The thing is, I find this entire discussion increasingly tiresome, as the answer is increasingly, "yes, but so what?". I mean, Jeremy Parish pretty much outlined the argument years ago. This doesn't change the fact that there's real questions to be asked and a real problem with having your main character not under your control.

But let's wind back a bit: why do we care? Does the industry think that, if games are treated as art, there will be more insightful critics? It's usually the other way around - insightful critics legitimise an art movement. Do we think we'll get better games out of it? Well, sure, but then games these days are almost universally better than they were twenty, thirty years ago, so they don't need to be "art" to get better. Very few games follow the broken design patterns that were prevalent in the 80s. In addition, there's nothing to suggest that the multiplayer games of the world are really going to benefit from more artistic insight.

You touched on this, but whether games are art has never been about the games. It's about acceptance, and I'm pretty sure we really care about acceptance from three groups: academics; politicians; and the public.

The academics we pretty much have, and yet the people really asking the hard questions about the limits of interactivity as a storytelling device are industry professionals, so how valuable is academic acceptance, really? It's only valuable for taking away ammunition from the politicians.

The politicians, I suspect, aren't really going to be swayed by gaming's Criterion, or even gaming's Sistene Chapel. Criterion doesn't stop them from complaining about violent movies. (What does stop them is a strong lobby group and widespread public acceptance.) I suspect that the Wii's remarkable success, and resonance with the public, will do more to convince politicians that gaming is no threat, a harmless, more elaborate board game, than any amount of arty games can ever do. Politicians only respond to what will get them votes, so they're slaves to public opinion.

So the people we really want to convince is the general public, so they'll stop snickering at us when we say we like games. Their perception of gaming is very much in line with the Wii, it's a fun diversion but not something you spend all day with. No amount of arty games are really going to change the perception that spending all day in front of a video screen is unhealthy. Nor should it, because they're absolutely right, and far too many games still expect players to spend an hour -- hours -- in front of it in order to get anywhere. Television solved this problem long ago with the "previously, on..." opening, and yet the amount of games that have implemented this extremely simple feature can be counted on one hand. We're too busy wrapped up in our own little world, expecting the elite to come to us, hat in hand, and boy howdy that did not work for comic books. If we want acceptance, we're going to have to change. It's unavoidable.

But I think there’s a reason we have been speaking in terms of Citizen Kane and not, for example, Un Chien Andalou.

True, but it's worth noting that Andalou came well before Kane and, regardless of the degree of direct influence in that particular example, the avant garde of a medium have always played an absolutely essential role - among other things, in getting the critics to pay attention in the first place. We need the full spectrum to be a real medium, and thankfully the rise of "art games" a la the Marriage, the various indie sub-scenes, and casual games are giving us that - certainly a more hopeful scenario than we were faced with five-ish years ago.

Interesting thoughts. I had a couple of things to tack onto this.

The bit about the companion cube I thought was interesting. My experience with the cube was a bit different. I never felt any emotional attachment to the thing at all and rolled my eyes at nearly everything GLaDOS said about it, including that it needed to be euthanized. Euthanized! Like the thing was alive to begin with. Then, after I burned the thing, she told me I had done it faster than any test subject and I realized what was going on. That whole test chamber wasn't about testing the gun or my ability to use it or even my psychological attachment to an inanimate object, but instead a process intended to make me feel guilty for doing the only thing I could do. It was at that moment that I decided that I was going to kill GLaDOS.

In a way this is kind of a poor example since the difference between players on this game is mostly psychological, but I believe that the power of a well crafted game is that it allows players to take different paths through it and arrive at the same conclusion.

Also, about this:

"If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?"

I believe that was exactly what Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson did with Dungeons and Dragons, it's also what Scott John Siegel does weekly in his Game Design Friday column at The Escapist. If we want to extend from the written word into oral traditions then kids have been doing this since time immemorial with games like tag and hide and seek.

I don't know if I can call any of these things art. D&D and Tag are, however, certainly of some cultural significance.

