Occasional Chewing Pixels commentater and EA producer Jim Preston has written an excellent article over at Gamaustra on the games-as-art question.

Before you roll eyes back into your head for the nth time, please take a look – it’s well-worth reading not least because it principally asks the more nuanced question: ‘How might games be viewed as Art?’.

Preston references last year’s wonderful Joshua Bell experiment when an enterprising staff writer at the Washington Post convinced the super-lauded violinist to busk in disguise at the busy L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington.

As you can see from the resulting video (still available on this site), the virtuoso went virtually unnoticed by passing commuters demonstrating that, when it comes to art, context really is everything.

Preston’s point is that engaging games-can-never-be-art critics such as Roger Ebert in an essentialist debate is largely pointless (to do so you have to wade into the question of whether art has to be a purely linear experience with all of the decisions pre-made by the creator, or whether a creator-set boundaries for non-linear experience is enough).

Instead, says Preston,those who would like to see videogames’ treated with gravitas and respect as a creative medium should be focusing on creating the conditions in which games can be viewed that way.

Arguing that anything can be art if the context is right is cheating a little (but then he brings out Duchamp’s infamous urinal piece as exhibit A at this point) but it’s good point and one that, thanks to the Game On exhibitions at the London Barbican and Science Museum, is partially proven.

I like Jim’s conclusion that games will, in time, be viewed as art whether one likes it or not: “As the video game generation grows older and more influential, the “is it art?” debate will be won by context and simple attrition,” he says. “Gamers will have grown up with them, and the cranks in meatspace will slowly die off.”

In a sense then it is inevitable that gamers who are desperate for their hobby to be seen as more than mere toys will have their dreams realised soon enough with the inevitable advent of museums, exhibitions and gaming equivalents of the AFI and BFI. Nevertheless, the deeper question of games-as-art, the one that transcends context, the one that asks whether it’s possible for a videogame to change and transform the way in which its players sees the world around them, will remain, with all of its myriad and messy answers.