Signification of Video Game as a Contemporary Art Medium

The 8th art is a title which sometimes used to refer to videogames. It’s been about 25 years from the late 1980’s first institutional considerations of videogames as art, when art museums began to show some old, first and second generation videogames in their collections. Video games in modern world have become cultural, economic and political tools to shape the thought of the younger generation. Examples of these games have made their way to the museums; scientific circles have focused on game aesthetic; and different countries are trying to take part in the growing market of game design. However, some critics still believe videogames can never be works of art. The mail question of this research is whether the medium of videogame is an artistic one or not. To answer that, we ask: based on which theory and definition of art we can consider videogame an artistic medium?The present paper is based on an analytical descriptive study, whose qualitative data are compiled in a documentary manner. The main goal of this research is to attempt to determine the signification of video games as a new medium in the contemporary artworld.The first step to solve the problem is to examine and criticize two main arguments against the artistic nature of this medium, Masterpiece argument and Disqualification argument. Followers of masterpiece argument believe that no video games ever produced which can be convincingly recognized as an artistic masterpiece. They have forgotten that artistic mediums like Minor Art / Low Art or Public Art / Mass Art, as well as any other newfound artistic medium, are incapable of producing a masterpiece at the beginning. Disqualification argument states that video games have features which does not exist in traditional arts and this denies their qualifications as artworks. One of the disadvantages of this argument is that its followers forget about other interactive forms of contemporary art like Participatory art. However, we should not forget that at the onset of the emergence of any new artistic medium (including photography and cinema), some people have resisted the acceptance of its artistic nature; but the new media has been recognized in the artworld, with the passage of time.After adapting videogames to nine theories of art (Immanuel Kant’s point of view, and theories like: Neo-Representational, Expressivism, Formalism, Institutional, Historical, Functional, Cluster, and Lively Art), we can claim that, many video games can be artwork, due to complicated narrative, significant form, historical connection with cinema, acceptance by the artworld, sophisticated aesthetics, expressive feelings, etc. Although video games are still in their childhood, but they can stimulate artistic and aesthetic sentiment. In the end, by discussing the ontology of video game as an interactive art, an attempt has been made to reveal the nature of this emerging artistic medium. Also, by examining the concepts and functions of game aesthetics, it turned out that there is a huge potential for research on the aesthetics of this contemporary artistic medium.