A micro-level comment that misses the point but so what:

I think there's another way to characterize the Moby Dick question. Your 'second option' implies that the player inhabits Ahab directly, and decides whether he succeeds or fails at killing the white whale. But the narrator in Moby Dick is called Ishmael, and while he has some autonomy, his primary role is that of Ahab's observer. A more useful and accurate approach to interactive adaptation might be to place the player in the role of a crewman who is swept along Ahab's path to self destruction, while having agency within his own station.

Unrelated note: 'art as rulebook' has been done and accepted into the canon of 20th century modern art, by Sol Lewitt. It was avant garde at one time, but influenced many other artist and is now enshrined in big museums for daily consumption by the general public. As JP notes, it all has its place, and public and critical perception can change greatly over time.

I don't really know or care about striving toward art for art's sake, but to the Citizen Kane question, I would not be surprised if Orson Welles himself were uninterested in making 'art movies.' Ambitious and innovative yes, but as you imply, his aim seemed to be simply making the best use of radio or film to create compelling entertainment which exploited the full potential of its medium, art be damned. Which I see as being the more useful approach in the end.

Wow. I have to say I agree with every point here, which is surprisingly because I thought I was completely alone with these feelings.

I work as an artist (the academic kind, not the Etsy kind), so for me there's always been one clear issue: what's the intention behind the majority of games? To make money. Pick up any periodical dealing with gaming and that'll be pretty evident. Instead of experiences and critiques you'll get never-ending praise and systematic reviews. The only proper critics for the medium are hidden away in the back rooms of MIT or blogs like this one. It's hard for a designer to take risks when his game took several hundred people several years and several million dollars to develop, and it's even harder to think up something for that game to say other than "buy me." And after the games media works their magic it's hard for the viewer to answer with anything other than "okay."

Gaming will have it's Andalusian Dog as soon as someone wants to make it.

The real problem, as I see it, is that in trying to become more artsy we've attracted people with no real sense of what art is. Because of that we have many folks with lofty airs touting pretentiously about what they think games and art are by putting down dissenters.

I don't think we need to change, but show more of the abstract tactical style of gaming (like Chess or Go.) Games that strengthen the mind and come with no pretext of a story. Why do games have to be art anyway?

Games-as-art and systems-as-art are two things I've thought about a lot. Thought I haven't played it yet, Spore definitely seems like a system that's trying to say something.

Another idea I've thought about a lot lately, is I guess similar to systems-as-art, but, when games force you to solve problems by thinking or doing things you would normally not do. Which is a method of conveying meaning that's not possible with other mediums. Like an edutainment game, but conveying a message instead of vocabulary.

For example, Phoenix Wright had an extremely linear, novel-like narrative, with an overriding theme of "faith is a necessary component of logic, as you need a hypothesis before you can make sense of the facts." It would force you to "try out" this philosophy by only progressing if you could make arguments before you even had enough evidence to prove them to be true. You'd often have to present a piece of evidence that would commit you to a certain theory before the other pieces of evidence necessary for proving that theory would become available. ("If the bullet hole is here, that means there must've been a second shooter!" "Now that you mention it, I do think I remember hearing a second gunshot...") Not only was thinking this way extremely satisfying, but it made the thematic message of the narrative carry more weight.

Phoenix Wright is sort of an "art game" but I have another example of gameplay-device-as-art from a more 'mainstream' game, Mega Man Star Force 2. The poorly translated (and possibly poorly written in Japanese, who knows) narrative was a pretty blatant comparison of the power of a collective group versus the power of an individual. And the only ways to actually make your character stronger were to connect with other players online, or to forgo connecting with anyone at all.

Each player's progress in the single-player game leveled up the players on their friends list, but not themselves. It's not fair for strong players to level up weak players, and get nothing in return. So it created this social network where players worked hard out of obligation to the other players who were helping them, lest get deleted to be replaced by a more courteous player.

Alternatively, players could choose to delete all of their online friends and become a powerful "Rogue" variation of their character class, who gets to break a lot of the basic gameplay rules. Since rogues inherently can't have friends, the only way to interact with others as a rogue is to harass random strangers over WiFi.

