Are video games art?  That seems to be the question of the decade, and practically everyone has an opinion on the matter.  As this debate keeps raging both among the industry moguls and among the players in forums, it seems that it's often the artists themselves who are their own worst enemy in the defense of their work.  The creator of Mega Man, Keiji Inafune, joins the ranks of many great video game artists in trying to deny their ... identity as artists.  Take a look at this recent quote from Keiji Inafune at http://kotaku.com/gaming/keiji-inafune/gdc07-capcoms-inafune-slams-clover-producer-242796.php :

Perhaps I might get into trouble if I say this in front of people from the mass media. Games are not a work of art. It's actually a product. If we think of it as a work of art, then... when we think about Picasso and Van Gogh's paintings, the end result is beauty, so it doesn't matter if you sell it or not. However for games, it's a product. It is a commodity. The producer has to think about that.We must because that's what they are.  Not to call them what they are, in this case art, is to inaccurately represent art.  Is there a dichotomy here?  Certainly!  But it's not a relevant dichotomy in determining what is and what is not art -- it only differentiates between different mediums of expression.Keiji Inafune

I realize that Inafune's primary point was not to throw video games out of the art arena, but rather to make an argument for marketing games properly.  Regardless, I think he touched on some of this anyway by accepting some of these faulty premises.  Games must be marketed, but so must art.  Beethoven didn't put on his symphonies with zero advertisements.  Nor did Shakespeare put on plays without tacking flyers on every wall.  When authors like Hugo and Dickens wrote a new novel, do you think they didn't have advertising?  Announcements were made.  Newspapers reported their upcoming novels.  Inafune's statements about Picasso and Van Gogh are particularly out of touch given that both of these men fully intended to SELL their works, with the former becoming quite wealthy doing just that.

This kind of statement is more than just a description of a sane business model, which by itself is perfectly reasonable.  Unfortunately, Inafune goes much farther by introducing what many in philosophy know as the dreaded art and entertainment dichotomy.  Besides being infamously indefensible and patently destructive to any medium of art caught up in its black hole of anti-reason, this is the very dichotomy that fuels the constant "us vs. them" attitudes between those artists producing so-called "great art" and those producing "popular entertainment".  It does this slight of hand to grand extremes, as if the two were so mutually exclusive that they are as separated as East is from West.  The recognition of the realities of the economic system that art is made around could have been easily made without presenting this dichotomy, but that unfortunately isn't what happened here.  Inafune apparently had to make the implication that unless it is totally unconcerned with that economic system, then it becomes something other than art.

I am very weary of hearing these statements, coming initially from critics and now increasingly from video game artists themselves, that art has to be something so elevated that we can only see it from a distance, as if it is something that common "unelevated" men couldn't relate to or even, *gasp*, enjoy without this admiration pouring out some "anti-art" taint onto the subject matter.  It's nothing new, as we see it in many other artistic mediums.  It's unfortunate that so many things we call art today are things that many of us cannot directly relate to without having to imagine circumstances other than our own.  For instance, every single one of my favorite operas, such as Don Giovanni or Le Nozze di Figaro, were once simple theater pieces that the masses related to far more than those who commissioned their composition.  It wasn't unknown for a common ditch digger to whistle arias from Figaro or drinking buddies to even sing an aria from Don Giovanni on the streets.  Heck, Figaro itself was a controversial play before it was ever an opera -- a play that some believe spoke to the concerns of the French lower classes so starkly that it helped to fuel the French Revolution.  They were pieces that were as relevant for their day as certain movies we watch or games we play are to us today.  Yet the simple fact that men today don't as easily relate to the themes of these past works somehow makes them "art" in the minds of many, while something they can more easily relate to can't achieve that status until they die off and the subject matter becomes remote again.  It's a strange distinction to push, if only because it makes the status of "art" inversely proportional to the dwindling relevance a work in any given medium has for its most timely audience.

So many things we think of today as high art were considered to be simple entertainment in the time that they were conceived by the men who are now known as artists.  In the days when Shakespeare, Marlowe, and a bevy of others were writing epic and frivilous plays for the stages, they were doing so for the common people on the streets far more than for the royalty and noblemen.  It was, in fact, many (though not all) of the well-educated in positions of authority who considered these endeavors to be too common even for the commoners.  In Mozart's day, he was considered to be crass and crude, his operas too playful, his choice of subjects too disrespectful, and his music too childish.  In his day, you went to the theater to watch his operas wearing your most common clothes, with the intent on dancing and singing in the aisles.  Today by contrast, we watch him while dressed in three-piece suits and keeping our mouths shut, making sure that proper respect to this "high art" is paid in commensurate discomfort.  Dickens and Hugo wrote literature for commoners, despite being viewed now as required reading for a serious class on literature as "high art".

I could throw out a dozen more examples, but none of that would convince the snobs who decry anything which could possibly entertain as art.  I suppose I've had enough of the would-be high artists who decry capitalism because their works don't sell, but I think, especially lately, that my real beef is with those in the world of entertainment who embrace the asanine judgements of their craft as less than artistic.  This kind of sanction of the victim can never be positive, especially to those of us who see a bright future for the artistic medium of video game development.  The question is this: just what is it that allows these individuals to exclude video games from the category of art?

In the early days of film, movies and films were just not taken seriously by the art-loving public at large.  It was considered much more personal to watch a play.  Most felt that you could get more out of a live production for no other reason than that there was an intimacy between a cast that had to face a very finite audience than film acting could ever hope to achieve on a more abstract level.  The theater additionally had an artistic merit attached to it -- it was more than just entertainment in the eyes of many.  It was very serious business.  On the contrary, it was common for many critics of the day to treat film as less than art.  Yet, here we are today with film trumping most stage productions in their ability to effectively tell a story.  And now, film is not excluded from the arena of art, nor are film makers considered less than artists.

So what happened?  Film still has that same limitation today that it had back then, but those involved in creating films have instead concentrated on its strengths, such as the ability to present a more wide-scale telling of a tale, the ability to impress more direct realism into a given situation, and being able to plan and execute every detail of a scene over and over until the result is exactly as the artists involved envision.  The fixed medium that is film came with both handicaps and advantages. There is less intimacy, and thus more detachment in film than the live stage, but there is also the power to be more effective than the stage in at least as many ways as the stage originally was perceived to have over film.  Film advanced as a medium at a rate proportional to the rate at which artists learned to use the strengths of the medium.

Video games have more than a passive chance at becoming a medium with not only the same marketing power as film, but also its own unique artistic power to tell a story.  Video games in particular have a potential that film cannot have to the same degree -- the potential to break the fourth wall.  They naturally treat the player as an active participant.  They can, through their presentation, either shield the player from the "realities" they present or actively involve him in them.  Video games can effectively tell a story by playing the player.  That's a potential that remains only rarely tapped in these youthful days of the craft, but its possibilities seem endless to the casual observer who takes the medium seriously.

Ultimately, no number of pontificating critics who have never bothered to examine the medium seriously will be able to hold those video game developing artists back from developing their art to their own exacting specifications.  Anyone who thinks those critics will be the biggest road block needs to rethink that position.  The bigger concern is what we've seen in the comments by Inafune along with those of many other video game development artists in recent years.  If they aren't taking their own art seriously, why should the critics?  If they don't know they are artists, then how can any of us?