Essay for the online journal First Person Scholar, 20/05/2020

Rather than reviving the popular debate regarding the intrinsic artistic value of video games, crystallised in the Roger Ebert controversy (Parker, 2018), in this essay I consider the different ways that two separate “art worlds” (Becker, 1982) engage with this medium: the video game industry and the field of contemporary art. This paper considers the visual avant-garde as an adjacent field to new media production and aims to sketch the evolution of the relationship between the two art worlds by exploring the different ways that creators have engaged in the artistic appropriation (De Certeau, 1980) of video game culture.