The Tragedy of the Art Game

The paper argues that a fundamental and unresolved tension is built into computer games understood as a medium: the game artist seeks self-expression through the work, while the player seeks an instrument to play with. Although games have gained recognition as an art form and have converged with interactive art, the author contends this progress has depended on overlooking that conflict, producing what he calls the "tragedy of the art game." The argument draws on ludological and aesthetic theory, citing scholars such as Juul, Kirkpatrick, Sharp, and Kwastek, and grounds its claims in close readings of individual works rather than a large empirical sample.

The analysis identifies two broad approaches art games take to resolving the tension between ambiguity and unambiguity. The first resembles conventional games, introducing failure conditions and learnable rules that let players develop skill; here the player is satisfied, but the designer-artist is displaced as the player owns the game as a personal instrument, with Molleindustria's Dogness offered as an example. The second removes failure and struggle, aligning with interactive art's open exploration; here the artist becomes the authority on meaning while the player's role shrinks to that of a passive audience, with Night Journey and Every Day the Same Dream as examples. The author suggests these approaches may mark the ends of a continuum on which individual art games could be placed.

The paper's conclusion is that the two kinds of satisfaction cannot coexist, so the artist and the player remain in conflicting positions. The author notes that the proposed continuum has not been tested through a systematic survey of art games, a limitation acknowledged as beyond the scope of this extended abstract. The work is presented as a conceptual intervention into debates over walking simulators, the medium-specificity of games, and the relationship between games and the contemporary art world.