Video Games as an Art Medium

There is an eternal struggle to define what art is. I used to reject even attempting to. But after reading a text conversation where a Fine Art college graduate and a Game Art major were convinced that art is an unnecessary element in games and that one does not need to be an artist to make games, I now feel compelled to try. My working definition is this: art is the genuine, curious pursuit of understanding and interpreting our world and ourselves, bundled into individual packages for the enrichment of the creator, and/or for the stimulation and engagement of a viewer.

What makes games art is so many things; games could never exist without art. It is knowledge of art, form, light, balance, composition, and traditional media that is present in everything that makes up a game. When a game’s art roots are ignored, the game loses so much of the medium’s substance and significance.

Traditional artists know about observing real life. Light waves bouncing off particles in differing structural arrangements, behaving in this expected way, is how we have unwavering art fundamentals like core shadow, bounce light, texture, atmosphere, and color theory.

Anatomy is a scientific field of study, and artists are able to learn anatomy with such precision because of artists and scientists in the past who dissected corpses to understand absolutely everything they were seeing. That era of art and science allowed art to blossom in a new way: one of deliberate and informed observation and deep understanding of the subject.

All the mathematical/physical ideas of optical perspective, light waves, momentum, particles, states of matter, and chemical elements are paramount in both traditional art and games. Not just game art, games altogether.

It took programmers and artists together to develop game engines, graphics rendering, virtual perspective, lighting, and atmosphere. Just like how it took scientists and artists together to build upon their knowledge of all those previous principles that are continually explored in art. What is art if not a way to simulate, replicate, and interpret things we observe in our world? Are games not doing that exact thing?

Game devs now might take for granted all the artistic knowledge that went into developing the programs that streamline all of those asset creation and rendering processes, since we don’t have to worry about any of that to be able to make a game anymore. A program like Substance Designer uses tons of artistic principles and methods. Blend modes and effects, such as invert, multiply, and masks, which are essential for workflows in several digital programs, are designed after film development methods in traditional photography and filmmaking.

Tiling noises used in materials, maps, terrain, textures, and more are programmed interpretations of natural textures meant to contribute to the digital creation of textures and materials we observe in the real world. Perlin noise, one of the most essential and multifunctional noises, was created by Ken Perlin, a computer scientist and software developer working on Tron’s special effects in 1982. He developed Perlin noise out of frustration with the unrealistic look of computer graphics at the time. In the Academy Award for Technical Achievement that he was awarded, this is noted: “The development of Perlin Noise has allowed computer graphics artists to better represent the complexity of natural phenomena in visual effects for the motion picture industry.” Is this not the goal of an artist? He is considered a computer scientist, but is it not in an artist's nature to strive to depict his subtle observations of the world in an art medium like film?

Without seeing these essential connections to traditional and historical art practices, it might look like the video game medium on its own is not art, and that you don’t have to be an artist to develop them. You might think video games are just shallow and mindless entertainment made by rigid mathematicians and programmers.

I am a lifelong artist who has always pursued understanding because I believe great art is impossible without comprehension and genuine curiosity of a subject and the world. I played Doom 2016 as someone with a casual interest in games at the time, and I felt something transcendent about that game’s art. I spent more time looking at the details in the walls, gore, skies, and weapons than I did actually playing the game. I spent a lot of that time soaking in the ambient music, the atmosphere, and the blood covering the arena after completing a demon encounter. All of it was meticulously and artfully designed, created, organized, and executed. It was my first experience truly seeing the incredible symphony of different art disciplines that made up this game.

I am so passionate about the lifelong pursuit of art, understanding, observation, and expression. Those ideas have an incredible amount of texture and depth when brought into the development of a video game by passionate and skilled artists. And I am not talking about just video game art, as that artistry is essential to every part of a game’s development. One of the important aspects of contemporary art, for example, is the experience of the viewer informing the meaning of the art piece. Where is the viewer looking at the art from? How big is the viewer compared to the art piece? What are the lighting and spatial conditions of the room, and how do all of those aspects impact the way the viewer feels about and interprets the piece? How do all of those aspects contribute to the intention of the artist?  A great example of this inquiry is Mark Rothko's black paintings in the Rothko Chapel. By putting massive dark paintings all around the walls of a white, round chapel with only a skylight, each painting carrying a different depth of color and texture quality to it, the building prohibiting talking and phone usage, there is an undeniable spiritual experience for the viewer. You feel dwarfed by the scale of the paintings, the deep blacks and purples feeling like a vacuum, the clouds passing in front of the sun overhead periodically, singlehandedly changing the lighting, color, texture, and sheen of the paintings. One might be confronted with an ironic lack of God inside that chapel, with nothing but emptiness in his place. Or one might feel like they are gazing into a portal to an infinite plane of unknowable godly power, with all the depth in the universe existing inside the vast black. Maybe God was once here, but the only trace of him left is the sun in the sky shining light into an empty room.

Those questions remind me a lot of designing a player’s experience. How big is the player character on screen? What gameplay elements will be visible on the screen at a time? What information will the UI provide for the player? How do the colors, lighting, and scale make the player feel? How do all of the elements of the game impact the way the player feels about, interacts with, and interprets the game? Elden Ring is a great example of this inquiry being done in gameplay. Once the player finishes the tutorial level, taking place in a dark cave filled with listless undead and mysterious architecture, you open up a door and are confronted with a massive world immediately. The Erdtree is absolutely massive yet so far away from you, and it glows a godly, ghostly yellow. The region directly in front of you is gray, green, and shadowed, with crumbling ruins of once great structures in all directions. The player character is pretty small on the screen, the UI is practically nonexistent in this moment, and between you and the distant Erdtree is one small flame of that holy yellow light, acting as the first step beckoning you forward. This is a very impactful moment, where the game immediately establishes the godly association with the color yellow, the player's microscopic scale in this world, and the decaying land that feels as if it was failed by this huge godly presence that vacantly looms above it. Just like the black paintings in the Rothko Chapel, Limgrave's collection of artistry, gameplay design, and inquiry poses questions to the player about the presence, absence, or abandonment of a god, the insignificance of you as one small being in a huge world, and how meaningful just one color can be. Games, just like traditional art, are stimulating experiences for any viewer who is willing to engage with their ideas.

It may be easy to think of games having nothing to do with art, or that because game development is so technical, it’s too complicated or difficult to be considered art. But if there is one thing humans have always done, it's compound and build upon our history. Every discovery leads to another discovery. Should programmers not have artistic inquiry? Can a person not be both a computer scientist and an artist? Should a game dev not seek to understand how artists throughout history chose to interact with an audience through their creations? Video games are such a new medium compared to all of traditional art. Without thousands of years of artistic development, video games would never have existed.

If you still don’t see the beautiful artistry that has gone into every single milestone of the video game medium over the last several decades and how all of that progress has allowed artists to create astounding pieces of media, then I think you’re missing out. There is just as much artistic and spiritual fulfillment to be found in video games as there is in an art museum. And there is just as much artistic and spiritual fulfillment to be found through developing games as there is through creating an art piece.