Video Games, unlike all other art forms, deny you access to the art form when you are bad at it. The below sketch certainly made me stop and think about it for a second. (Warning! There are some crass terms/imagery in the video.)
I like video games but I am generally very bad at them unless it’s something like Simms where you just live the life of a person and the goals of the game are what the player decides. Art does not deny the viewer in the same way video games do. Games in general produce this frustration for many. Dancing adequately for an album to continue or understanding a books metaphors is not necessary to finish or enjoy the content.
To me there is no doubting video games as art. I do wonder if the idea that gaming is the only art form that blocks certain people from joining it is true. People often talk about easter eggs and homages in content that others might not understand or notice. While a book may not spontaneously shut down on someone who can’t list the main themes, a particular reader might not fully appreciating a work because they lack the skill to think deeply about the content.
Perhaps this exclusion might be something that helps define art in comparison to crafty endeavors. Art not only needs a particular amount of skill to create it also needs a particular amount of skill to be understood. There are so many people who scoff at various modernist pieces and say that they could have made a piece or that it isn’t art. In a way there scorn might be something that helps define what art is.
This is not to say that all art is of the same quality and needs deep thinking to be understood but that many art styles may exclude viewers in the same way that video games do in a less obvious way.
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