Neither narrative nor the gameplay really declare a 'winner'. Characters backed by the power of a network of dedicated friends are about evenly matched to rogues, and the conflict is never really resolved in the narrative. But it creates a system that's about a certain idea, and forces the player to deal with it. It was a cool way to make players be part of a microcosm that reinforced the message of the narrative in a more participatory way.

An often overlooked aspect in this discussion is the fact that they're interactive; sometimes what the game makes you do is more important than how you can affect the game. Some games can use gameplay to 'trick' you into thinking or acting a certain way, that you otherwise might not, even if it's through a detached lens of "I'm playing a video game," it still registers as your own experience, and provides food for thought. Which is what I thought was the point of art.

This is an excellent post. Here are a few thoughts I had while reading your insights:

1. On the Issue of Control

It seems well accepted (or at least en vogue) that a text's meaning is somewhat fluid in that it is partly defined by the interpretation of the consumer, as well as the creator.

Part of the reason why Moby Dick is so important is the broad cultural acceptance of the idea that it is in fact significant. In many ways, it seems that the reader/viewer/player is ultimately responsible for the way a story is interpreted because they give articulate the meaning of the story.

It seems that games are the logical extension of this mode of authorial control: not only are the consumers interpreting the material as they see fit, they are actually affecting the outcome in a way that goes beyond interpretation.

2. Regarding "art," games, I think there is probably room in the gaming world for games that fall more on the artistic side rather than the entertainment side. Film is seen as art even though Holywood blockbusters and french avant garde differ greatly, and I think games can do something similar.

I loved this post, and enjoy your site. Keep up the great work!

What I often see in discussions like this one is an unspoken assumption that giving the player choices somehow abolishes authorial control and renders the game meaningless as a statement from designer to player. I don't think this is the case because a game designer can to some extent account for how players will interact with the game.

This shouldn't be that surprising since every other kind of artist does this. Painters use lines and contrast to draw attention toward certain details, writers work very hard to make their main characters more human so that readers will care about them. Filmmakers combine a variety of techniques to manipulate the audience's emotions. All of these techiniques require participation, however passive, in order to mean anything. Video games take things to the next level.

Monopoly distributes resources to make concessions to other players both necessary to progress the game and unacceptable if one wants to win, usually transforming everyone at the table into tight-fisted scrooges who wait for each other to give up. Metroid focuses on a single character in a hostile alien environment to give the player a sense of isolation. Team Fortress 2 uses specialized weapons and abilities with obvious and easily exploitable weaknesses to ensure that no one goes alone and build a sense of camaraderie between players.

The fascinating thing about these messages is that they are not so much consciously interpreted as they are intuitively internalized. Nobody playing monopoly thinks "I get it, I should be a greedy bastard," they just do it because the game sets up the right conditions. I guess I have to say again that I don't really know if any of this is art*, it's just that it seems like a medium that can affect people in such an immediate way must be important and not a complete waste of time.

I guess those examples are kind of weak since I can't establish that any of that was the authorial intent behind those games. At the same time I feel that those are strong statements in those games, and it is not hard to imagine, based on what I've seen, that people are getting their ideas across in games, despite the complaints of a handful of high profile game makers who "nobody understands".

* Plenty of people who do know would tell me that since these are all commercial products they are, by definition, not art but entertainment.

An interesting and thoughtful post, but suffers, as so often in these discussions, from an insufficently robust definition of 'art'.

Also, the use of the term 'art-game' is highly misleading, as it seems just to be a synonym for 'obscure' in some sense.

By using terms such as these two different questions become entangled: 'Can some videogames be considered 'art'?' and 'Are some videogames 'more artistic' than others?'

Separating these questions is essential for progress on this issue.

Hello James Croft,

May I ask how you would robustly define ‘art’?

Also, I do not recall using the term ‘art-game’ in the piece at all, so count me just as confused as you are about it.

