I don&#x27;t buy any hard criteria for accepting something as &quot;art&quot;. Ultimately it&#x27;s just a status contest. Will the hip folks accept video games into &quot;high culture&quot;, or will they keep sneering? Post facto excuses can be made for either choice, but the deal maker is the opportunity for social differentiation.<p>The best way to elevate the status of games is not by making art games like Gone Home that try to tackle social issues with a veneer of interactivity. That&#x27;s a transparently wannabe tactic. Instead, gamers could project a hipster-like appreciation of <i>pure gameplay</i> as something that takes effort to enjoy. There&#x27;s a good case to be made that the unwashed masses don&#x27;t actually enjoy gameplay once you remove all the set dressing (art, music, plot...), so there&#x27;s an opportunity for an informed minority to claim better taste. Such hipsterism could sow the seeds for eventually accepting games into the high culture pantheon.<p>As a bonus, creating pure gameplay is much easier than asset-heavy games. It&#x27;s well within reach of a single brooding artist on drugs, and you can credibly sell it as a momentary flash of inspiration later. That&#x27;s convenient, because picking out the name of one auteur from ten pages of credits is a real mood killer.