Can games be called the ninth art?
In 1911, the Italian poet Giotto Canudo published the Manifesto of the Seventh Art. In it, he declared that movie, along with painting, sculpture, music, architecture, dance, and literature, was a newborn art discipline alongside these six disciplines. After this, the concepts of the Eighth and Ninth Arts emerged. But nowadays people's controversy is often on top of the Ninth Art---are video games the Ninth Art or not? This question has been circulating for years, and although it is quite controversial, it should have been settled in the minds of the players. Video games are highly experiential and immersive in a way that no other artistic medium can match, which means that the player, as the audience of the video game, can participate in it and in a sense experience the entire work as the creator.
Therefore, I will start with my research question: How does interactivity give games a unique artistic value? Does the interactive nature of the game make it more “hands-on” with the story than a traditional medium (film or novel) ? Does the player's ability to make choices reconfigure the narrative authority of art? Highlighting the fact that an important feature of games as the Ninth Art is interactivity, which is utilized to demonstrate unique skills and ideas. In this way, I will demonstrate that games are truly the Ninth Art.
First of all, I believe that games can be called the “Ninth Art” because they break through the one-way expression of traditional art and build a multi-dimensional art experience through interactivity and immersion. Death Stranding, as Hideo Kojima's philosophical experiment, perfectly illustrates this proposition. Hideo Kojima's innovative and interactive design allows the player to not only participate in the narrative, but also to integrate into the art-making process by actively building the world. The player takes on the role of Sam, who needs to reconnect isolated cities in a post-apocalyptic America through delivery, and the player's own actions and decisions directly shape the entire game world. For example, the bridges or rain booths that the player builds not only serve him or her, but also affect the experience of other players and the world in real time—keeping the rain off other players or making it easier for them to get over a mountain.
Death Stranding, compared to other well-known game works, doesn’t bring many adrenaline-raising thrills. Players have to rely on their feet to measure the distance between people in a broken world. We can only feel the slow charm of the clouds and mountains embedded in the game. Kojima expresses death, the connection between people, and thoughts on the meaning of human existence with an expression full of interactivity. According to Simon Radchenko’s meta-modernist analysis of Death Stranding, the game’s interactive mechanics go beyond a simple entertainment function to become an important medium for emotional resonance and social bonding. The design of this “community of shared practice” allows players to feel not only a sense of accomplishment in artistic creation, but also a real-world sense of social responsibility and emotional resonance. The player's interactive choices cause the game to constantly move between optimism and pessimism, solidarity and isolation. This narrative uncertainty reinforces the depth of the player's emotional engagement and exemplifies the unique potential of video game narratives for artistic expression.
As Amy M. Green points out, the design language of Death Stranding deeply expresses the theme of “fragmentation and connection”: players walk through a ruined world and rebuild a “community of practice” by delivering packages and building bridges and shelters, thus gaining an unprecedented sense of emotional engagement. These interactions are not only functional operations, but also a kind of emotional repair and social reconstruction realized through physical labor, and the narrative mechanism behind them has gained a depth of artistic expression.
This aligns perfectly with Nic Kelman’s perspective in Video Game Art, where he argues that video games, due to their interactive nature, allow players not just to witness but to actively engage in narrative creation. Kelman emphasizes that interactive media uniquely facilitates profound emotional experiences, enabling players to feel intimately responsible for their actions and deeply connected to their digital environments. Similarly, Henry Jenkins notes that video games continue the tradition of myths and legends by placing players directly into heroic roles, enhancing emotional depth and personal identification far beyond passive media such as films or novels. Death Stranding exemplifies this artistic power of interactive storytelling, as players don’t merely observe Sam’s journey—they embody him, actively crafting their paths and the bridges they leave behind for others.
In general, Death Stranding is an artistic experience akin to savoring fine wine—it invites contemplation rather than passive consumption. Kojima masterfully uses the interactive capabilities of games to explore profound humanistic themes like life, death, and the existential need for connection. Players become architects of communal hope, building emotional and literal bridges between each other in a desolate world. This transformative experience not only deepens players’ emotional engagement but leaves lasting footprints on their paths to self-discovery. From this perspective, Death Stranding unquestionably earns its place among the highest forms of interactive art—the "Ninth Art." Players are far away from each other, but in fact they themselves are bridges of connection, and the paths players take and the connections they make in the game leave indelible footprints on the path of self-discovery.