Thanks,
matthew

In July I published an interview with designer and Escapist writer Jason Rohrer about the place of context in game design--I too thought The Marriage was rendered meaningless without some sort of context, and we discuss it as an example.
The interview can be found here:
http://thehappymedium.tumblr.com/

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your understanding of interactivity seems flawed. Interactivity doesn't equate with choice. It's simply an action that receives a reaction within the game.

If we limit the actions and define the reactions, you're left with what I believe to be the perfect approach. There are no alternate paths to take. You merely 'play through' an experience that's the same for everyone every time through. Elements (often point scoring, unlockables, filler tasks unrelated to the main story - like GTA's driving and pedestrian-killing) with no artistic meaning to them would therefore not belong in the 'game' world. I think 'game' is the wrong term for it, but that's another issue.

I haven't read Moby Dick, but that traditional adaptation is a perfect example of what is wrong. The story is one aspect and the gameplay is another, seperate piece. We need to be playing through the story alone. No swathes of monsters to kill inbetween levels, no needless activities whose sole purpose is to make the experience 'fun.'

One poster talked about authorial intent. Very important. If the game is made only as a product, it can't be art. Applying meaning to it is futile. It's why I'm hesitant to elevate Bioshock, but not something by Fumito Ueda.

Another poster talks about how allowing player control is an extension of interpreting an artwork. Wrong. You become the artist as soon as you change anything about the art. This isn't a case of viewing a sculpture from a different angle; that's perspective. It's a case of chiselling away to create an entirely new sculpture, lacking the original's intent and purpose. You can't do that and call the work someone else's 'art.'
Everyone may have a unique interpretation, but they're interpreting the exact same thing.

Art is expression. We want games to sit alongside film and literature, not technical 'art' such as a well crafted toy. Games can achieve that status by utilising their interactive (and visual) strengths to tell their stories, to communicate emotion. Exploration is a good start, if you're looking for an interactive element to exploit. In fact I'd say it's the simplest to imbue with meaning. Even Half-life 2 redeems itself by containing Highway 17.

When I said that giving the player some choices and control over certain things was part of allowing interpretation, I didn't mean that players should be given control over everything or that the player could be allowed to change the game and that its message would somehow remain intact.

I just meant that in order for it to be a game at all the player has to have some involvement in the experience. To me "chiseling at the sculpture" would be more analogous to allowing the player to modify the game code or make their own levels. That would definitely go beyond interpretation into the realm of being the artist, but within a single game you can have a large number of ways of playing through it that generate a cohesive message.

The reason I think this is important comes down to how communication works. Let's say you had an idea you wanted to tell one hundred people about, and you will deliver this idea by having a two minute conversation with each one individually. These people vary in age, education level, and cultural background. It should be obvious from this criteria that in order to get your main idea across that you will have to take a different approach to each of the hundred interviews and that you will be asked different questions by each member of your target audience. Interactivity potentially gives you an engine to make that happen without a face to face encounter.

If you dilute that you are no longer making a game. If you have to dilute that then games are not art.

Looking over it all again I think we mean roughly the same thing by "giving control" and "utilizing interactive strength." My main point is simply that having multiple paths through a game does not necessarily negate its ability to convey a cohesive message.

I see having multiple paths as simply being unnecessary. You're telling those 100 people a story in a different way. The way it is told is just as important as what's being told.
You change that, you've got another story entirely.
Films don't need multiple versions to be understood, why should games?

Let's say we offer choice.

If each choice doesn't result in an outcome that carries the main theme, then the theme is incoherent. One player may not notice, but his experience will be different from his friend. The author could not intend to deliver thousands of potential messages (branching paths) through this one game. Choices are clearly there to make the player's input more personal.

If each choice does result in an identical outcome (in terms of its message), then what was the point of making the choice in the first place? Does each choice line up with every other choice in the context of the game? If so, it's merely an illusion of choice.
I believe that having no choice allows for a more focused interactive experience. It's on this point that we differ.

What I don't understand then, is how it is an interactive experience. Perhaps we differ on the definition of interactive, or of choice.

