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The film critic Roger Ebert’s recent comments about video games and their potential as art, and especially the immense stir the comments caused on discussion forums all over the internet, shows the intrinsic interest there is in the question of whether video games are art. Of course, many people see the debate as entirely pointless, and there is the separate question of why we should want to establish that video games are art.

But the question remains, and it is entirely sensible: are video games art?

Individual opinion on this issue is understandably varied, but what has not be been noticed in all of this debate is that video games are increasingly a topic of study within the philosophy of the arts. A number of recent philosophical papers and books, including those by Aaron Smuts, Dominic Lopes, and my own book The Art of Videogames, have taken up the task of explaining video games in terms of the arts. A natural aspect of this explanation is the status of this new medium within the