy formatting now!