Why Games Should Be Art
The previous essay was about what the games industry lost. This one is about what it had to begin with.
I. Art Is Not Made
Art is not made. It is found — but only when something has been designed with the intention of making that finding possible.
You might discover something about your logical structure while playing chess. You might touch something real about physical limits while running. But those discoveries happen inside the structure of those activities, not because they were designed to produce them. Art is a world built with the intention that the person who enters it will find something there — something about themselves or about how things are. That intention has to be present for the finding to be possible.
Games can do this, and they can do one thing that film and literature cannot: they let you bring your own judgment into that space, and then discover — in the collision between your judgment and what the world does with it — something about yourself that you didn't know beforehand. You are not watching someone else's choice. You are making a choice, and watching where it goes. That is not saying games are better than film. It is saying they are built to do something different.
This capacity did not come to games by accident. In 1974, D&D established a premise: the world is built by the Dungeon Master, but what happens inside it is decided by the players. That premise was inherited by computer RPGs in the 1980s, entered Wasteland in 1988, then Fallout, then Baldur's Gate 3 today. The line has never broken. It was never accidental — the games in this tradition were built with the intent of giving the player's judgment real weight.
II. Highpool or the Agricultural Center
Early in Wasteland 2, two distress calls arrive simultaneously on the radio. Highpool is under attack. The Agricultural Research Center is under attack. Both are waiting for someone to come.
There is no third option. Wherever you go, the other place disappears in the silence you cannot hear. Highpool has a reservoir that supplies the whole region's drinking water. The Agricultural Center has research facilities and food production. Water or food — you choose one, and you carry that choice forward.
You chose Highpool. You saved the people there. They thanked you. Then they took you to see Bobby's grave, his dog's grave placed beside it.
In Wasteland 1, the Rangers before you killed a dog that had gone rabid — no other option, the dog would have infected others. Bobby, the dog's owner, rushed out, and the Rangers killed him in self-defence. That event lodged itself in Highpool's collective memory. You came and saved their lives, but that gravestone is there, and the historical debt it represents is there with it.
I don't like what the Rangers stand for — that certainty, the Rangers', the NCR's, that their justice is the only kind. Bobby's gravestone is a fragment produced by that certainty, and they had placed it there, in front of the person who had just saved their lives. I dug up the grave, then killed everyone.
The game said nothing. It just let it happen, and kept going.
In The Godfather, Michael Corleone's fall has its power partly because you cannot stop it — you can only witness it, and that helplessness is the specific thing cinema gives you. Games give you something else. I didn't know I would dig up Bobby's grave until I did. That discovery came from the collision between my judgment and that moment — it wasn't arranged for me by the writers. No film could give me that, not because film isn't good enough, but because its structure doesn't allow my judgment to actually intervene.
III. Titan Canyon
Before you enter Titan Canyon, the first thing you see is craters — dense, covering the ground.
The canyon is controlled by the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud, a zealot sect that worships a nuclear missile left over from before the war, installed in a launch silo in the mountain, with a temple built around it. The terms of passage are simple: to cross the canyon, you accept the escort of a monk carrying a nuclear grenade. Merchants, bandits, Rangers — everyone moves through with a guard ready to detonate at any moment, and the craters are proof of it. Mutually assured destruction — the monks call it the Peace of Titan.
The Diamondback Militia operates in the canyon's shadow, claiming to want to overthrow the monks and bring real order. I thought the Militia was more workable — at least their logic was secular, negotiable. I supported them.
Then I discovered that the "jammer" the Militia had me install in the launch silo was actually a launch code — one that would detonate the missile with the silo door closed. They intended to destroy me and the monks at the same time.
I turned back toward the monks. Then I found out that the Titan God is a decommissioned museum exhibit, no warhead, never capable of launching. Only the monks' inner circle knew this. The entire Peace of Titan was built on a fake weapon, built on everyone's fear of that fake weapon.
Something came to me among those craters: a system of order survives not because it is closest to the truth, but because it can absorb the most situations into its framework while generating the least internal contradiction. The Servants' system worked precisely because it rested on a premise nobody verified — the Titan God's power came from its unfalsifiability, not from any real destructive capacity. Once someone looked, the order dissolved — not because power transferred, but because the narrative broke.
I didn't arrive at this while reading political philosophy. I arrived at it among those craters.
IV. Dark Souls
Wasteland 2 lets your judgment leave marks in the world — Bobby's gravestone is there regardless of what you do with it. Dark Souls does something different: it doesn't provide an answer to "what is this world" at all. The construction of meaning is your work from the beginning.
In Anor Londo, you encounter a guard called the Darkmoon Knightess. She keeps a bonfire; she can reinforce your flask. She wears heavy brass armour, silent, offering no account of who she is. You can kill her. She drops a soul — the Fire Keeper Soul of the Darkmoon Knightess. You read the item description: the brass armour is a disguise. Inside her body, swarms of humanity writhe beneath a thin layer of skin. The armour exists to hide this.
The game didn't tell you this before you met her. It didn't tell you when you met her. Only when you picked up the item and read those words did the encounter that had already passed become newly illuminated.
This is how Dark Souls tells its story: not narration, but archaeology. You dig in the ruins, and each fragment you uncover changes your understanding of everything you have already seen. Your reconstruction and another player's reconstruction can be entirely different. The game will not tell you who is right.
A novel can have an open ending, but the author's choice of every word is always there, forming an intent that cannot be fully evaded. FromSoftware suspends that intent entirely — not because they have no intent, but because their design intent is to hand the construction of meaning to the player. The text is the ruins. The meaning is yours.
V. On the Player Who Follows a Walkthrough
Someone will say: most players will never experience what you're describing. They follow walkthroughs in Wasteland 2, look up wikis for Dark Souls. The collision you're talking about only happens for a very few.
This is correct. It doesn't affect the argument — but it needs to be clear why it doesn't, and what it does affect.
Most people watch The Godfather without analysing its narrative structure. Most people read Dostoevsky skipping the psychological description passages. This doesn't affect those works' standing as art, because art is defined by its design intent, not by whether every person who encounters it uses the space that intent opens up.
But there is a distinction worth making: the player who follows a walkthrough is not the same as the player of a Battle Pass game. The first is a recipient choosing not to enter that space. The second is a recipient for whom that space was never designed — a Battle Pass game's design intent is to keep you spending inside a system, not to give your judgment somewhere to land. Wasteland 2 has that intent. Bobby's gravestone is a design decision, not an accident. Battle Pass games don't have that intent. Even if a player occasionally collides with something inside one, that happened outside the design intent, not because of it.
What the objection does affect is the scope of the claim. The experience this essay describes depends on a particular kind of player in a particular kind of state — someone willing to be surprised by their own judgment, willing to lose, willing to stay in the difficulty. That is not most players. The honest version of the argument is narrower than "games should be art" — it is that games have the structural capacity to produce something no other medium can, and that capacity is being systematically compressed. How wide that capacity actually runs, and what conditions allow it to open — that is a question this essay doesn't fully answer. It is the question the next one starts from.
VI. Why Games Should Be Treated as Art
The Wasteland series sat in EA's archive for fifteen years. FromSoftware's sales will never match Call of Duty's.
Cost and intent are never on the same ledger — the first is calculated by the market, the second is not, so the second always loses.
The Titan God is a museum exhibit. No warhead. It was never capable of launching. Before anyone looked, the order held.
Wasteland 2 put that world there and waited. What you found when you looked was yours.
If this piece made you think — or made you argue — I'd like to hear it: f227f0227@zohomail.eu
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