For every grade school book report, I tried to argue with my teachers that comic books had legitimate literary value.  My mom said I would grow out of comics, and teachers kept trying to make me read books.  I read Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Squadron Supreme very young and felt comics were persecuted for stereotypes.  Whenever someone said comic books are juvenile, I asked when was the last time they read a comic.  Most said not since they were kids.  A few said never.

But times have changed.  Comics, it seems, have earned some legitimacy.  Video games are the new medium to legitimize.

I graduated college and continue to read my comics, but people, even my mother, don’t criticize me anymore.  I wrote several papers in college about comics.  I even got honors in a Renaissance Literature class for adapting part of Squadron Supreme into an epic poem.  Instead of attacking my comic book collection, my mother and friends raise their noses at my obsessive video game collection.  It seems Watchmen is now high literature while Bioshock is common drivel.

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An ongoing debate among gamers and culture critics of all variety has been asking whether video games are art. The Washington Post published a short piece asking Pulitzer Prize winning book critic Michael Dirda if the critical-acclaimed game BioShock can be considered art.

After playing the game, with some difficulty, Dirda recognized BioShock “obviously [had] artistic value” but “would hesitate to go that far” as to call it art.

Various articles and “art” critics have been chiming into the debate. Roger Ebert recently backtracked on his 2005 statement that video games are “inherently inferior to film and literature,” now saying video games can be art, but not high art. In Ebert’s 2007 column, he wrote: “Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell’s soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it.”

The problem I find in these arguments is there is little defining of what art is. This is the challenge because defining art becomes the kind of thing you can’t describe but you know when you see it.

Ebert, for instance, says video games are limited as a art form because of player choice whereas movies and literature force your path (he’s never played Final Fantasy has he). Dirda claimed art needed to make you sad, which video games don’t. But this only says why something might not be art. It doesn’t describe what is art.

Frankly, I subscribe to Scott McCloud’s broad but meaningful definition of art in Understanding Comics as anything done not for survival. This means even solving a math problem can be considered math. I say this because I don’t think there is a difference between art and high art. I prefer to call things good art and bad art. This is very subjective but does not ban any medium as a whole from being consider art. Each unique piece is evaluated on its own merits. To a mathematician, a simple equation to solve a complex problem might be beautiful art whereas a cubism painting might have no meaning and be deemed bad art. The math problem and painting are not being compared to each other. Instead, they are being evaluated for their own qualities.

This is why Ebert and Dirda’s definitions make little sense. Ebert says personal choice makes video games more like sports than art. But what about martial arts? Sometimes martial arts can be brutal sports or artfully crafted dances. What about improvisation in acting or jazz music? Personal choice already has a part in popular art forms. Video games pushes that limit like no other medium. Dirda’s argument that art must be sad, well, everything that isn’t the English Patient suddenly becomes trivial.

Moreover, niche mediums like video games and comic books often get slighted for their artistic merit, much like the way science fiction and fantasy movies are snubbed by awards and critical acclaim. “Higher” art forms might be threatened by the encroaching competition or simply think to highly of themselves. Michael Grade, executive chairman of UK network ITV criticized video games as a “moral vacuum” for their violent content” claiming television violence was morally superior because of its storytelling format. Of course, he probably doesn’t mind when video games make games based on violent television shows.

The truth is video games are a young medium. There are many technological hurdles to overcome, much like film, that slow the development of an understood artistic language. But video games and other mediums should be compared on their own merits. I would never play a video game in place of reading a book. The two are different in the way they give me information and the way I process that information. I gain different skills and different experiences from both and both are equally valuable. One might be for learning, the other for enjoyment, but life requires both. And that doesn’t make a book or a video game a bad thing. But it just might make it art.

Anti-video game activist Jack Thompson says he has been asked to draft a bill for Massachusetts banning the sale of violent or inappropriate video games to minors. Thompson bases his bill on porn statutes preventing minors from buying games that lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.” Thompson’s previous attempts in Utah and Louisiana have failed, the former dying in the legislature and the latter ruled as unconstitutional.

Without getting into a debate of the freedom of speech rights regarding porn, I simply want to look at how that porn definition is being applied to video games. For all the studies that attempt to link video games with antisocial and/or violent studies, other researchers are finding beneficial effects resulting from game play. Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Bad is Good For You,” examines the problem solving challenges in video games. Even the controversial Grand Theft Auto requires so much information to play, fans have written 50,000 word summaries on how to beat the game.

If video games do provide such educational benefits, then how can these laws be applied (should they get past the courts in the first place). The porn standard deems pornography as plainly recreational and even I would concede porn’s benefits are harder to defend without getting into a moral debate. But the benefits in video games can be quantified (unlike a correlation between video games and violence) from problem solving to hand-eye coordination to book and social intelligence. Grand Theft Auto forces you to budget money. You use that money to buy weapons and fronts for illegal businesses, but doesn’t that offer some political lessons? Maybe in the sequel you can bribe a politician (you can already bribe police).

It’s never too early to discuss video games’ future in the history books. How will the ages of video games be divided; what are the influential turning-point moments, etc.

A friend of mine got me thinking. He proposed Final Fantasy VII started the Silver Age of Video Games, which at first I fought on the grounds that it’s too early. But I now agree for these reasons.

Final Fantasy VII divides the video game medium between an art of visual stimulation to an art of interactive story telling. Final Fantasy VII raised the bar on graphics, cinema-styled art direction, and a rich story filled with character development, back-stories, and emotion not yet seen. Certainly games explored this style, especially the Legend of Zelda games and early Final Fantasy games, but these games, with their cute, pixilated figurines just had too many limitations visually to create the emotion needed. Early video games created these cute characters not for aesthetic quality, but because this was the best computers could do.

At first this sounds like a contradiction: early video games were visual arts without good visuals. But that, simply, was the art: It was about creating a believeable 2D world that encouraged extremely repetitive play and rewarding challenges. These games were short, often only a few hours took to beat them, and the joy of constant play came from finding shortcuts and power-ups. A friend could jump into a game of Super Mario Bro. at any point and not be worried about following the back-story.

Now, a game of less than 20 hours is considered too short by critics. Games, as a standard, are expected to have compelling lead characters and a structured story. This change is most obvious in fighting games like the Mortal Kombat series which started out as the controversial blood bath where only avid fans knew the mythology. Now, Mortal Kombat has evolved into a detail story where characters die, come back to life, and players must complete role-playing styled missions to unlock new characters. These stories are rarely as fleshed out as the champion of story-telling, the role-playing genre, but the change in style is revealing.

The visual styles of older video games resemble the black and white silent pictures of cinema’s golden age. Video games manages to create atmousphere and style using limited means - no voice overs, 2D, minimal memory to save games or variety in game play. But games fought through the challenges, creating the colorful world of Mario and Sonic compared to the dark and scary adventures of Castlevenia. But we played these games for those visuals, not the story. In the end, the story broke down to saving the princess or killing Dracula. Everything else was about finding a power-up mushroom.