Let’s take a little break, let’s have some lighter fare; video games.
But first, my brethren, let us pray:
Oh lord, if it means having a house and a steady job and 2.5 kids in a heteropatriarchally normative society, then please please please turn me into an NPC

I made free to play mobile games professionally for a number of years, and as a child I did almost nothing but game. These are my qualifications. I didn’t write this out of antipathy to gamers, I was only able to write it because I used to be one

Despite no one anywhere being able to offer a cogent definition of art, no other medium of entertainment struggles with this question the way games do: Are video games art?
Related question: is golf a sport? Is cocaine?

Gamers have a strong interest in an affirmative answer to this question: if games are art then they are patrons of art. If not, then they are junkies, and game developers are dealers

In the old days games used to be simple: the technical limitations of hardware forced them to be small and economical, and the constraints were freeing.

The atom of game design is called a mechanic, and mechanics are combined to form loops, and loops are layered and interleaved to create a experiences

A mechanic is a point of tension, it is an action whose outcome is mediated by player input. The representation of the player on the screen is called an avatar, and the mechanic is the relationship between the input, the behavior of the avatar, and the achievement of a goal

When you engage in a mechanic it feeds into another mechanic, and that mechanic feeds back into the first one, each modulating goal-achievement in the other. This is called a loop

There are short loops and long loops, and loops of loops that form meta-loops, which are called metagames. Completing a full loop at any level is it’s own reward, however, game designers fill their loops with ornamentation, and this is another type of reward

When you complete a loop, it increments a counter. This can take many forms: increased “stats”, new “equipment”, increased availability of novel loops. The logic of the dispensation of rewards is called the reward schedule

The reward schedule contains two kinds of rewards, fixed and random. The fixed ones are known in advance and they give structure to progression. The random ones are semi-unpredictable and they are a promise of a series of delightful surprises

Research has demonstrated that random reward schedules are extremely compelling in all arenas of human behavior and comprise much of the surface area of addiction. They are the reason you can’t get that BPD girl out of your head.

The evolution of game design is the marriage of art and science in the church of addictive compulsion.

The aesthetic qualities of games are a substantial part of their appeal, but they are ultimately window dressing.
However, with the rise of ugly and dehumanizing art in high culture, games are one of the last bastions of beautiful representational art

At the same time some people use games as a medium for storytelling, but the attempt to sew a compelling narrative to a psychedelic compulsion factory always results in the debasement of the former.

Moore’s law gave JRPGs poison to drink, and they did not die, but degenerated into anime

If we entertain for a moment the fantasy of game designer as auteur, then the art of games is the morphology of psychic addiction, and its telos is the Entertainment in Infinite Jest.

The reason that games falter as a storytelling medium is that they place you personally as the protagonist, and the story goal of putting you in someone else’s head fights with the game goal of trapping you in your own

Many game developers feel personally bad about this. I know because they are my friends and I have talked to them. Any decent f2p designer has read Cialdini and addicted by design and similar books and they all know what they are doing and most of them have a heart

Comics, fantasy novels and TV serials and are structured like games, the way they have scarce unpredictable side characters and steady low-level plots and bigger meta-plots. They did this before games but the explosion of vidya intensified it

Gamification is when real life goals are dressed in the iconography of video game progression: it’s only really effective with a certain type of fixating, min-maxing personality. Everyone else gets to live with it, the revenge of the nerds

Goodhart’s law states that when a proxy of success is used as a target for optimization, the proxy ceases to correlate with success. Gamification is like this, and it’s incredibly condescending, and if the whole world gets gamified we deserve it

The indy game scene is a little different to the mainstream scene: they very much want to play the role of auteur, and so they pour much careful attention and even love into their projects, but they can never transcend the nature of video games

Some designers, aware of this, try to craft brutal and un-fun mechanics, like a chef who makes a revolting dish and claims that food-as-art must break free from the chains of “good flavor” in order to make a statement about the human condition

Ultimately on the question of “are games art?”, there is much art that can go into them, and they can be artful, and yet the overall product is not uplifting to the human spirit. Perhaps much that is called art fails by this metric. Acceptable

Afterword: If you’re trying to break a video game addiction, realize that it is much easier to replace an addiction than to break one. All that energy has to go somewhere. I suggest the gym.

Related thread https://twitter.com/logo_daedalus/status/1059171777476259840