You knew this post was coming, right? If there's one existential question both developers and players ask about games, it is, "Can a game can be considered Art?" The latest foray into this realm I've read is Ian Bogost's "Why We Need More Boring Games" on gamasutra.com. That article is also a â'' perhaps unknowing â'' member of a set that inspires one of my personal existential questions, namely, "Why do all 'Game as Art' conversations invoke Casablanca?"

Of course I say, "Yes, games can be Art." I'm an old hand at this conversation: before I came to this topic, I was an art student where the question was, "What is the difference between Art and Craft?" which is the more primal version of the game question. And, being rather logically-minded and debate-oriented, I do well in that conversation, too, because I have a fairly unassailable definition of "Art". (Debate Tip: always clear up your definitions of your terms first, before you get down to the actual debate. If you have good definitions in mind before you start, you can win the debate right away by just acting like your opponent hasn't even thought about their side of things.)

Art is anything that can produce as aesthetic response in the audience. It's the only unfalsifiable definition I know, that doesn't exclude actual Art or include things that are Not Art (you can email me to try and take this on as debatable, but, to quote a famous idiot, "Bring it on.") . Games can clearly produce an aesthetic response in their audiences. It's not a terribly high bar to hurdle, of course, so by meeting that requirement, we haven't said a whole lot about games.

Can games be Good Art? At their best, I think yes. There are game experiences I have remembered for years, where the entire combination of the gameplay, game metaphor, and emotional experience felt so perfectly designed, so completely whole, that I felt a sort of transcendental joy. The first time I saw Tetris all those years ago, I had that frission of being in the presence of true genius.

But, as with all media, the criteria on which one judges Art is unique to the form. You don't judge sculpture's cinematography, and you don't judge a dance's contour line quality. Games should be judged by their level of interactivity, and level of mental stimulation, or heightened awareness, that is produced in the playing. Interactivity is the one attribute of games that no other art shares to such significance, so I feel that it is the area in which games are to be most judged as exemplary or not. A game can have great graphics, or well-done cutscenes, but no game's graphics can be compared to the best on offer by galleries or cinema, and no writing or acting in cutscenes can compare to the best of literature or theater. Interactivity is where games cannot be approached.

The game experience is one where the audience is just as much author as the developer is: both join together to produce an experience, perhaps similar to, but unlike any other, never to be repeated precisely again. That's magic. And Art.