Digital games as a medium for artistic expression
Sezen, Digdem (2013) Digital games as a medium for artistic expression. Connectist: Istanbul University Faculty of Communication Journal, 45. pp. 129-147. ISSN 2636-8943
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In November 2012, the New York Museum of Modern Art announced that it will exhibit a collection of digital games. In an article, art critic Jonathan Jones responded to this announcement by declaring that games lacked ‘authorial vision’ and were inadequate as an expressive medium. In 2010, the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote a similar article arguing that games could never be considered art. Such articles sparked discussions of whether or not digital games may be considered ‘art’. This article examines the relationship between arts and digital games through a comparative analysis of the literature on the nature of art and digital games. The article focuses on the participatory nature of art works, beginning with the interactive tradition in art from the 1960s onward, today focusing on the application of digital technologies. Since the 1990s, some artists have seen digital games as both an inspiration and a medium for artistic expression. Thus, they have created a variety of art works utilizing games as the medium. The importance of this artistic application of games comes from the use of procedurality as a form of expression. The article comes from this perspective to discuss not only the relationship between art and games, but also to explore the artistic applications to digital games through both looking at examples of such games as well as concepts from digital game studies.
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