gameplay is art

let me first define art: art is whatever i think is art. creating games is an art. playing games is an art. gameplay is art and gamers are artists. artistry is itself a game that creates art. in the case of game development, artistry is a game that creates art that is a game that creates art.

it is now commonly accepted that video game developers are artists. many people however don’t seem to think of gameplay (the action of a gamer playing a game) as art on the terms of art alone. most serious gaming as-vocation is in the form of competition (esports, speedrunning) or as a background activity for online entertainers. neither example is necessarily gameplay-as-art. there is an art to them, but it’s not innate to gameplay—it just involves gameplay to serve its own specific kind of art. all gameplay can be art on its own if only you framed it.

games are still going through their Modern period. there is an abundance of self consciousness. the relationship between game and gamer has never been so uncertain. winning and losing is just a formal convention (and law, as video games are defined and bound by laws, unlike meatspace games which are built of breakable rules), a pretense of motivation with which the gamer can choose to play along or ignore completely. could a game be a tool? obviously yes. maybe we should ask ourselves when making a game: how can this be useful? i don’t mean useful in the sense of therapy. what I’m trying to ask is, in the case of the gamer-artist, how do we better make our games themselves tools of art? videogames as explicit creative medium is a mature form at this point, made unquestionably so by popular titles like Minecraft and Super Mario Maker whose gameplay is itself modal systems of creating play areas and then playing in them, but games without creative tools like these can still be recontextualized by their own residue like demo saves (emulation turned retro gaming into a demo sandbox retroactively) and even a game with no residue is changed by the presence of an audience, even if just the audience of the player.

when designing a game, you are designing a space for gameplay with a certain kind or kinds of play in mind. but the designer-intended mode of play is an infinitely small subset of all gameplay. you can only account for nothing. all I’m suggesting is for you the designer to be aware of how the gamer can transform your game into their art, and design accordingly.