When Pong was introduced in 1972, one wonders if anyone ever envisioned video games as more than just a source of entertainment.

Today, the industry it is credited with establishing is worth USD$184.3bn as of 2024, and while Pong has been immortalised in museums, will we be able to say the same of modern games?

Do video games even count as art worthy of sitting alongside relics and paintings?

WHAT CRITICS SAY

In 2005, film critic Roger Ebert gave the opinion that video games are incomparable to art forms like film and literature on the basis that there had not been a game comparable to the classics of said forms. 

Ironically, revered game designer Hideo Kojima, who some consider “the first video game auteur”, agreed with Ebert in a 2006 interview. He argued that in seeking to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to achieve “100% player satisfaction” (unlike art which is always targeted at a specific audience no matter the size with a certain message), video games are not inherently art.

Looking at the landscape of modern games, it is obvious where such disdain for the pro-”games are art” argument comes from. The best-selling games of all time are Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V and Wii Sports. If we go by these critics’ definition of art, only GTA V comes remotely close by virtue of having a narrative, but even then the average player is probably prioritising criminal escapades instead of following the story. Competitive multiplayer games like first-person shooters (FPS) and multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA), which often do not facilitate active storytelling through campaign modes and cutscenes, dominate players’ screentimes.

Even with single-player role-playing games (RPGs) where developers try to lock players into a linear storyline, there is often no fixed way for players to interact with the game in the interest of creating replayability, which means players are likely to have different experiences. One player might be more interested in speedrunning (finishing a game in record time) and make different choices in dialogue options or usage of characters from someone who is new to RPGs and is likely to prioritise fun. A gamification module I took in polytechnic taught me the existence of different types of gamers, which helps explain the tendency for video game executives to maximise a game's appeal.

Another issue with trying to reconcile video games as art is how best to define it. Going back to Ebert’s controversial take, a lot of people who attempted to rebut him used metrics like market impact as evidence, but like Ebert, I do not think numbers make for compelling proof of the value of art, be it games or otherwise. If popularity was all it took for something to be considered art, why do so many people make “content” and not art?

THE ULTIMATE STORYTELLING MEDIUM?

Here, allow me to play devil’s advocate. If art has no generally agreed definition to begin with, it is only natural that there is a case for video games having the capacity to be an art form - by examining its very nature.

Look at the development team for the first Final Fantasy game, for instance. To create a game like that, it required:

• Programming (in this case it was solely coded by Nasir Gebelli)
• Game design (led by director Hironobu Sakaguchi)
• Illustrations (Character designs by Yoshitaka Amano, and pixel artists to translate his work into the 8-bit format of the Famicom)
• Sound (Music by Nobuo Uematsu and sound effects)
• A scriptwriter (Kenji Tarada).

The latest mainline instalment in the franchise, Final Fantasy XVI, includes extra elements such as motion capture, which then requires a new skill set not found in older games. For me, it is this mixture of audio-visual presentation, writing, performance and interactivity that makes video games a potent medium for evoking emotion in ways traditional mediums could never achieve by themselves.

I will say that while I have not played a whole lot of games (many classics, from Final Fantasy VII and The Witcher 3 to Portal 2 and any first-party Nintendo game, are foreign to me), I can attest to the power that video games have as an art form through my personal experiences.

HALO: REACH

It may not be an absolute system seller like the original Halo trilogy, but it still received critical acclaim as developer Bungie’s swan song before the franchise was acquired by Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries (now Halo Studios).

I remember getting a copy at an IT show (back in the days before e-commerce was a thing), and struggled with the single-player campaign due to my reflexes as a primary school kid brought up by a tiger mum. It was after completing PSLE that my brother and I finished the game on co-op mode.

Probably the biggest meme to come out of the game in the years after was the phrase “Objective: Survive”. Given its spoiler-y nature, I will only say that after that segment came to a close, I felt a sense of loss, or more accurately grief - something I had only experienced from reading books and comics at the time. This was exacerbated by the fact that the player character, Noble Six, is designed as a self-insert for players to fulfil their fantasies of becoming a Spartan, the armoured supersoldiers that are represented by the Master Chief in pop culture. My brother and I got to choose how our Spartans looked, and saw them appear in various cutscenes. The extra level of immersion afforded by the game kept us invested, and this was still true many years later when I replayed Reach, this time through a copy of The Master Chief Collection I purchased on Steam.

