Games As Art Forms

Guest Column by Brooks Barber, 30 October 2025

Toward the end of August, an old argument popped up again on Bluesky about the limitations of board games in eliciting different resonances of meaning. A lot of the conversation boils down to the old, simple “can board games be art?” Perhaps a more pointed way to put the question at hand is, “Are board games more than efficiency puzzles that force players into optimal styles of play at the expense of more emotional or expressionist experiences?” Another way to think of it is, “What is the range of experiences board games are capable of delivering to their players?”

I’ll get this out of the way early – I believe board games, and all games, can be art. Not all games are art, just as not all pictures, movies, poems, stories, or sculptures are art. And I don’t mean that some of these are not art because of their quality. Bad art is still art, and it is still worth studying. I have learned as much from playing poorly designed games as I have from games that sing. What I mean is that sometimes these mediums are used to sell products and not to advance a creative vision. I recognize that everyone has their own definition of art and how to spot it. I am not attempting to open that can of worms here. But in my estimation, games (and especially board games) can be art.

What I hope to do here is examine why board games are not generally treated as an artistic medium and put forth my ideas around why they should be.

What makes games different from other artforms? The classical artforms are easy to spot: painting, sculpture, music, theater, dance, poetry (and others, I’m sure). Several more modern artistic forms of media have established themselves firmly: film, television, the novel, even video games (again, among many others). But board games seem stuck in an interminable cycle of discourse around whether or not they can be art.

It’s helpful to look at these other, more modern, and therefore more familiar, artforms for some additional context. All of them have gone through similar processes of establishing themselves, of proving themselves, as “legitimate” or “genuine” examples of artistic expression. Among them, cinema progressed the most quickly, gaining recognition as early as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. But their place in our culture as art is still debated, with constant refrains about remakes and superhero stories – many think there are no original ideas left in cinema. Novels have been around for a thousand years or more, but they were long considered a form of popular entertainment that did not rise to the level of “high art”. Television was seen through the same lens, and hotly debated for decades by cultural critics. It wasn’t until the 1990s, with shows like Twin Peaks or The Sopranos, that television cemented its legacy as an artform. The debate around video games is much more recent and much more well known to many in the gaming community, I’m sure. Roger Ebert famously said video games would never be art, while others credit Bioshock with proving they can be. That question is mostly settled now too.

Yet board games, despite having been around as long or longer than some of these other artforms, continue to struggle with convincing the community at large that they deserve to be considered for their artistic merit. Most of these arguments follow the same general lines of thought: that board games are just toys; that they are meant solely for entertainment; that we shouldn’t take them seriously as cultural objects. These are dismissive and reductive and relatively easy to push back against.

These arguments confuse games as products and games as creative expressions. Sure, there are plenty of examples of games created solely to move units and not as artistic expressions, but the fact that these exist, even the fact that the majority of games in the world likely fit into this category, should not preclude games from being capable of achieving the status of art. This is the same kind of conversation all those other forms of media went through: films, video games, novels, comic books, and so many others have at times been dismissed as mere cash grabs targeting the lowest common denominator. This is ground better folks than I have covered elsewhere, as in this article by Dan Thurot.

The much more insidious argument against games as art runs deeper, and is unique to board games in particular – that they are primarily collections of mechanisms dressed up with various “themes” that could otherwise be interchangeable. A slightly different but related version of this posits that games are too reliant on their players to consistently deliver a designer’s message, invalidating its artistic power or legitimacy. The thinking runs that the mechanical systems ingrained within tabletop (and especially board) games prevent players from immersing themselves into the experience enough to experience it as art. That this layer of structural awareness, and the limitations on player agency it imposes, means board games cannot present a vision of the world that approaches the artistic expression of something like a novel or a film or even a video game.

Furthermore, these conversations about which forms of media and entertainment can be art and which can’t are driven by the community of people who serve as critics of those forms. And unfortunately, many of the most popular board game critics think experimental games are merely being pretentious or that we should not allow politics to interfere with the fun of gaming. On the other hand, it does seem the tide is turning toward a more general acceptance of board games carrying deeper meaning. Board games are political, yes all of them, and I do mean all of them! Many critics have been approaching games this way for years, with a depth of thought and care similar to what we see in treatments of film, literature, theater, and the visual arts. But this perspective has yet to break through to the wider gaming community.

I think there are several reasons the “board games aren’t art” perspective misses a critical thing about board games – that the marriage between a game’s thematic elements and its mechanical structures are exactly why it can be a unique form of art. And perhaps even more importantly, that they require play, which is itself one of the most fundamental human arts, practiced so readily by children and forgotten so easily by adults. The former argument has been articulated about as well as possible in this video essay by Amabel Holland. I would like to spend the rest of my time here exploring the latter idea – that play, whether children’s chaotic silliness or in a board game about presiding over political trials during the French Revolution, is inherently meaning-making, and that through it we understand the world better. Every board game, no matter how serious or silly, can be art because it brings us back to the fundamentals of play, and that especially for adults this can be quite revolutionary.

Play lays the foundation for how kids learn to face the world. They take risks, they develop social skills, they explore new ideas and difficult emotional concepts, all through play.

