How Call of Duty May Have Finally Proven Video Games Are Art

Whether video games are capital-A “Art” or just mindless entertainment has been a subject of debate for many years. Now, that debate has been settled in a court of law. And you’ll never believe the game that did it!

Call of Duty has basically been declared a work of art in a recent U.S. district court ruling. A federal judge ruled that Activision Blizzard did not infringe on trademarks for featuring Humvees in Call of Duty, because they were part of the game’s “artistic expression.” Thus, Call of Duty’s use of Humvees was protected under the First Amendment.

And despite how you may feel about that monolithic company and their endless shooter iterations, this is big. CoD’s artistic status is going to benefit the entire gaming industry.

Don’t believe it? Let’s do a deep dive into this classic debate, the legal verdict, and the future of video games.

The classic debate: are video games art?

In many ways, the debate about whether video games are art or not has been raging for as long as games have been around. And some pretty important cultural critics have weighed in on the matter.

The late, great movie critic Roger Ebert once declared that “video games can never be art.” And he doubled down on this statement back in 2010, despite having years of fans trying to convince him to change his mind. And he was even bold enough to declare “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

In the eyes of the law, this is no longer true. But what was Ebert’s (and by extension hundreds of other critics’) beef with games as art? To him, “art” as a label is automatically comparative. If games were art, he believed we’d need to have a single game that could stand up to other works of art. We’d need a game as good as the finest painting, the most moving movie, or the most engaging novel.

In 2010, Ebert thought no such game existed, and I’m pretty confident that Call of Duty would not have changed his mind. Nonetheless, that game is now our artistic trailblazer.

Early culture war victories

Obviously, Ebert’s notion of art isn’t the same as yours, mine, or anyone else’s. And well before the recent legal ruling, the “video games as art” proponents scored some major victories.

For example, starting in 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts began offering grants to aspiring gamemakers. These are part of their “Arts in Media” grants, putting games alongside film, TV, and radio.

Furthermore, there are multiple gaming museums and other preservation efforts to help us hold onto and study video game history. You can even find prominent video games in the Museum of Modern Art, where games like Pac-Man rub elbows with famous paintings like Starry Night.