Blogs tend to fall into three categories: online diaries; lists of cool stuff the author found on the Web; and places for someone to ride a hobby horse. This one falls into the third category.

In this case, I hope my hobby horse is something other people will find interesting.

Essentially, I want to talk about games, and game design, as art. I'll be posting essays, such as this one, talking about the field, about specific things I've encountered, and about business trends in the games industry. I'll also be posting looks at particular games--and not necessarily hot titles in the field, either. That's because I'm more interested in what's innovative than what's hot.

Why is this a hobby horse of mine? Largely because I've been trying to promote the idea that games are an artform since I was a teenager, when I first started designing them professionally. Also because the rest of the world, both inside and outside the game industry, is starting to realize the validity of the idea--with increasing academic attention to games, increasing press coverage of them, and an increasing interest among game developers in thinking about design on a theoretical level. And finally, because so much nonsense is written about games that I think there needs to be a venue for a viewpoint that both values games and realizes their limitations--and the often stringent limitations of the sometimes soul-crushing engine we call the games industry.

The idea that games are art has its critics, both outside and inside the game industry. Let's take the two in order.

The main objection of non-gamers to the idea that games are art lies, in essence, in contempt for games. How can these degraded, violent, flashy little entertainments for adolescent boys possibly be spoken of in the same breath with Michelangelo and Dante?

The first counter to that argument is to point out that games are a popular artform; they are not high art. It's possible to conceive of a game that might qualify as high art, but it's unlikely to receive widespread distribution at present, for many reasons: the industry is unlikely to publish such a thing; the culture of gamers would be likely to reject it; and the "art culture" is unlikely to accept such a thing as valid either.

The distinction between popular (or low) art and high art is an arbitrary one, anyway. Classical music is high; popular music is low. Gallery art is high; illustration is low. Realistic novels are high; genre novels are low. And so on. In essence, to qualify as "high art," a work has to be ostensibly non-commercial (though I assure you that gallery artists are quite as interested in money as, say, comics illustrators); it has to belong to one of several artforms that has a long history and which academia has accepted as being legitimate art; and the broad public has to accept it as "art."

In reality, of course, the most vibrant artforms of any particular era are often the most despised. As an example, at the turn of the last century, Gilbert Seldes wrote The Seven Lively Arts, which put forth the then-controversial notion that forms such as jazz, film, vaudeville, and comics were vibrant, exciting, artforms--urban and active in nature, unlike earlier forms, which were largely pastoral and passive. Of the forms he studied, some (like vaudeville) have largely disappeared; others, like film and jazz, have been accorded recognition as "art"; and others, like comics, remain in the low art netherworld.

If you were to write a Seven Lively Artsfor the 21st century, the form you'd have to mention first is clearly games. Games are the mainstay of entertainment for our youth, and increasingly played by people in their 20s, 30s, and older. They're the second or third or fourth largest entertainment market (depending on how you count). They're the only successful form of interactive entertainment. They put forth the most impressive and astonishing examples of interactive 3D, interactive music, and emergent behavior. They're the things that press most processors to their limits--more so than virtually any kind of application other than graphics programs. And virtually every year sees astonishing innovation and change in the field--in design as well as technology.

Forty years ago, most teenagers fantasized about working in film--as my film professor once said, their ambitions depended mainly on class. Lower class kids wanted to be actors; middle class kids wanted to be directors; and upper class kids wanted to be producers. Today, most teenagers fantasize about working in games.

To paraphrase the gay rights movement, games are here, games are queer; get used to it.

But to get back to the criticism: Games are flashy, degraded, violent little entertainments for adolescent boys. Right?

Hardly. Go to the Interactive Digital Software Association site, and download their demographic information. Most gamers are over 18. PC gamers skew even older than console gamers. The average age of gamers increases year by year. I'll talk about why in another essay, perhaps. And almost 50% of games are bought by women.