Yes. Interactive (to me) doesn't mean you're making choices. The Godfather film lets you see Michael close the door on Kay, the hypothetical game lets you close the door. It doesn't let you not close the door and change events, and in turn, the meaning.
Choice is a subset of interactivity, but interactivity /= choice.

It's not an interactive film in the sense that you get to do something every once in a while, though. What it wouldn't feature is "gameplay" in the traditional sense. No filler sections inbetween story. Shadow of the Colossus managed, so I'm convinced a more complex idea is feasible.

I was beginning to wonder.

I don't entirely agree that allowing the player to influence the outcome is a bad thing, but I can understand the idea of involving the player without letting him be the co-author.

What I've seen numerous times, though, from people who claim to be making games that are art is stories dictated by a controlling narrator who engages his audience rarely, and only then to ask them to turn the page. I don't particularly care if what they made was art. It was never a game.

I think a desire for authorial control can drive someone to insulate their creation from the player to the point where the player can't connect with it on any level.

Shadow of the Colossus is interesting. Part way through the game I started to get the idea that I was doing something very bad. When Agro died there was a part of me that said "That tears it. Nothing is worth murdering gods and sacrificing your only companion. You stop right now." Of course I continued, but it was under a kind of protest. I was starting to wonder what could possibly be driving the protagonist who I had come to identify with less and less. I can't think of any other game that is so effectively tragic.

Heh, that story reads a lot like the one about wanting to kill GLaDOS. Maybe I have some issues with disembodied voices to work through.

And let me be the first to say that striving to merge the storytelling with the gameplay is a great thing. There's a kind of emotional impact that you just can't get without convincing the player that he's involved in the action.

Mmm. There would be that extreme - an interactive movie is possible but undesirable.

What I'm talking about is in the vein of SotC. There's nothing in the story that the player can choose to do or not do. They must kill the colossi in sequence, lose Agro, and revive their lost love. It's a player led story through a calculated world. You see, hear and experience what Team Ico wants you to experience. But I wouldn't call that letting the player have their input only to turn the page (and I know you're not saying it either). This is the sort of interactivity I'm talking about.

Without having the player form a bond with Agro (through relying on him to defeat colossi and carry your around), that moment would'nt have been as effective.

And the visual cues are astounding. As the Wanderer continues to kill Colossi, his hair greys and his clothes become more tattered. It's rare to see that kind of interactive-visual link. He's dying because he's killing these beasts. This medium is both interactive and visual. I'd say they're equally important.

I guess it's pointless to tell you that it's my favourite interactive artwork.

I was beginning to guess as much. It's a favorite of mine too.

I've played it enough times to notice all the things that you're talking about. There are some neat audio cues too. Dormin's voice changes throughout the game, as more and more of his essence returns to him. There's a really in-depth faq for the game that covers a lot of things like that and tries to pin down some of its cultural influences and possible connections to Ico.

I'm not really sure what the author of this post is trying to say. If you change the story of Moby Dick you can't call the game art? Or would you just be dissatisfied with the story because it doesn't proceed according to your expectations?

The freedom to choose the way you want to play and end the game lets gamers become artists. Thus, I think many games can be classified as art depending on the gamer and his perspective. Dealing out unique types of death in Devil May Cry is art. Mixing and matching different types of materia in FF7 is art. How you choose between the light and dark side in KOTOR is art. Gamers can create something unique and beautiful out of the tools the game developers provided.

Moby Dick is just a story. Yes it is art but you can use it however you want. I don't care if a few people don't like it because it spoils the true message of the story. If someone wants to make a new message using Moby Dick, then that is what they are going to do.

I loved Ico but I think people are jumping the gun with SotC because it was made by the same people. All you do in that game is climb beasts and slay them. You don't really have many options when it comes to destroying them. Unlike Ico, you are not protecting someone like you sometimes have to do in real life. It is more like a tragic adventure story but less exciting than Kratos slaying hundreds of foes.

Understanding art is about understanding yourself. If you can't see the art in games, then what can you see it in? I know that books are powerful because there is a spirit in words, but games come from words. Games are words, messages, and thoughts made into external reality. Games are art.

