like it seems fucking obvious, right? any medium that can contain degrees of symbolism, has the potential to provoke viewer interpretation, has the potential to contain specific or vague messaging from the creator, and just generally can be used for self-expression has the potential to be an art form.
Why the fuck is/was this a point of discussion? to the point of heated discourse, even! Was it just the most geriatric people they could find on the street? Weird snobs?
like, the second games started having narratives this should have been a moot topic. why the fuck did Kojima parrot it?
reading his statement, i feel there's two different discourses happening, the already solved (:lt-dbyf-dubois:) point of "can video games be art" and the more interesting question of "does the video game industry currently have a culture that promotes artistic endeavor over mass appeal"
to which my personal answer is 'no, but we're slowly getting there with the rise of auteurism (despite some of the problems inherent to it) in acclaimed development teams (:praise-it:) and the indie scene's entirety, and we'll see if it starts to push against the corporate board schlock in the future.'
but still, god damn, half of this debate comes from the same place as the video games cause violence bit and the other half is just people being annoyed with call of duty schlock, which, fair. but why is the former even a debate that happened/is happening. i'm genuinely curious.
Weird snobs, it's the ghost of that old fart Roger Ebert. In a fit of arrogance, he declared games to not be art, while understanding virtually nothing of the media's history and having no actual interest in engaging with any of it, be it because he was an uncurious asshole or (more charitably) because he was already an old codger and games have too high a barrier to entry if you never picked up a controller before. So instead of trying he dropped a hot take about win states or something.
IIRC he pulled back on that statement after getting a big backlash for it. I think he either played or watched a video of someone playing Shadow of the Colossus and went "sure fine whatever".