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.
From the side of the Gamers themselves, I think the main driver of this discourse was commonly-held anxieties about being an adult while culture tells you that the things you like are for children. The Discourse on this as far as I remember it really focused on trying to get people from other more socially accepted mediums to agree that video games could be art - think Roger Ebert saying that they weren't and then kind of retracting the statement in an article punctuated by screenshots from Shadow of the Colossus after getting a huge backlash.
Now I think we've all mostly come to the understanding that the things the boomers decided were for "kids only" is a silly and arbitrary list and that it's cool to like what you like, and people who still cling to outdated signifiers of maturity are roundly mocked for doing so (like when Ben Shapiro lights a cigar and slowly lets it burn out without actually smoking it). Of course the toxic extreme of this is the reflexive response of "let people like things" whenever a "thing" is criticized, but that's a different discussion.
The shapiro big boy masculine incense stick.
There was also a red pill masculinity dude on youtube who would pour himself a glass of whiskey then never drink it or take mouse sips over the course of an awful 1.5 hour long video.