Video Games Are the Most Important Art Form of Our Time

A few years ago, I played through Disco Elysium, a role-playing game set in a dying fictional city haunted by a failed communist revolution. It is also, incidentally, one of the funniest things I have ever encountered. It could not exist as a film or a novel. The interactivity is essential to what it does.

The Numbers First

The gaming industry generates more revenue annually than film and recorded music combined. In the United States, 65% of adults play video games regularly. The average age of a gamer is 31. The medium is not juvenile. It never was juvenile, but it has stopped even being plausibly dismissible on those grounds.

What Games Do That Nothing Else Does

The formal property unique to games is interactivity. When you play The Last of Us, you do not observe Joel and Ellie from the outside. You perform their relationship. The emotional weight of the game's ending is inseparable from the forty hours of muscle memory you have developed for protecting Ellie.

This is a genuinely new form of empathy-generation. Games like Hades, Celeste, and Outer Wilds have staked out aesthetic territory that has no equivalent elsewhere. The condescension toward the medium is the artifact now.