Another day I read a very interesting post about a statement against video games classification as art. After some reflection I guess I picked my side.
The big matter is there is some ambiguity. There is video games and there is electronic puzzles. A electronic puzzle is a game played in an electronic device. Even common games like blackjack or draughts (checkers) are on electronic devices. If you consider chess just a game instead a sport, electronic chess against the computer is an electronic puzzle. I particularly prefer electronic puzzles.
Video game is something different. They aren't only about solve a problem against an automatic antagonist. Video games are touched, blessed, with the most permeator and abstract kind of art: literature. A fundamental point in a videogame is the need of follow a history, or create it somehow.
It's very simple to get there is histories behind modern and old video games. It may be just the background to a bunch of fights or a complex and mysterious screenplay. Sometimes people used the history just as an excuse to shoot zombies, alike some film out there. Even more if there is literature, there is art. There isn't such of thing like more or less art. If there is art is art. How much you have liked that particular work is totally up to you.
I even consider a person who tries to deny the video games as art are depreciating the literature. Even more, there is another kinds of art composing them. It is clear there is graphic arts involved. Even the electronic puzzles are plenty of graphic art. And graphics are fundamental as well it is to cinema and people don't deny it as art.
Perhaps the problem is about the challenge involved. We would hardly accept Olympic Long Jump as art. But in video games the player also acts like actor. There is some level of role-playing. The player incarnates the character, avatar, in that history. The problem about the player role on the art is the same ambiguity there is on dramaturgy. There isn't play without acting. But also on games and sports there isn't contest without the contestants. The video game player does as the actor does: make from literature a different kind of art.
There is a interesting book with this ambiguity between game and art. Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game) is the last work of the German author Hermann Hesse. In that fictional universe there is a game which encapsulates the whole synthesis of human learning and the matches are somehow art pieces.
Even video games are far from the concept alluded on Das Glasperlenspiel they are art and beyond. Art doesn't encapsulates video games, but they shouldn't be excluded of the art set either. I guess the synthesis is: Since videogames have literature and graphic art on them, they are art, but they aren't only art.
