There have been quite a few discussions throughout the history of video games over whether or not they can be considered “art,” especially after the release of several unique games in the last few years like Journey, Gone Home, and others. At the same time that many gamers are pushing for games to be considered as artistic as film, others are rebelling against this idea, saying that games are just an entertaining hobby, and trying to make them artistic is pretentious.

According to Paul Taylor, Joint Managing Director of Frozen Synapse indie studio Mode 7 Games, video games can absolutely be both art and hobby, but the attitude many gamers have toward the “pretentiousness” of artistic games needs to change.

“We’re in a time of significant cultural tension,” Taylor wrote in a recent blog post. “This partially manifests itself as a tug-of-war between a progressive ‘games-as-art’ movement and a conservative ‘games-as-entertainment’ group.”

Taylor said that the hobbyists, those who consider gaming to be an entertaining pastime, are resistant to changes in the way people perceive gaming because it is such an important part of their life and personality.

“When you attack the nature of a hobby, you are attacking someone’s private personal fulfillment,” Taylor said. “Essentially, you are attacking them: the hobby is core to their personality and it is an external expression of it. You’re also attacking their sense of community: it is no wonder that people take any attempt to change the way in which gaming is perceived as a personal affront.”

He explained that many of the hobbyists resistant to the idea of games-as-art refer to attempts at making the medium more creative as pretentious, but Taylor dislikes that word as needlessly dismissive.

“If pretension is ‘affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed’ then literally all creative people are pretentious,” Taylor said. “There is no good reason to believe that anything you are making has any merit at all: statistically it doesn’t. Until it’s finished, it certainly doesn’t, and unless you believe in its importance throughout then nobody else will.”

Taylor concluded that there is a place for both entertainment and creativity in gaming, and not only do the two not have to be mutually exclusive, each can actually be improved by the other.

“Just as art can make a hobby better, so I increasingly believe that artists should try being hobbyists a little more,” Taylor said. “We need more dialogue. Let’s make concessions: if one side agrees to stop shouting ‘pretentious!’ and the other admits that, just sometimes, it’s nice to have a minimap then maybe we can all be friends?”

Image credit: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off | Paramount Pictures