Video Games are not (just) Art
Games are art, yes. But games are also design objects: A painting doesn't need to function. A novel doesn't need to be operated. But a video game? It must be played. It has to work under your hands, respond to your inputs, make sense as you use it. This isn't a limitation—it's what makes games remarkable.
I’ve been meaning to write about video games for a while and now I think I finally found my motivation to do it. What motivated me was reading a 2018 blog post by Brendan Keogh titled 'There’s not enough video games; everyone should be encouraged to make them (or, video games are just art)'. And I don’t think they just are.
I will admit that being provoked by that statement, video games are just art, is entirely on me, and probably doesn't happen to very many people outside my specific niche of academia (which I left... good call Magnus) — or at least not in quite the same way. See, I used to be a design researcher, and a large part of design research, at least in my nook, was justifying design as a research methodology. This, at least to some degree, echoes years of struggle to have video games recognized as a worthwhile creative endeavor and art form, that is not inherently inferior to other art forms. Thus, Keogh very intentionally uses ‘just’ to signify banality. Supposedly, we should not question whether video games are art or not. Of course they are.
For what it's worth, I do agree — video games are art. But I think there’s more to be said. I don’t think ‘art’ is a very encompassing term for what video games actually are.
What I am broadly attempting here, and more specifically in future writing, is to argue for games as design objects. Now, I am sure some of you are thinking that I am doing this to justify my own merits in discussing games and to a certain extent, sure I am. But I also think that there’s something to it. The first thing we need for such an argument is to figure out what design is and why it is different from art. John Heskett says that ’design is when designer design a design to produce a design’. Well, that didn’t help us very much, did it? Design is a fluffy word, maybe even more so than art, so let’s narrow it down.
Design is, more or less, the act of giving form to function through a design object. A chair as a design object is form given to the function sit-on-able. Clothes as a design object is form given to the function wear-able. A design object can be operated and used. (As a side note, the function might be fictional, such as in the case of speculative design.)
It is that function which differentiates design from art, or at least other art forms. A painting does not serve a function; that is, it does not assert an influence over the world through its operation, and thus it is not a design object. (Of course design objects might be used to create art, such as a paint brush or a guitar).
Looking back to video games then, what differentiates them from other types of art is exactly that they do have a function; they are play-able. What makes video games remarkable is that it is direct interaction with them which mediates our experiences of them. There is a kinesthetic quality to video games that is much more akin to playing a beautifully configured musical instrument or riding a perfectly fitted bicycle than to watching a great film or listening to a new album.
In the very influential 2007 blog post by Clint Hocking titled 'Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock’, many of us were first introduced to this idea. Hocking makes the point that the design of the game's functions is at odds with it narrative, creating a dissonant experience. In his final paragraph he argues that we do not yet have the video game equivalent of ‘Citizen Kane’, and while we still might not have it, I do not think that is a failing of the video game as an art form, but rather an inherent feature of it as a design object.
If we acknowledge that games are design objects and thus have the additional burden of function when compared to traditional art forms, we can begin to peck away at this notion. We might agree that a bicycle is beautiful but if it fits us wrong, what good is it?
The reason the perfect video game does not yet exist is the same as why the perfect bicycle or perfect chair does not exist. A design object must be used, it must perform its function, and how it does so is not solely determined by how it is designed but also by who uses it. The evaluation of a design object cannot rest exclusively on aesthetic judgment because it also needs to answer to function: does it work? And crucially, does it work for the person trying to use it?
Consider Hocking's critique of Bioshock. His dissonance wasn't just about taste - it was about the functional relationship between the game's mechanical systems and its narrative themes. The design was at odds with itself. This type of critique cannot be delivered to art forms other than design. It requires an operational function only found in design objects.
So how do we develop that kind of criticism? I had a lecturer at university who used to be a car designer. He was as fascinated with the complete expression of a car as with how a singular line wrapped around the side of the car and was resolved again. He was interested in how that line influenced the whole, how it affected both the aesthetics and the function of the car, but also in the line itself.
He talked this way about cars because he understood them as design objects. As things that needed to work, not just look good. He could describe how a line solved a problem, how form related to function, how constraints shaped solutions.
We don't really have that language for video games yet. At least I rarely see it. Plenty of reviews will say 'the gunplay feels good' or 'it makes you feel like Spider-man.' But that’s often where it stops. We don't dig into why it evokes a specific feeling, what concrete design decisions created that feeling, or how the mechanical functions work together to produce that experience. We assert how something feels without examining what that actually means in terms of design.
Of course, there are great examples of this out there — Kirk Hamilton wrote a 2011 piece for Kotaku on ’the rhythm of play’. In it, he describes the bullet time function in Red Dead Redemption:
… Sound fades away and the screen goes sepia as your right index finger flips up to the right shoulder button; you press it one, two, three times, marking your enemies with red X’s. A sound like a rush of air grows louder and louder and you press the right trigger, time crashing back to full-speed as John Marston unleashes a deadly fusillade of lead.
Of course, we cannot all be as prolific writers as Kirk ’Seven Deaths’ Hamilton (if you know, you know), but this is the kind of analysis that video games deserve.
That's what I'm going to try to do here. Write about games as designed objects, connecting how they feel to how we use them. Video games are not just art — they're things we use, things we operate, things that must work. Why do double jumps feel so good? Why does one control scheme feel intuitive while another fights you? Why is it sometimes kind of fun when a control scheme fights you?
I don’t quite know how this will pan out, and I definitely don’t have all the answers yet. But if you've ever wanted language for why a mechanic feels elegant, or how a game's systems work together, or what makes something satisfying to use, then maybe we can figure it out together. I think there’s more to be said about video games than is said currently, and I really want to be part of that conversation.