For the first time, I awakened to the power of video games as a storytelling medium. 

FINAL FANTASY XV

As much as I love this game, I now present it as an example of storytelling with video games done messily.

After years of development hell (most notably starting life as a spin-off, changing directors and eventually becoming a mainline entry), the game released on 29 November 2016 to mixed reception. While its audiovisual presentation was great as expected of the Final Fantasy franchise, FFXV felt like it was needlessly torn apart to become what developer Square Enix called the “Final Fantasy XV Universe”, presenting its story across mediums like the feature film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (starring Aaron Paul, Lena Headey and Sean Bean of all people), the original net animation Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV, and various games of smaller scales, including a mobile game that brings shame to both FFXV and mobile games in general. The idea was part of FFXV’s direction as “a Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers” in a bid to save a franchise in decline after a turbulent 2000s.

There were also quite a number of collaborations, including the likes of Japanese fashion brand Roen, games like Assassin’s Creed Origins and, bizarrely, Nissin. The latter entails a whole side quest where our protagonist Noctis and his entourage seek “the ultimate flavour experience” and hunt for ingredients to add to their cup noodles. Noctis also gets a Cup Noodle hat (I wish I was joking).

To be fair, it worked. I had been aware of the franchise for a while after seeing ads for Final Fantasy XIII-2 in copies of the now-defunct Official Xbox Magazine that I bought in secondary school, but Kingsglaive became my gateway into the franchise proper. In the months leading up to FFXV’s release and my eventual purchase of a Xbox One copy in February 2017, I binged some of the supplementary media, watched full playthroughs of FFX and FFXIII, and even tried emulating FFVI on my MacBook until I was stuck due to what I presume was a compatibility issue with my emulator.

FFXV has a story with a lot of heart, enough to overcome its troubled presentation and help cement its place as one of my favourite games ever. Still, it would have been nice to put all this media entirely in a single game to do it justice. There's a reason its former identity as Final Fantasy Versus XIII lives rent-free in the minds of many fans, including myself.

P.S. On a side note, check out this one-of-a-kind Audi R8 featured in Kingsglaive!

NIER: AUTOMATA

If there was any game that came close to proving my thesis, it would be this.

Amidst the 2017 RPG renaissance (as I have dubbed it), when major releases like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Persona 5 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 were all released within a similar timeframe, NieR: Automata stood out with its use of gameplay mechanics to tell its equally intriguing story.

I did not have a PC when it first released, so I watched a walkthrough on YouTube to satiate my curiosity. When I eventually bought it on Steam about a year later, I experienced first-hand the brilliance of director Yoko Taro’s vision.

The use of game mechanics to tell stories is known as ludonarrative (a blend of “ludology”, the study of games, and “narrative”). Many games fail to reach the heights of aforementioned traditional mediums due to ludonarrative dissonance, a term coined by game designer Clint Hocking to describe a situation where a game’s mechanics do not match up with the given narrative. This often happens when games rely on other mediums (most commonly cinema) to present their stories, creating a disconnect between the story depicted in cutscenes and the story players experience in gameplay.

Already, many games with a story exhibit such dissonance. Players are often told “the end is nigh” and that they must rush to slay the big bad before they execute their world-ending plan, but then find themselves getting away with doing side quests, attempting to go out of bounds of the map or fishing (hot take perhaps: I’ve never liked a single fishing minigame) without any repercussions for their lack of urgency.

In the case of NieR: Automata, it has been held up as an example of art that can only be presented as a video game. From the GUI (graphical user interface) being framed thematically as swappable chips installed into the playable android characters to the theory that sex and violence are two sides of the same coin manifesting in ways like the characters' differing gameplay styles (this turned out to be a very good read as a player), it’s hard to find another game like it.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

As with every medium, not every video game needs to be or aspires to be a game-changing (heh) classic. No one is saying Super Smash Bros or Gran Turismo is art on the level of Citizen Kane, the Mona Lisa, or To Pimp a Butterfly, but neither does it mean video games are not capable of becoming such. We already have games that demonstrate the beauty of combining different mediums for storytelling impact, and others that push the limits of this combined medium - perhaps we just need to wait for the classic to arrive.

Or maybe, we were asking the wrong question all along.

- Wei Feng

Cover image: JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Images: Minecraft, GTA V, Wii Sports