A version of this article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.  It’s an expanded version of this blog post.

Whether or not video games can be art has been debated for as long as game devs have been putting pixels together.  It’s a question that goes beyond mere academia – games as art brings professional legitimacy for the industry, and goes to the heart of the concept of games as protected speech.

Naysayers argue that video games will never tell complex stories, touch as controversial topics, or display emotions as textured as those found in film – largely because games are obsessed with ’fun’.  This argument suggests that until designers get out of the rut that is focusing on this singular emotion, art will elude us.

I feel like this particular line of reasoning completely misses the point of where the art of video game design actually lives.

Do games have to be fun to be successful? Almost certainly.

Does this mean that every game needs to push the same emotional buttons?  Or that games can’t be art?  No to both.

Let’s back up.

There is something that is holding back the idea that video games could be art. What is holding back the idea that games can be art is the simplistic notion that they will not succeed until they can do what the movies can do. This is, I’m not afraid to say, extremely shortsighted.

Video games will likely never have the capacity to tell a story as well as a well-crafted Scorsese film. They will struggle to have characters as strong as those found in a Donald Westlake novel. They will never have the pacing as masterfully handled as an Alan Moore graphic novel. Simply put, timing and pacing is just too important to a pure narrative, and the concept of interactivity gives too much control away to compete with master storycrafters.

Yet fascinatingly, interactive stories in video games always seem to be more… artful to me than linear, canned, non-interactive ones.

At Bioware, we work harder to bring the art of narrative to video games than perhaps any other company in the world. We strive to push the envelope on narrative, and Bioware’s devotion to pursuing story-based gameplay is one of the reasons our games are among the best in the business.

All this being said, narrative is a red herring in the discussion of games as art. Let’s put it this way: can oil paintings be art without great cinematography? Can classical music be great without a killer screenplay? Can a Ming vase be exquisite without compelling characters? These are very silly questions.

So why should anyone insist that video games follow the rules of another artistic medium?  Every medium has its own rules for what makes that particular craft capture the viewers eye and imagination.

This is not a particularly new idea – Marshall McLucan coined the phrase “the Medium is the Message” back in 1964 – talking about a new upstart called ‘television’ that most critics felt had little or no artistic potential.  It took years for television writers to abandon the rules of radio and cinema and create art suited for their genre.  Nowadays, many would argue that shows like Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica and the Office surpasses in many ways the westerns, sci-fi and comedies you can find in a movie theater.

For video games, narrative is an exceptionally powerful tool – one used exceptionally well in Knights of the Old Republic and Starcraft, for example.   But I posit that many games without story, games like Civilization and Minesweeper, are elegant, artful games with barely a lick of developer-provided narrative. The art found in these games is less about what you find in a movie theater, and more about what you find in an ancient Chinese puzzle box.

So what makes for an artful video game?

There are many opinions as to what makes good art. I keep coming back to a simple idea – the films, books and television that I consider art is the stuff that lingers. The stuff I reflect upon afterwards. The films that surprise me, like Usual Suspects. The graphic novels that challenge my world views, like V for Vendetta. The songs that become deeper and more intricate the more times I listen to them.

Good art is interactive. It is not a passive thing that slides off the viewers experience. It involves the viewer, and is made richer by his involvement and his point of view.  You reflect on it.  You experience it.  Great art evolves in your mind the more you reflect on it.  Why is the Mona Lisa a great piece of art? Because the viewer is left wondering, “why is she smiling?”

Video games can be art then, certainly, because while it will never do other things as well as film, television, novels, photography or oil paintings, it is perhaps the best medium in existence for interactivity. Certainly, there are video games that are not very artful – but this is also certainly true of a lot of films, television, novels, photography and oil paintings.

The art to be found in a video game is the interactions – how a player interacts with the game, and what sort of feedback he gets in return. Thus, the art is in the mechanics, the systems, and the simulation.

There are many, many places to go from there – some may find more art in systems that are very naked and easy to manipulate, such as a fine game of Magic: the Gathering. Others may find awe and wonder in simulations designed to mimic reality and hide the mechanics. Even others may be most intrigued in the art of how multiple people can share or impede each other in the same system. These are all techniques or tools for the notion that the interactivity is the art.

Think again to the Chinese puzzle box.

Why are Bioware games considered among the best story-telling games in the world? Many reasons, including some traditional ones (a focus on characters and cinematography, for example). But one lost on many observers is Bioware’s insistence that the narrative is interactive – the player must be able to make choices, and the choices should matter.  This level of interactivity, self-learning and control is what the movies can’t compete with.

So where does Fun fit in?

In A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster argues that that fun is what happens when a player encounters a game system, is challenged by it, learns it, masters it, and then takes it to the next level.  In his model, fun is a measure of personal engagement.

In this light, ‘fun’ is the result of successful interactivity. And if you start with the idea that interactivity is the basis for art in games, then it stands to reason that, not only is it possible for fun games to be art, it is very likely that games that will be considered great works of art will be fun.

Saying that a game needs to be fun is kind of like saying that a movie needs good dialogue and direction. Sure, you could have a great movie without a spoken line, but don’t kid yourself, it will be an anomaly.

The trick is that ‘fun’ is not a simple, one-note emotion inside of the game space. Nicole Lazzaro, for example, is a game researcher who describes several different kinds of fun inside successful games: easy fun (the joy of interacting with an environment in a non-threatening way), hard fun (meeting a challenge, being frustrated) social fun (helping someone) and schadenfreude (smacking them down).

And this is still very coarse in texture. The mindless fun in Diner Dash is nothing like the cerebral fun of a game of chess. Raiding in WoW pushes vastly different buttons than nailing a drum solo in Rock Band. Players frequently find different kinds of fun in the same places – playing with Half-Life’s gravity gun is very different than running some Team Fortress.

Arthouse favorite game Braid is a work of genius not because of a social message, a gripping narrative, stirring characters, or even great art. It’s fascinating because it has interesting, novel mechanics. Which, when you figure them out, are fun.

Even more interesting is Brenda Brathwaite’s experimental game, Train. Train is a board game where players try to maximize the number of passengers on their train. They are given no prior clues, but at the end of the game, they are told that the passengers they were loading up were Jews heading to a concentration camp, and that no one wins. This is an interesting case: most people are shocked, and feel guilty about the fun they had playing the game. It is doubtful that the game would be fun if the players played it a second time in a row. It’s all very ‘meta’ in the whole games and fun discussion.

But the whole message would be lost if the core game interaction of loading passengers wasn’t fun.

You can tell a narrative in your game, as in Mass Effect, or discuss a philosophical point of view, as in Bioshock. The story can be core to your interactions, or it can be window dressing. Doesn’t matter, the game still needs to be fun.

You can have the mechanics of your game teach an important lesson. Consumerism and success doesn’t necessarily make your life easier (the Sims). Nuclear war may result in a pyrrhic victory and destroy the earth (Civilization). Killing terrorists won’t necessarily make us stronger (web game September 12th – google it). In all three games, the lesson comes not from preaching, but from interacting, which is a far more powerful way to learn something. But if that interaction’s not fun, the messages will never gain traction.

The games industry needs more kinds of games. It needs to reach more markets. The lifeblood of the industry will continue to be to find more kinds of interactions and systems for players to experiment with. It needs to tap into a wider shell of emotions. It could stand to explore more adult themes. It would be nice to see more games teach real-world relevant knowledge, or encourage players to explore deeper philosophical divides.

But to just base our success on how well we can copy what the movies do? Where’s the fun in that?