I have had similar thoughts about creating an artist effect from a collection of rules. However, I have long recognized that narratology is at odds with ludology, but that there has been a strategy to sell each new generation of hardware with better draw distances, scene complexity, texture detail, dramatic 'HDR' lighting and sound, so that the Publishers of this software can operate more in the manner of a Hollywood studio and (increasingly unconstrained by what it is possible to put on your TV), pick any characters and high-concept story that polls well in its Marketing Department's overly-influential focus groups.

Under pressure of a 'seasonal' deadline, Developers will rarely be given the opportunity to balance & polish the gameplay after they have 'squandered' 3 years on the Graphics (engine & art design), and context-dependent orchestral Music, not to mention all the self-indulgently 'epic' non-interactive Cut-Scenes that remove all doubt that most mega-budget game developers are actually frustrated film directors.

We are the third group to blame for the rise of narratology when we justify the cost of a PS3, PC or 360 by arguing that it is going to be a purchase for the household to be used as a multifunction 'media-center' by the whole family. Cynics would say it was just as well you could use your PS3 as a jukebox, photo album, TiVo, web browser, MMO social networking 'chat-room', as well as being a way to see all of those "fascinating" directorial commentaries on your ever-expanding collection of Blu-ray discs, because you had precious few actual next-generation games to replay through on it (partly, because the increased costs of HD development had reduced the number of developers who were prepared to originate new IP that didn't fit the easily marketable formula of an 'Epic Cinematic Adventure' and, partly, because the resultant hypothetical "game" in question stupidly eschewed 'non-linear discovery through empowered choice' in order to tell a story, which despite being uncomfortably padded-out to meet some measure of value for money was over by the end of the weekend).

Sony are happy to encourage this trend towards 'semi-interactive movies' as it will homogenize their media pipeline:

They not only want you to see their next Spiderman film at the Cinema, but then immediately go home and take on the role of Spidey in the simultaneously-released "official game of the movie", and maybe muck around delivering pizzas in the Marvel Superheroes MMORPG until the Blu-ray disc gets released when you can relive the whole experience a fourth time on your Spiderman-font branded PS3.

I mean what the hell was so wrong with Robotron?

Clearly, Sony's Marketing Department is telling them to only make family games (like Little Big Planet) and poor imitations of Cinema (like Heavy Rain). Even traditional FPS games are increasingly lumbered with the 'emotive' portrayal of your "co-stars" (like Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway).

I can understand the motivation behind Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy, a popular book made into a successful Hollywood movie. Yet, I don't want to play the part of the film's stuntman in the Parisian car chase sequence, with poor handling and immersion-breaking "Quick Time Events", I don't want to be the puppeteer of some virtual Matt Damon ensuring that he says his lines according to some 'Choose your own adventure' script (like Mass Effect) and emotes throughout the interactive cut-sequences like some human Sackboy, in fact I don't want to be Jason Bourne if I cannot deviate from the plot.

I only want to be this amnesiac assassin in search of redemption if I feel am in Bourne's world of espionage. I should be free to travel anywhere in the world, enter any building, talk to anyone to enable my quest, yet have the game work subtly in my favor to keep re-writing the script to ensure that both the theme and empowered character of an $30 Million agent would not depend upon the player discovering the correct choices - even if this were somewhat ameliorated by an automatic instant snapback to last checkpoint save system (like Halo).

Clearly impossible.

However, there were three whole cities in Driver 3 and you were largely free to drive around them as you saw fit without annoying traffic lights holding up progress (like GTA...) - am I alone in despising Roman Bellic so much that I didn't interrupt my boring date when he phoned to say he'd been stabbed? Then, what am I doing going bowling, playing darts, or watching television in this cousin's cockroach infested apartment?

