Hello there, dear reader. Welcome to the super-duper guide to art games. You've made a good choice in bringing your eyes to these pages, we promise. Settle down, pull up your favourite comfy chair and make sure that your eyes are at a respectable distance from the computer screen. Ready? Let's go. We'll start with an itty bitty analysis of the following deep and meaningful sentence to kick off a deep and meaningful article:

"ART GAMES, WOOOO!"

Now consider the following responses:

1. "Bwuh-uh?"
   
2. "They exist."
   
3. "Games are not art."
   
4. "Oh no, not this **** again."

We couldn't find a tattoo with the right options on it, nor could we convince Nandrew to get one.

Jot down the number which most closely reflects your view on the matter. It can be scribbled on a scrap of paper, inked onto a handy whiteboard or even stencilled in your leg as a tattoo if you have the equipment and expertise. Just find a way to remember it.

Now, on to the discussion proper. The question of whether or not games can truly rise to the level of "art" has been asked for a long time already. There's probably fossilised evidence of this knocking around somewhere. Recently however, the query has become fuelled by the raging fires of a thousand mighty developers and gazillions of curious gamers, to the extent that it's becoming a pertinent question in all modern game development circles.

Unfortunately, few sources provide an objective and informative view of the situation and not everybody is given all sides of the story. In this article, we're going to look at the various points of view on the matter, and what experts have to say about each.

If you answered (1):

Your views are kinda shared by: Quite a few people.

Okay, okay; so option (1) isn't strictly a viewpoint (unless you really want to consider 'bewilderment' as a legitimate expert stance). This is more of an excuse to let us brief the newbies on what's going on before moving to the juicy stuff. Feel free to skip this section if you know what's potting. Or feel free to read it anyway if you're sufficiently enamoured by this beautiful writing.

Now, we're not talking about "art games" in the same way that we discuss "game art". The two concepts are very different. Game art most commonly refers to the visual art that you get on your screen when you fire up your favourite title. Those are images – sprites and skins – and are a different matter entirely.

What we're looking at is the medium as a whole. Games are a medium in the same way that books, films, newspapers, pictures or even flyers advertising a 50% off sale at Hot Topic could be considered media. Most media have their functional components (such as news reports on the telly), their entertainment avenues (Saturday morning cartoons) and even their relentless advertising streams (hideously long infomercials). They also usually come equipped with an art component. In print, this is typically manifested in deep and thought-provoking literature. Film has its indie cinema and the occasional mainstream film that rises above the level of flashy action-fests, such as Transformers and Dragonball-Z.

For this reason, many gamers believe that games as a medium can be considered art as well. While most titles aren't developed with any particular art goals in mind (Counter-Strike, after all, isn't exactly deep and meaningful), there has been a trend among some developers of going out of their way to push the boundaries of gaming, and deliver something that's different and thought provoking.

A lot of art games come from the indie arena, and today's offerings of "art games" can be considered, at the very least, to be quite interesting.