Some people think that video games, being interactive, have in some way less value artistically than mediums that are seen as more static. Some people think that the interactivity of video games is actually the exact thing that makes them so potent artistically, possibly even more potent than other non-interactive mediums.
My opinion is that the interactivity of video games is unique, and it's interesting, but it doesn't seriously alienate video games from other forms of art; for all purposes and all intents, video games are basically as good as any other art form, and vice versa.
If you really think about it, if video games were actually so self-determined as to fundamentally change the experience of playing them from person to person, then it'd be really tough to have critical conversations about them.
But it's not-- the conversations that people who play video games have are basically as varied as the conversations people have about books, and they end in as much of a consensus (or lack thereof) as any conversation about PARASITE, or TITANIC. The ability to form consensus isn't really that important anyway. Some people don't understand Michelangelo's DAVID. Some people do. It's a guy made out of a rock. Pretty neat! Possibly beautiful. I've never seen it in person.
I don't really understand the argument that games are less intersubjectively understandable than a sculpture. Have you ever asked two different people about a sculpture?
Nobody knows what's going on at all.
The conversation is total anarchy. It's like the aftermath of a civil war where both sides are trying to justify how they think the government should be set up and they're pretending like their ideas are somehow objective, like when Hammurabi said that some people are just born to be slaves because that's what God said.
Games aren't any worse than any other form of art, and they also aren't any better, but we should continue to tell people that they're actually the greatest form of art ever conceived because we need to make up cultural ground.
Happy Monday everyone.