Commercial Art, Or Just Art?

Their sketches may have been created for use in video games, but they’ll soon be touring the world as part of a juried exhibition. Does that make the works produced by Lee, McCarthy and Stevenson glorified marketing materials or bona fide pieces of art?

The age-old question prompts McCarthy to reply with a question of his own. “I think anything that involves creating a finished product which other people enjoy is a kind of artform in its own way, isn’t it?”

Lee also believes his creations—and the creations of his colleagues in the gaming industry—should receive the same respect as any other artform. And that includes the classics.

“I think games are the highest form of developed art, in terms of art and technology, in human history,” he says, adding that in hundreds of years, some video games will be remembered as art while others will be forgotten completely, just as many artists from the past are ignored while art history books wax poetic about the works of van Gogh. “We will remember the ones created by talented artists,” Lee adds.

Answering the question isn’t quite as easy for Stevenson. “I think some games are art and some are just entertainment, just like in the film industry,” he says. “There are action movies that don’t really say anything but entertain you, while there are films that can move you, make you laugh and cry, change your life.

“Maybe we've become too obsessed with the question ‘are games art?’ and should just appreciate it as a medium like no other,” Stevenson suggests. “The industry is always changing, so it’s going to be interesting to see what happens once people see past the technology we use to produce the game and see the care and love we put into the art.”