Opinion: Video games are already art, love them or get out

Attacking video games, and those that play them, is the edgy thing to do today, with one of the more popular attacks being some variation of “video games won't be considered art until…” It happens on a regular basis, often from games media writers that would fancy themselves my peers. However, I can't bring myself low enough to consider people so far up their own a**es as being anything but two planes of existence beneath me or any other typical gamer.

I often wonder how people so stupid could have discovered time travel to the past, which they must have done in order to exist in a decade where gaming wasn't art, or hadn't surpassed their beloved movies in terms of money spent on entertainment. Perhaps the matter between their ears is so dense it emits gravitational waves that warp and slow the flow of time, allowing their minds to exist in the past, but I digress…This was supposed to be a discussion of why people who make their living off of video games should show them a little more respect, and realize they've long been acknowledged as art and (quite literally) serious business, not a theory on the phenomenal levels of idiocy needed to bend the fabric of space and time as we know it.

You heard it here folks, art cannot be fun.

Video games have long been art. It can be argued that they have been art since the beginning, as every endeavor of video game design is an application of creative skill and imagination. If that alone is not enough, and video games must also meet the artistic requirement of being appreciated as something more than ordinary, I'd say the development of fairly large subcultures dedicated to the different types of visual aesthetics in gaming (retro, 8bit, pixel, polygonal, etc.) covers that as well. Whether or not video games are art is not up for debate: They f**king are.

Another issue that's not up for debate: Video games are the ultimate artistic medium, head and shoulders above music, movies, literature, sculpting, and the canvas. Simply put, video games incorporate various combinations of all these smaller mediums, with each piece acknowledged as art before they're even assembled into a whole. In fact, video games are currently saving symphony orchestras, the classic height of artistic music, and creating jobs for starving visual artists.

Skeptics may point to the lack of video games that have made the transition into successful movies as some sort of strike against their artistry, to which I say “No shit?” Even the Mona Lisa loses some of its appeal if you start cutting it into pieces, and that's exactly what converting a video game into a movie does. It cuts out crucial pieces of what made the original the success it became. Not to mention many of the movies are altered by people with no respect for the source material, resulting in a product that has nothing to do with the property it's based on. Super Mario Bros. movie, anyone? That's a failure of Hollywood, not video games, and one could just as easily turn that flawed logic onto movies as well. How many video games based on movies have actually been good? A number that creates an equally sad ratio of success to failure.

Not sure if embarassingly ignorant or lying to further agenda.

If you think video games aren't amazing, or art, then kindly get the hell out of gaming culture. The industry would be a lot healthier without you, as evidenced by the fact that video games were the most progressive form of entertainment in the world, and had a unified community, before you losers came about. Out of ignorance or outright malcontent, all you people have done is tried to drag gamers down to your level, created and fed hate mobs, and misattributed toxic internet culture to gamers, all for clicks. Disgusting.

Games media personalities hating on video games is in vogue for now, but people will eventually get tired of your trash, and I personally can't wait until your ship sinks.