Which is a real act of moving the goalposts, really. Can video games only be art if they compare with masterworks? What, then, of those poets today whose works

Which is a real act of moving the goalposts, really. Can video games only be art if they compare with masterworks? What, then, of those poets today whose works will fail to stand the test of time? Are they doomed to have all their toils "not art" simply because somewhere, sometime, there was a better poet? A deeper complaint, however, is that the great masterworks of video games are incomparable to the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets because video games are an inherently different medium. If the plot of Heavy Rain were presented as a TV miniseries or a movie, it would be at best mediocre, but the plot is simple in the game precisely because it branches and reacts to your choices-- something no movie can do. Thus, the story expands in ways that a movie cannot, and it loses in a naive comparison. As I've said elsewhere, the Metal Gear Solid series is a wonderful example of an artistic work, but it too would lose much if direct naively compared to a great novel-- its charm comes from (among other things) its delightful strangeness, its vibrancy and its interactivity. The story is dynamic and something to be explored, rather than experienced. A better comparison may be to a written work like Lyra's Oxford, a companion to Phillip Pullman's excellent His Dark Materials trilogy that serves to show glimpses of what the protagonist's alternate England looks like, letting the reader explore a truly foreign land. How much more, though, can you explore the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Fallout or the dark urban fantasies of Final Fantasy VII? By leveraging interactivity, these games allow you to explore an environment in ways that books simply cannot. This isn't to say that books don't have their own strengths over games-- they definitely do!-- but rather to emphasize how different the media are.