Another Matt Damon film 'The Departed' was actually a remake of the (superior) Hong Kong crime thriller 'Infernal Affairs'. The idea of this is that the cops and triads mutually infiltrate each other with tragic consequences for those involved. Now, I think it is a lot more interesting to be playing an undercover cop as in Driver 3 rather than a grumpy criminal as in GTA IV (where the player's impulses to 'run amuck' as they always used to enjoy doing in past GTA games sit uneasily with the heavily overpaint of characterization), but Infernal Affairs shows that you could have a cooperative multiplayer game in which one member from each team was ostensibly working for the other side and only their team captain knew their identity. Hence a system of rules would be used to create an interactive drama with the same foundational theme as the movie, but a totally different plot.

So, read that as "The World of Infernal Affairs" or, if you prefer to be technical, "Infernal Affairs the MMORPG/FPS" rather than the game of the movie...

You see I think that it ought to be possible to not only shape the game world around the periphery of the player's attention in order to dynamically 'script' events that are in harmony with the underlying theme, but to determine the player's psychology through how they played (e.g. avoided quests, targets of aggression, etc.) and then 'ensnare' them in alternative quests that also lead to the same thematic goal, but via a totally different path of challenges and character development.

In fiction a character is compelled by accepting a situation with some backstory, advantageous relationships and opportunities. Then when they have committed themselves through love, duty or ambition, etc. something about this situation changes outside of their immediate control and affects something/someone they care about. It is then that the story has the power to manipulate the protagonist against even their desire for self-preservation.

Games don't really know if/how to make their players adopt roles and then stick with them when things get difficult. We really need to crack the assumption by the player that they should win and not die. If the theme is strong the dynamically generated plot should be too and a tragic end should not be viewed as any kind of failure by the player as, actually, "the journey is the reward".

Wait a minute, you addressed adaptations but didn't even mention telling an original story in the game medium? WTF? Please tell me that I have misread this post.

Part of the problem is that you're taking the tale of a man's defeat as your example. Most games can't be completed until you ultimately win. There's that start and end point that are static. True, more and more games these days have multiple endings, and often they branch in distant directions.

I think it's interesting how people most commonly compare film and literature with games. I think games are best compared with poetry because they both have an interactive element. Poetry's beauty is most commonly found, in my opinion, in the variety of interpretations. You can read the same poem in different moods and understand it in different ways. I think this variety is similar to the multiple paths in a game.

Games are rarely intended to be art and are such commercial entities that it is hard to find good examples of art, but I like to think of Portal as a minor example. At the end, once you defeat GladOS, did you destroy her or set her free? Your journey through the game and the way you react to it will determine your interpretation of her swan song.

I think the biggest problems in any discussion on games-as-art arise from the points of reference we use.

Pornography is defined as a creative activity with no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire. That doesn't mean, however, that anything that stimulates sexual desire is pornography.

The same runs true for videogames, just because games are primarily a form of entertainment, doesn't mean they have no artistic merit. Entertainment and Art aren't mutually exclusive.

Artistic merit in any genre or medium is a debated subject. What makes art, Art, is a network of different aspects. Context, intent, expression, technique and the response are all-important components of any artwork (and certainly not the only or exclusive components). If R. Mutt's Fountain (a urinal on its side) is an important piece of Art, I think the door is wide open.

Interactivity is spoken about it like the person playing the game is removed from the equation rather than the defining element. Consider Rez, where the person actions playing the game directly impacts the electronic music soundtrack. Or Panzer Dragoon Orta's visuals. Both of those games are reasonably simplistic rail shooters but use player interaction to create interesting and engaging sound and visuals, respectively. A game doesn't have to drag you along in a structured narrative to be Art. That would be like saying an abstract painting isn't Art because it doesn't look like the thing it is supposed to look like.

This also reflects on systems-as-art. “If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?” Rules in of themselves are not art, any more than a urinal or explaining Art to a dead rabbit, but you put that in a gallery and add components like context, intent, humour and an agenda you have Art. When we consider The Marriage, we see that the intent was for a representation of what the dynamics of marriage are like expressed in an interactive environment. It was also a study of producing something in a videogame in such a way that it wouldn't have worked in any other medium. It is a fair judgement to say that you didn’t find it particularly entertaining or emotionally engaging but that doesn’t stop it from being Art.