Is games art? No! Art are games!

The is games art debate should never have started in the first place, and shame on Roger Ebert for starting it. They are coherent cultural artifacts, distinguishable from their environment, from each other, and from the experience of playing one. They are created in a cultural context by people. It is inevitable that we make art of games for that reason.

With that out of the way, I'd like to consider the real question, are arts games?

That's more than a little vague, so I'll give a little background. During the whole "games is art" argument, we all realized that none of us could agree what art was, nobody could come up with a meaningful and inclusive definition that anyone but themselves would accept. I began to see the limitations of the definition I had been using, but at the same time I was making aesthetic discoveries that lead me to believe that games might provide such a definition.

This article (pdf) is a very good, very passionate defense of mathematics as an art form, and it has lead me to a potential new criteria for an artform: something that is intentionally created despite having no real usefulness.

Oh, you can make arguments about how art expresses the human condition or acts as a window into a culture, you can wax poetic all you want, and when you're ready to go back to talking about ideas, I'll be waiting in the next paragraph.

Art can serve a useful purpose, and it often does. But if it is made specifically to serve that purpose, it is not art, it is craft. People make art to make art, then other people can figure out what to do with it.

Note here that what I've described could as easily be a game as an art. Games can serve a social function, and people can become very wealthy playing games (but, peculiarly, only if the game involves a ball of some sort.) Nevertheless, people play games primarily to play games.

So here's what I'm really driving at: define a game as an intentional structure of rules governing what things one may do while playing it, created and played and spectated for the experience of the game itself. Art then is a very large subset of games, and a work of art is a recorded play through of one particular game.

Different people like different sorts of games, and so different people like different sorts of art. Some people prefer to play rather than spectate, others prefer to spectate. Some people bring their own rules to a game, rules that other players may not know or understand. David Sirlin calls that being a scrub, I call it taste. Some people play games where all of the rules are vague in that way, some claim there game has no rules at all, yet even then there are rules, they just don't talk about them. Yes, I'm looking at you, fluxus.

These articles may as well be recorded rounds of a peculiar yet familiar game, that of essay writing. It's a rather freeform variation, far more tolerant of unusual plays than the variations taught in schools, but look close enough and I think you could determine the rules of this game. As a whole, once these articles are compiled, edited, and perhaps even published, you will see the result of my playing another game, called "making a book of creative non-fiction," which involves playing the essay game many times over, and inviting others to play this particular variation of the essay game.

I am perhaps getting too circular, so I'll close with this: a game is a set of constraints that exists for the joy of exploring the ramifications of those constraints. The result of that exploration is very often art.