Games demand more from their audience than TV, but you're still given a lot to consume passively, compared to a book: instead of imagining scenes, you're again given them as pictures. Games do compensate though with demanding that you make choices as you play a game, which may impact a story. Well... that's as long as the game is not an FPS, or a racing game, where choices don't matter for a story, as the story is either non-existent, or barely important; and what matters a lot more is your dexterity and reflex.
Also see https://ifdb.org/
There are a lot of MUD games. I've been playing WoTMUD on and off for a little over two decades now.
The Witness is a slightly more interesting case in that it presents a sequence of evolving puzzle rules. The rule evolution again relies on presentation aspects to achieve the "twist": early puzzles are clearly framed to stress the notion that puzzles are limited to clearly discernable canvases. Later puzzles dissolve these boundaries until they are no longer present and the puzzles are simply part of the environment. This sequence is only partially gated by the game (whether or sequencing/gating in a game is part of the rules or the presentation is another can of worms). The only real change from clearly framed to unframed puzzles here is that the problem statement transforms into finding the right viewpoint. Which part of this is art?
In my opinion, the art in these games is the beautiful intersection of a set of puzzle rules with the world they inhabit. In The Witness, the world is additionally constructed to be thematically interesting, and I think that the set pieces on the island are intrinsically connected to the puzzles next to them. The island by itself would not make for very interesting art: it’s the game element that brings the art to life.
Also, “pressing a button to reverse time” feels very reductive. By playing the game, the player learns, and this learning leads to understanding. Usually, this understanding is tied solely to the game world and is used to tackle new and more complex challenges in later areas, but maybe it can also lead to extra-game insight. Even a tiny game like Passage makes powerful gestures in this direction.
Somewhere along the path towards modern computer games, a conflation happened between the game and its presentation. My intention here is to point this out. If you retain the meaning of the word "game" from its pre-computer origin, you arrive at the reduction that I outlined and the question whether you can convey artistic intent solely in a set of game rules.
Artistic intent is always somehow relying on a certain level of control over an artwork's presentation. What is (or isn't) shown in painting, how is it represented and where is it on the canvas relative to everything else? Music, film and video have a temporal aspect under the control of the artist. In that sense, Kandinsky paintings can be art under the assumption that the compositions of these paintings are very deliberate.
In a computer game, there is always tension between the game elements which give agency to the recipient and the presentational aspects for which the creator has to assert control from the player in some form to ensure that they are conveyed with the proper intent.
This tension makes any answer to whether video games can be art nontrivial.
It's frustrating that the reasons The Witness is lifechanging can't be explained to others without preventing them from having that same experience and understanding. But that in itself is a revelation to discover. It can't be told, it must be experienced.
Games are supposed to be fun. The money goes the other way, so the annoyances are taken a bit more seriously. The creator has to take that frustration on themselves instead of externalizing it, which is more work for them.
Add to that the delight aspect, and games try crazy stuff that would never fly with business software. 'Safe' doesn't get you many accolades so you're essentially obliged to try at least a few things. And the shelf life is lower so even if you fuck up you usually only have to hear about it for three years and then you can try something new. Once in a while, every five years or so, one of those UI gambles ends up being adopted by the industry, so while not the most effective petri dish for general UX research, it still gets some results.
Things do appear to be changing, yet with older generations there's still a lot of judgement.
keep your mind on your self and it's surroundings, and let your self be one with both pleasure and struggle.
let not the words of others compel you to eat too many frogs [1]
[1]: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/excuse-me-but-why...
TLDR; games like movies are a sum of parts that is a lot less creative and original than might appear at first blush.
I've worked with various teams on game jams and I’ve had conversations with people over the years, encouraging people to hold themselves to a lower standard. It’s not just the fact that this is a game jam—we are not competing with Zelda, and our game doesn’t need to have scope, scale, or polish similar to a Zelda game.
I also enjoy playing a game and seeing somebody’s amateur-ish art, or hearing some clumsy musical phrases that they put together. There’s something special about that which is hard to capture when you start spreading the work around people, because it’s just so hard to put together a coherent vision for a game in multiple minds.
We’ve also talked about how you run into a lot of people who’s main goal is to do job X at a higher level of technical ability and polish so they can get hired by a studio they like. It’s understandable why they’d want that, but it also leads to people sanding the edges off their style, so to speak. This makes it difficult to assemble a team of people who are all interested in the same style of development process (no judgment—some people on your team want a portfolio piece for a future job, some people want to express themselves here and now).
I don’t think making a solo game developer should be any different than being a novel writer, in the sense that it’s not a club reserved for the people who are good at doing it—but a club for the people who put in the time and effort to make something.
I definitely bought a $0.99 app that you could tip up to your face to make it look like you were drinking a beer.
Very, very low.
Also! Physics, vector math, AI, cameras, shaders, networking, etc
On a small project you also usually have to do the game design, it is art too.
And art is harder than technique in my opinion.
I got a lot of respect for artists.
That's because most games are about shooting other people. This is something only children (and perhaps some dictators) love to think about.
So it is with games. I’d urge you to take a second look. These sorts of generalisations, ill-supported by evidence, have historically been bad for the medium.
Creating a video game requires knowledge of the following: programming, graphics, 3D or 2D art tools, artistic ability, UI and UX design, game design, music production, cinematography, storytelling, copywriting, etc etc. It’s just astoundingly complex.