In the discussion of whether video games are a form of art, What Remains of Edith Finch demonstrates the profound potential of the medium for artistic expression through its unique interactive narrative and emotional experience. The game follows Edith Finch as she returns to her ancestral home, where everyone in her family has died for various reasons. As the last of the family, she explores the mansion and searches for the truth behind the deaths of the family members. The game is essentially a “walking simulator” in which the player experiences and learns how each member of the family died. I was struck by the game's “fish-cutting” sequence, which uses an innovative interactive mechanic to place the player between the character Lewis's dual realities: the monotonous repetition of factory work on the one hand, and the fictionalized world of fantasy on the other that gradually takes over. Eventually the desire for the fantasy world leads to the decision to end his life in the real world.
As Bozdog and Galloway point out, the player needs to control two very different spaces on the screen at the same time, and “the player's attention is forced to switch between the monotonous reality and the attractive fantasy”. This type of interaction not only vividly represents the psychological state of the character Lewis, but also directly allows the player to experience the tension between fiction and reality through the game's mechanics. The construction of this scenario fully reflects the interactive nature of the game, that is, “the interactivity of the game allows the player not only to passively receive information, but to directly influence what happens in the game world”. The split between the player's manipulative gestures and visual attention, as well as the eventual occupation by the world of fantasy, embodies “direct interaction” and “player's interaction”. The split between player-controlled gestures and visual attention, and the eventual occupation of the fantasy world, exemplify the core elements of “direct interaction” and “player control”. In addition, Bozdog and Galloway argue that this interaction is not just a demonstration of skill, but a deeper manifestation of the fusion of literature and game mechanics: “Lewis's inherent conflict is expressed through the mechanics of the game, as the player is required to live in both worlds simultaneously”.
Furthermore, the interactive mechanics embodied in Lewis's "fish-cutting" sequence in What Remains of Edith Finch powerfully align with Chris Barney's framework in Pattern Language for Game Design. Barney argues that effective game design relies on establishing a "pattern language"—a system of recurring interactive structures—that enables players to viscerally grasp the emotions and experiences the designer intends to convey. He emphasizes that compelling interaction patterns should transform players from passive observers into active emotional participants, allowing them to organically inhabit a character’s psychological state through gameplay. Crucially, Barney positions these "patterns" not as mere technical design tools, but as narrative instruments for transmitting layered emotional truths—a bridge that elevates player engagement from story consumption to empathetic embodiment.
The fish-cutting sequence epitomizes this philosophy. As players split their attention between controlling Lewis’s monotonous factory labor and guiding his expanding fantasy realm, they transcend mechanical button-pressing to directly experience his yearning for escape, meaning, and creative liberation. This dual-control mechanic exemplifies gaming’s unique narrative capacity: players become co-authors of the story rather than spectators. Such design achieves Barney’s ideal of interactive storytelling—using game systems to craft artistic experiences that resonate more profoundly than traditional media.
I think it really shows that video games as a medium have the most unique narrative appeal---interactive narrative. The impact or sense of immersion and immersion that this technique brings to the player is very strong. When the player puts themself into the game, and after completing a game, you feel what it conveys, then it will in turn participate in your life. While when one reads a book or a movie it is also the viewer who will have some interaction with the author, the interaction with a video game is more like a higher dimension. What Remains of Edith Finch is one of those works that utilizes transmedia narratives with aplomb. Games are an artistic medium that can encompass and encompass other artistic mediums. Most importantly, games can be more creatively and interactively interspersed with other art mediums, allowing for greater resonance and potential for emotional communication.
While traditional works of art (like novels or movies) leave the creator in control of all narrative direction, Elysium Disco boldly cedes some of that power to the player. In this game, the player doesn't just “watch” a detective story, but grows with it, changes it, and even deviates from its original direction. For example, a movie is more like a person telling a story to the audience, and the audience can only listen, even if they occasionally ask questions it doesn't affect the direction or ending of the story, the audience is passively receiving the information. But the game is like many people chatting and discussing, their thoughts collide and enlighten each other, and the more they discuss, the more they get. On the contrary, if you don't move forward, you can only see the limited light around you.
