Are Games Considered Art? | Museums Say Yes

Major U.S. institutions, including the Smithsonian and MoMA, treat video games as art, yet the classification still sparks debate.

The question of whether games count as art surfaces every time a new blockbuster launches or a critic dismisses the medium. While no universal rule settles the argument, the strongest evidence comes from America’s most respected cultural institutions—and they’ve answered clearly. Museums have spent over a decade collecting, exhibiting, and framing games as an expressive artistic medium.

What The Smithsonian American Art Museum Says

The Smithsonian American Art Museum settled its position in 2012 with The Art of Video Games, an exhibition that ran from March 16 to September 30 that year. The museum’s official page describes video games as a “prevalent and increasingly expressive medium” and frames the show as an exploration of the form’s “forty-year evolution” as an artistic medium.

That phrasing matters. The institution didn’t just hang game art on walls—it treated the games themselves as the art objects, tracing how the medium developed over decades the way a retrospective might chart a painter’s career.

MoMA’s Collection And Exhibition Record

The Museum of Modern Art has gone further than curation. MoMA’s collection page states the museum acquired 14 video games a decade ago and now holds 36 in its permanent collection, treating them as part of its standard collecting practice alongside painting, sculpture, and design.

MoMA also mounted Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design, which ran from September 10, 2022, through July 16, 2023. That exhibition placed games alongside other design objects, reinforcing the argument that interactive works belong in the same conversation as more traditional creative output.

Does The Supreme Court Say Games Are Art?

Not exactly—and the distinction matters. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games qualify as protected speech under the First Amendment. That’s a legal protection for expression, not a formal declaration that games are art.

The court’s reasoning leaned on the idea that games communicate ideas and stories, but the ruling addressed censorship and government regulation, not aesthetic classification. Separately, the National Endowment for the Arts expanded its eligible project categories in May 2011 to include “interactive games,” a federal arts-grant recognition that supports art status in practice even without a single legal ruling.

Why The Debate Still Continues

Institutional recognition hasn’t ended the argument. Museum acquisition shows that respected curators consider games worthy of preservation and display, but it doesn’t represent universal cultural agreement. Critics still question whether commercial entertainment, however sophisticated, meets the threshold of art in the traditional sense.

The honest answer is layered: the institutions that define American cultural heritage have largely said yes, the legal system protects games as expression, and federal arts funding treats them as grant-worthy work—yet the philosophical debate continues outside those settings.

For a hands-on look at how games express artistic vision on the tabletop, our roundup of the best art board games shows how the conversation extends beyond screens.