Since the initial appearance in the 1970’s of the medium we now understand as video games, its position and reception within the cultural landscape has undergone a profound shift. Fifty years on, video games have evolved from mere play-things for an avid but specialist audience, to a prominent paradigm at the forefront of contemporary digital life. As early as the 1980’s, an evolution was underway, with the inclusion of video games in consequential exhibits like “Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade” (1989) at the Museum of Moving Image suggesting a new view of these play-things as objects for serious aesthetic consideration. In the 1990s, new media artist Jodi took up the video game as a form of found object, much like the bicycle seat had been for Picasso and the urinal for Duchamp in the previous century. The early 2000s saw creators like Porpentine, Paolo Perdiccini and Joseph Fares explicit in framing their video games foremost as works of art rather than as entertainments. At the same time, increasingly elaborate games like Halo and Minecraft ushered in a novel turn: that of video game as platform, in which the player-audience is afforded unprecedented levels of agency to craft original aesthetic experiences within a game’s topology. This latest stage of maturation of the video game medium has been decisive and defining. An expanded and expansive state of objecthood means video games hold dual status as both object and world; as a result, artistic acts, no longer limited to the game’s creator, are available to any of its participant audience. 

—Rene G. Cepeda & Kat Mustatea, January 2023