Video Games as Art: What Lessons Can We Learn?

How can video games help us understand our museum audiences and what they appreciate about art? This is the first question that came to my mind when I read about the new exhibition to open today at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, entitled of The Art of Video Games.The Smithsonian institution took a participatory approach to the planning of this exhibition by reaching the gaming community on their curatorial enterprise.

According to the USATODAY article that inspired me to write this post, the museum received the help of 119,000 online voters who assisted on narrowing down the initial 240 games to the final 80 that will be included in this exhibition. "More than 3.7 million votes were cast" so it occurs to me that we could learn a lot by looking at the final 80 choices. Even though the museum is not attempting to engage in the debate of whether or not video games could be consider art, I personally believe that a lot of interesting data could be collected out of this curatorial effort. What do you think?

Not being extremely familiar with video games myself I could be totally wrong, but it seems to me like video games are getting more and more realistic-looking nowadays and "audiences" seem to enjoy that. As technology advances, game developers acquire new and more sophisticated skills and they seem to be trying to reach as much realism as possible in the games they create. On the other hand, gamers seem to enjoy playing realistic-looking games. What can that tell us about their taste when it comes to art? Would it be safe to conclude that video gamers would prefer representational works of art over abstract ones? Whoever can follow them around as they visit other galleries at the Smithsonian American Art Museum could end up with a very interesting study! Any gamers (or researchers) want to comment on this?