Video Games are Art

SPOILERS: Eternally Us

For me, art is among the least expendable concepts to have ever existed. Would life be worth living without the emotions that are supplemented by those mysterious paintings? The stories and messages you take from the music of the world? What would life be without all of this?

All forms of art are spectacular in their own right, and I don’t believe any one art form should overshadow another. That being said, I think one of the most underappreciated forms of art is actually the one that maximizes our ability to view and marvel at art in all of its shapes and sizes: video games.

Think about it, what do you do when you look at a painting or a sculpture? It probably evokes a feeling in you, or you acknowledge in awe the amount of effort and thought that one person put into this one object. What about a good book? You peer into the mind of the author, watching their characters interact with one another, becoming more and more fascinated with the story at every turn of the page or swipe of the screen. Speaking of screens, what about movies? How cool is watching a story happen before your eyes and, if you’re a nerd like myself, watching out for all the thematic and symbolic connections made through the dialogue and events?

Things like books, movies, and paintings have this basis of showcasing the wondrous, impactful, and sometimes frightening power of the human imagination and feeling. My argument, which I’m finally getting into, is that video games are able to do this and so very much more.

There are a plethora of options video games can use to appeal to folks. They can have an emotional appeal; Infinite Grace Games’s Eternally Us shows us the story of a young girl looking for her best friend, who in reality has passed away. Each level is designed to represent the different stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Needless to say, it’s a heavy-hitting play through, and watching this beautiful game unfold as you play wrenches your heart as a poem would.

Do I even need to touch on how video games feature stories? The Uncharted series? The Paper Mario franchise (the first three, anyway)? It tends to be incredibly important to genres like Adventure and RPG games. Some games like Community College Hero take the form of a completely interactive, second-person novel, making the story itself the entire game.

But what makes video games so fascinating as an art form is their ability to combine all of these aspects together, allowing them to accommodate the interests of almost everyone.

Look at Cuphead, for example. At a glance it’s a simple run-and-gun platformer game, but as you look closer, perhaps you’ll notice the flawless integration of 1930s animation, the over-the-top, everyday items-turned-characters, the added touch of a film grain during the entirety of the game, a “level complete” screen that could trick you into thinking you just finished a Looney Tunes episode, and the goal of acquiring souls for the devil that you know only old cartoons could get away with. This game captured the essence of classic cartoon nonsense absolutely perfectly, paying flawless homage to the roots of digital animation, and people liked that!

What about the PlayStation 2's War of the Monsters? I’d wager that any monster movie fanatic would take interest in playing this. Each level, loading screen, and cutscene is a nod to classic monster movies like Godzilla or Them!, and the game itself is absolutely crawling with references. Such a heavy theme of old giant monster films brings a similar atmosphere to the game, one that people with such interests would gladly try out. And where does this mashup of monster movie culture take place? A video game.

Then you have adaptations like Tron and Warcraft, taking everything that we enjoyed about the video games and testing their strength as films, or the Injustice fighting games that bring your favourite DC comic book characters to a Mortal Kombat-esque platform, and can you honestly look me in the eyes and say that a Super Mario Odyssey musical wouldn’t be epic?

Art is all around us, and while paintings and novels have more value than we can measure, I will stand by my belief that video games can just do it all. From emotional impact to grand storylines to cultural references, video games have the ability to showcase it all under one beautiful bundle of coding, and that’s not even including how much further they can take it with gameplay elements. But I suppose that’s a story for another time.