That doesn't mean that 50% of the people playing games at this very instant are women, of course; some female purchasers are doubtless buying games for the men (or boys) in their lives. But women do play games--more than half of the people playing on sites like Pogo.com or Uproar are female, for instance. Something like 30% of the players of massively multiplayer games are women. And virtually all of the players of Pern MUSHes are female.

Games aren't just for teenage boys any more.

Flashy? Generally, yes; digital games are a visual medium (board and cardgames less so). Flash sells.

Degraded? That's a value judgment, isn't it?

Violent? Yes, to a degree. But also no, to a degree. Go play Roller Coaster Tycoon, and tell me how violent it is. Or Dance Dance Revolution. Many games are violent--some very violent. But then, so are many movies. And many novels. The role of violence in games is worth talking about it (and I do here)--but it's not something that characterizes games as a whole, any more than it characterizes film as a whole.

The argument from outside the field--that games cannot be art, because they are degraded--is an argument from ignorance. You don't have to like games--but nor can you legitimately criticize them until you are familiar with them. (Personally, I loathe television as a medium--but I'm quite familiar with it. Hard to grow up in America without being familiar. And I would never argue that television can't be art--or even that there isn't any good stuff on TV. Merely that the conditions of the medium mitigate against the production of good work.)

The argument from within the field is somewhat more rational. The main argument is: God forbid we should start to think of ourselves as artistes. A designer who claims to be an artist is going to fight tooth and nail with other members of the team who want to muddy "his vision." A team that thinks they're producing art is going to produce fancy-schmancy crap instead of cool stuff people want to play. Fuck art! Let's rock!

Sure. I agree, to a degree. But this is fundamentally a straw man. A game designer unwilling to collaborate with the rest of the team, incorporate their visions, and get everyone excited about contributing their best effort to that shared vision is a game designer who should be fired. This is a collaborative medium, and even if, in some sense, the game designer functions as the artistic lead, the rest of the team--the technical lead and art director in particular--are at least as much responsible for the ultimate quality of the game as he. This isn't so strange; film is a collaborative medium, too. So is music. It's--well, not impossible, perhaps, but very difficult--for any single individual to create some kinds of art. Conceiving of your endeavor as the production of art does not, in se, prevent collaboration.

As to the "Fuck art! Let's rock!" argument--well, I would argue that the Ramones were among the greatest artists emerging in the 70s. They've had a huge influence on subsequent music, and remain very listenable (and danceable) today. "Fuck art! Let's rock!" Sure, amen. That's an attitude that can produce really great art.

Great popular art, at the very least. And there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that.

High art is dead art. It's art that gets show in museums, played in symphony halls, buried in dusty tomes. It's worth preserving for the sake of the continuity of our culture, and because a self-selected elite loves it. But it's museum art, it's museum music, it's museum prose. All those silly wine-swilling artists in Soho; all those academic musicians composing "new" symphonies; all those university professors writing novels, stuck in academia because they can't make enough money to survive from their actual writing--they have a role to play in our culture, of course, but what they're doing isn't really very interesting.

Is it?

Low art is what's fundamentally important. Low art reflects what's actually going on in our culture today. Low art expands the boundaries of the possible. Low art is vital, exciting, vibrant, disturbing, cool--and, generally, fun. Popular music, genre fiction, comics, independent film, weird shit on the Internet--and games.

That's where it's at, man.

Grand Theft Auto isn't art? Then I guess neither is Fatboy Slim, Sandman, or King Rat.

This is a dumb argument. Games are art. Most of them are bad art, to be sure.

I don't want to get into an argument about "what is art?" I'm not a drunken college student, any more. But let me suggest this: Painting is a craft. Interactive design is a craft. Writing is a craft. Art is merely craft applied with conscience and care. If you use the craft of painting to create an interesting image instead of a clean-looking wall, you're making art. Use your writing skill to write a story instead of technical documentation--it's art. Use your interactive design skill to create a game instead of an e-commerce site--welcome to the high-falutin' world of art, you effeminate intellectual, you.

You don't have to agree with me... But this argument is fundamental to everything else that's going to appear here. This blog is going to treat games as art. Everything else follows.