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charon writes:

The idea that motion pictures can be works of art has been around since the 1920s, and it hasn't really been disputed since. It's easy to see why—cinema shares characteristics with theater in terms of acting, direction, music, set design, narrative, and so on. Now we have whole academic departments dedicated to film appreciation, to understanding the emotional and intellectual responses—deep feelings of awe and reverence, among others—that movies can elicit.

But video games aren't assumed to be as artistic as cinema or theater, if it all. In 2010, for instance, the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote an essay titled, "Video Games Can Never Be Art." But with the increasing sophistication, and variety, of video games today, it's becoming more and more clear that they are forms of art; or, at least, they evoke many of the same intellectual and emotional responses that artworks do. What's more, creating large-scale titles is like creating big-budget films or operas, since they require huge teams of people. An enormous amount of the cost of a big-budget video game is paid to people the industry classifies as "artists." (When their jobs have such titles as set and lighting design, music composition and performance, acting, animating, and painting, what else should we call them?)

There have been many arguments against views like Ebert's, and I won't rehash them here. But perhaps it's not enough to say, as the philosopher Aaron Smuts does, that video games are on equal artistic footing with any other so-called art. It might be that video games can actually do more as art than other forms.

One of the primary differences between video games and other art forms is that, in games, the player helps decide what happens. Controlling a character in the game's narrative can create emotional responses impossible—or, at least, extremely rare—in other art forms. In a 2006 study, for example, researchers interviewed what they termed "heavy users of first-person shooters," and found that players could readily recall feeling guilt, or at least moral concern. One player noted that, sometimes, his enemies would writhe on the ground for a while, rather than die immediately: "That reaches a limit," he said.

[Continues...]

It's true, you can feel guilty for watching a trashy movie; but that's the same kind of guilt you might get for drinking too much—a feeling that you should have been doing something else. You might have felt this after playing video games too long, perhaps at the cost of other things in your life. But this isn't the kind of guilt I'm talking about. It's not an artistic response.

Closer is Norman Rockwell's painting The Problem We All Live With, which can make people feel guilty for their own complacency or association with the racism of the American people. But video games can make one feel a raw guilt for something only happening in the artwork itself. Because you are sometimes making moral choices in many of them, and the game shows you the consequences of those choices, game designers can make players reflect on the moral outcome of their decisions in a way that's difficult or impossible with other art forms.

I'm talking about guilt.

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