Many players may be dissuaded by the sheer volume of text of Elysium Disco, but once they experience the game in its entirety, they will realize that it uses dense clues and information to build a real and believable miniature world. Players can also learn about the history of the country, its landscape and ecology through conversations with NPCs and the collection of items. The story presented to us in the game is just the tip of the iceberg. The game's thought cabinet system allows the player to internalize absurd or philosophical ideas - such as “hobo cop” or “tough cop” - through accumulated actions and conversations. “or ”harsh self-criticism"-which not only alter the character's skill set, but also in turn affect what story segments, dialogue options, and even the fate of certain characters the player sees.
As Bodi and Thon point out in their analysis, Elysium Disco gives the player a high degree of narrative-dramatic agency, meaning that every choice the player makes can have irreversible consequences or branching narrative structures. For example, in the case of the character Klaasje, the player can choose to arrest her, let her go, or even turn her over to a mysterious organization-all of which will lead to completely different consequences and perceptions of the character's fate, all of which revolve around the central theme of "what kind of detective are you? " as the central theme. Instead of offering a single “correct” narrative path, the creators of Elysium Disco have built a complex space of possibilities, allowing players to define the structure and meaning of the story through their own moral and emotional judgments.
Briar Lee Mitchell in Game Design Essentials states, "A game goes further still with interactivity by allowing a player to not only receive information... . but also directly affect what happens during gameplay. “The artistic value of a game, she argues, lies not in the amount of beautiful graphics or grandiose plots it displays, but in its ability to allow the player to ”change the story" through interaction. She believes that the artistic value of a game lies not in the amount of beautiful graphics or grandiose plot it displays, but in the way it allows the player to “change the story” through interaction. In Disco Elysium, this change is not just a linear “good ending” or “bad ending”, but a deeply non-linear psychological profile: you can choose to be a police detective obsessed with justice or a nihilistic drunk. Your choice not only determines the direction of the story, but also defines the character's way of being. And it's this shaping of existence itself that brings the game close to the artistic depths sought by philosophy and literature.
Additionally, Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin introduce the idea of video games as "Self-Involving Interactive Fictions," highlighting a unique artistic quality. Unlike novels or films, video games inherently involve players as active participants whose personal actions shape narrative realities. Robson and Meskin argue that games differ notably because they are "in some important sense, about those who consume them"—the player's choices become integral to the narrative experience itself, deepening emotional and ethical engagement beyond passive media. Thus, this perspective underscores how interactivity in games uniquely positions players as co-creators, further strengthening video games' claim as a distinctive and innovative form of artistic expression.
In a way, this is not only a reflection of the interaction mechanism, but also an extension of the artistic concept that the meaning of the story is not predetermined, but generated through interaction. The player truly becomes a participant and creator of the story. In other words, instead of telling a fixed story, the game provides a structure for “story generation”. This structure is open and responsive to the player's behavior - it transcends the traditional art experience of passive spectatorship and challenges the monolithic nature of narrative authority. As such, Erotic Disco is not only an interactive text, but also an artistic experiment, proving that the medium of gaming is fully capable of undertaking complex and profound artistic expression.
Overall, games are more interactive and groundbreaking than traditional art mediums because in games, the player is the center of the world. Traditional mediums show the audience a world, a story, or a person. Games are more of a simulation of reality, and if a game allows the player to participate, experience a world, read stories with ups and downs, and meet people with very different personalities, isn't that art? Although games are only a utopia for people to escape from their lives for a short time, and reality is the only reality, the artistic value of games is unquestionable. I think participation and interaction - that's the essence of gaming, but also an important part of it that no other art has. But it's undeniable that games, just like books, music, and movies, have their good and bad points, their works of art and their mediocrity. But games are uniquely interactive, more inviting to experiment with and understand the content, and that's what makes them most thought-provoking. Nowadays, this is an era that integrates all the arts and thus sublimates them to create an ultimate art, a work of art that includes all the other kinds of art, and the player can swim in the world composed of this work of art, and the game, as one of the countless bright stars of this era, may be shining in a new posture to illuminate more people who aspire to the beauty of art.
WORK CITED