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Argumentative Essay: What Are Video Games Art?

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Does the art community consider video games art? And how long does it take a new cultural form to convince people it deserves recognition? The "are video games art?" debate has been ongoing for as long as I can remember but it has roared to life recently. Last month, an American film critic by the name of Roger Ebert stated in an article suggesting that video games "can never be art''. And in terms of our own local culture, an Australian film critic Lynden Barber ran a similar argument in an Australian paper. Tens of thousands of blog posts, comments, articles began to argue each other’s points as to why video games should be considered art or not. And it would be fair to say that there hasn't been a lot of movement between the opposing views, with both sides assuming they are more than right. …show more content…

I believe that video games are an important, often amazing, under-appreciated cultural form that is slowly becoming a mainstream interest. I grew up with video games. Pokémon, Mario kart, and even Crash Bandicoot (About to make a comeback). I loved playing them because I find them genuinely interesting. But I'm no unabashed apologist either. But deep down computer games are an unimaginative industry. More often than not they fall well short of their creative potential and many people who love computer games will agree that too often video games are not created with artwork in mind, however quite recently there is a shift in the momentum of open world map games, such as Dragon Age, Fallout and Far Cry. Today's computer games have a lot in common with early cinema. They draw from so many other creative cultures to create its own. They can incorporate narrative, acting, animation, choreography, music, pictures and text to fuse them to create something that is entirely new and can be powerful or - as I will admit is often the case – ridiculously unpopular and

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