this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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I actually have come around to games not being art, but my argument is very different from the vast majority of people.
Games aren't art in the same way a piano isn't art and a guitar isn't art and a paintbrush isn't art. It's an instrument to create art, and while we can engage with pedantry over whether pianos, guitars, and paintbrushes can themselves be art, nobody seriously considers them art beyond "good craftsmanship automatically becomes art." It's the music being played by the piano and the painting being painted with the paintbrush that is art.
So what is the game equivalent of music and paintings? It's essentially every single instance of the game being played by the player. That is the art. The any% speedrun is the art. The speedrunner is the artist. The actual game is the instrument in which the speedrunner the artist brings forth their art the speedrun into the world.
It's stunning how games map so well with musical instruments, especially with PC games vs pianos:
game dev = composer
game engine = physical construction of the piano
level design = sheet music
saving = playing the piece at a particular measure instead of the very beginning
mods = writing on the sheet music
speedrunning = playing the piece with a much faster tempo because you're bored playing the same piece over and over again at the same andante tempo
sound and visual from the game = sound and vibrations from the piano
keyboard and mouse = keyboard and pedal
gaming chair = piano bench
videogame player = piano player
"I play videogames" = "I play the piano"
You could probably set up a rhythm game played on a PC keyboard and a piano program also played on a PC keyboard with identical keystrokes and identical music being played. But the miscategorization would have people believe that the rhythm game itself is the art and not just an instrument like the piano program.
It really doesn't map well at all and many of those things can be art. Saying composers or song writers aren't artists would certainly be a take.
I would say that composers and songwriters only become artists once performers actually perform their piece with instruments made by humans, be it through artisans or factory workers. It's a collaborative effort between composers/songwriters, the workers who make the instruments, and the performers. Hell, you could throw in the audience while we're at it. The art, music being played, is a collaborative effort between composer, workers, performers, and audience and if any one of them is missing, I do not think the final product is art.
This is also one way to argue why AI music isn't actually art. AI music is missing the composer who came up with the sheet music, the workers who manufactured the instruments, and the performers who actually play the piece. At best, there's just an audience consuming AI slop.
I don't always need a performance to be impacted by lyric. Others more musically literate might even be impacted by reading musical notation. With other performative arts like theater I feel like it's even harder to argue that the works needs the performance to be considered art.
There are artistic influences in AI slop. It's all thrown together, processed and extruded. I think the AI has better odds at creating art than monkeys on typewriters. Models that can produce plausible sounding music have been around for a while longer than picture generators and LLMs. But why would I want to sift through AI extrusion as a consumer when art is already produced at a faster rate I could ever consume and when some of the joy of art is shared experience with others.
Ultimately, the question "is X art?" just perpetuates commodity fetishism since the art in question only exists because of human labor. And as we know, commodities don't need to be physical objects. A service or a performance could itself be a commodity.
The real question should be "is Y an artist in the context of X?" For a piano recital, the vast majority of people would say that both the composer who wrote the piece and the pianist who is actually playing the piece are artists in their own right. Some people might include the audience listening to the piece (the audience's role in piano recitals is obscured due to bourgeois cultural norms of reducing the audience to passive listener, but it's far more obvious in music with call-and-response). I personally would include the workers that make the instruments and perhaps even the musical "peripherals" like the piano bench as artists since the piano recital wouldn't exist without them actually making it possible through their labor.
Perhaps you might think it's a reach to consider a janitor who keeps the recital hall clean an artist, but if we consider a film production, I would absolutely consider stunt people and workers who labor towards constructing sets and the catering crew as much of artists as the director and writers and "the talent." It's honestly elitism to suggest otherwise. Stunt people put their bodies on the line to make an entire genre of film watchable, but some bigshot celebrity who phones it in for a fat paycheck is more of an artist than them?
As for " "is Y an artist in the context of X?" implies that you've already decided X is art," I subscribe to a fuzzy definition of art that most people use in practice (non-utilitarian product, not bad craftsmanship ie talent, made by humans, societal consensus, needs an audience to appreciate the art, has aesthetic qualities that lead to an emotional reaction with the audience). Not everything needs a precise definition nor an all-encompassing criterion.
Actually, how did we get those long/comprehensive end credits? Doesn't seem to immediately benefit capital, neither the studios nor the cinemas.