Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Vincent van Gogh, and Edmund McMillen; They’re all great artists, but I’m sure you haven’t heard of that last person. That’s because Edmund McMillen is the lead designer and artist of the independent video game development duo ‘Team Meat;’ a team famous for the tough-as-nails platformer ‘Super Meat Boy,’ and  McMillen himself is known for the religion-themed game ‘The Binding of Isaac.’ The aforementioned games are critically acclaimed works, with many considering  them pieces of art within the gaming community. That’s just it, video games are a work of art, as they are an amalgam of the various forms of accepted art, they can evoke emotional responses to it’s content, they can be manifestations of an artists’ feelings, or something they want to convey, and like most other art, video games are very inclusive.

At their core, video games are just a combination of other traditional arts, such as paintings/drawings, music, and writing. They’re artforms on their own, so why does mixing them, and then making them interactable suddenly take away their right to be a valid artform? It's a ridiculous idea to think of video games as anything other than the ultimate art form, as each individual piece of development that goes Into a game, such as art and music assets, and the story, where it could be skillfully told by being integrated into gameplay, so it's fairly obvious that if you pick a part a video game, you'll get multiple forms of art. It seems that people that don't believe video games are art, are old curmudgeons that just don't understand games, or they still see them as the basic games that they played so many years ago. Like most things, games have evolved beyond running and jumping, deep story telling, complicated game mechanics have been added, and immersion is at an all time high. Games like Persona 4, which use it's art and music to convey a sense of happiness, which contrasts so well with the tragedy occurs within the game, which affects the player is just something that wouldn’t be able to be performed through any other entertainment medium.