When we are children, we play all the time. One might argue that play is the point of being a child, that to some extent it defines childhood. Play is not just fun time-wasting but a critical way through which we develop as humans (as mammals really – we just play in different ways than cats or dogs or chimpanzees). Play lays the foundation for how kids learn to face the world. They take risks, they develop social skills, they explore new ideas and difficult emotional concepts, all through play. A state of play is a safe place in which to try on new forms of self, or to die or lie without consequence, or to test your own and others’ boundaries. It is the temporary occupation of a new identity, which may have thoughts, needs, desires, and personality traits entirely different from your own. Kids slip into and out of play constantly and without friction. It is just a part of how they approach life. Sometimes there is a formal declaration (“plet’s play!” my toddler screams several times a day) but often it simply happens, as if this shift in mindset is the natural way they know how to engage based on the social cues around them.

At some point, most adult humans lose their playfulness. Not all of us, and not entirely, but we get bogged down with the daily responsibilities of life, the constant, nagging, somewhat arbitrary requirements that land on us when we “come of age”, the anxiety of knowing just how complex and dangerous the world really is. We begin to confine our play to specific bounded instances, and frequently we look down upon adults who continue to express their play in childlike ways. This is part of the reason there has been a social stigma against grown ups who enjoy things perceived as children’s pursuits: comics, cartoons, games, playing dress up, or any number of things that are fun dammit. In losing or limiting our play, we also lose important ways of engaging with and understanding the world. We become more entrenched in our own singular perspective and lose sight of how to occupy alternative forms of agency.

The beauty of board games is that they help bridge the gap between our adult and childhood selves.

The beauty of board games is that they help bridge the gap between our adult and childhood selves. They bring structure to play in important ways while still allowing players to step outside themselves and into another skin for a moment. Even games that are not narratively focused shape a player’s goals, motivations, and mindset during the scope of one play of a game. So to an extent every game is a work of art because it provides the opportunity for people to engage in the wonderfully human art of play itself.

I spend most of my time in the historical gaming genre, where some games are especially adept not only at opening up a space for play, but also at creating powerful mechanical vehicles through which to explore some of the most difficult topics imaginable. Children sometimes role play through traumatic experiences as a coping mechanism. In a similar vein, these games allow adults to grapple with and better understand intense, and often horrifying, subject matter. We do this not only through games but also through watching movies, reading books, or attending the theater. I argue that board games, unlike any of these other artforms, allow for a different form of learning and exploration because as players of games we are part of the action. We participate in the creation of meaning about these subjects by bringing ourselves to the table and putting ourselves into the state of play. The discourse occurs within the boundaries of the game’s mechanical systems and for that one instance of play only. We can also return to that same game and see a completely different shape of things because the game’s systems allow for multiple instantiations of meaning.

I think this is why board games in particular struggle to establish themselves as art. The type of play they are best at is not narrative or lyrical, it is systemic and mechanical. Many people find it challenging to look past the mechanisms and see what they represent, or to see a game in its entirety as a cohesive work. For a game is more than the sum of its parts. When brought together well, the things that make up a game, its mechanisms, theme, art, physical components, rulebook, box, and framing, all contribute to lifting up the whole as a work of art expressing something about the world from the unique perspective of its creators. In order to nudge the community forward in its consideration of games as art, we must lean into the design and development of games taking this holistic approach. We must prioritize and champion those that do it exceptionally well. We must recognize and celebrate play as art.

So, how do we accomplish this? I don’t claim to know the answer. The cultural ethos around tabletop games would have to shift. I do, however, have some ideas about what people who care to move the needle can do.

• Seek out and support the designers and publishers who see games in this way, who explicitly discuss games as art or argument or political diatribe. Buy their games, share their work, and make them commercially as well as critically successful. Prove that these kinds of games can be not only interesting thought experiments but also viable business units. If you need places to start, here are a few I find interesting: Wehrlegig, Hollandspiele, Fort Circle, Lunarpunk, Resonym, DVC, among others.
• Demand critical treatment of games as makers of meaning. Flock to the content creators doing this work already (there are many). Create your own threads in whatever forums you use. Counter the “games are toys” narrative. Hold accountable those creators who dismiss and diminish the potential games hold. Some of my favorite content channels are Armchair Dragoons (obvious plug), Homo Ludens, Beyond Solitaire, Space Biff!, the Game Design Deep Dive podcast, Lunarpunk’s Dialogues at Dusk, Amabel Holland’s video essays, Building the Game podcast, No Pun Included, among many others!
• Create weird things! Make your niche game about whatever topic you hold dear. Do it earnestly and with the intent to educate and entertain, and it will become so engaging that people will experience it and talk about it and consider it thoughtfully. Make it known that games can do more than what we’ve been conditioned to think they can do.

In the end, I believe we need a watershed moment. A breakthrough game (or publisher) that cements board games in the zeitgeist as things that can aspire to art. The die hard fans are the ones who ultimately make this happen, by sharing their joy with other communities and people who are not yet part of the gaming community. It is a communal effort to move this direction.

Postscript — The good news is that there are many corners of our hobby pushing the boundaries of what games can do. The work of people like Amabel Holland, Cole Wehrle, Alex Knight, Tory Brown, Fred Serval, and Dan Bullock is already well known. I count myself lucky to also know the work of Non-Breaking Space, Joe Schmidt, Joe Dewhurst, Xoe Allred, Matthew Hocker, Maia Thomas, David Masnato, Eric Dittmore, and many others exploring the nooks and crannies of new gaming experiences.

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