How Artistic Movements Have Shaped Video Games

The relationship between the fine-art tradition and video games encompasses both the aesthetic movements that developers have consciously borrowed from painting, sculpture, and architecture, and the parallel evolution by which games rediscovered problems of spatial representation that Western art first confronted centuries earlier.¹⁶ Scholars and critics have increasingly argued that the history of games should be read not only through hardware generations and industry milestones but through the same aesthetic and cultural lenses applied to older art forms.¹⁸

The technocentric versus the aesthetic account

The history of video games is conventionally told from an industrial and technological perspective, periodized into hardware “generations” — the 8-bit era, the 16-bit era, and so on — with innovations in hardware and corporate strategy treated as its turning points.¹ Art historian Ruben Meintema, writing in the journal Crossings, calls this the “technocentric” point of view and argues that it obscures the fact that games are designed by people, for people, within a context of fictional and cultural mediation.¹ In this reading, “game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces,” and it is through spatial layout and architecture that a game delivers its experience.¹

Because games are especially concerned with representing and interacting with space, Meintema locates them awkwardly within the traditional division of the arts into spatial forms — painting, sculpture, architecture, photography — and temporal forms such as theatre, music, and dance.¹ Games possess spatial extension, though in virtual rather than physical space, yet they are also “performed” by the player, resisting the categories inherited from G. E. Lessing’s analysis of the Laocoön.¹

Rediscovering linear perspective

Meintema’s central claim is that the evolution of games from two-dimensional to three-dimensional worlds closely repeats the discovery of linear perspective? in Renaissance painting.¹ Classic two-dimensional games treated space much as pre-Renaissance art did, and the transition to 3D — exemplified by Super Mario, the series Meintema examines in detail — reprised the mathematical mastery of pictorial depth achieved by Renaissance painters.¹ He argues that where fine art moved beyond the linear perspective after the rise of Modernism, distorting and abstracting space, video games remained bound to a mathematically correct perspectival structure, leaving them, in his phrase, stuck in a “pre-Modern” era.¹

Meintema attributes this arrested development to the pragmatic function of game space: perspective in games serves navigation and legibility rather than aesthetic experiment, which he sees as an obstacle to games being valued as aesthetic and cultural objects.¹ He singles out Shigeru Miyamoto — trained in industrial art and design rather than programming, and designer of the Super Mario series — as an early exponent of a “humanistic” design philosophy he called ningen kougaku, or “human engineering”.¹

Borrowings from historical movements

Beyond this structural parallel, contemporary designers have drawn directly on named art movements for the look of their games.⁶ Renaissance art has shaped the treatment of detail, perspective, and lighting, and its study of human anatomy and natural proportion informs the character models and environments of games striving for photorealism.⁶ The chiaroscuro? first exploited by masters such as Caravaggio? survives in the dynamic lighting systems that set mood in game worlds, from neon-lit cyberpunk streets to torch-lit medieval castles.⁶ Impressionism?’s preoccupation with the effects of light and atmosphere reappears in the rendering of dappled forest light and shifting weather, while its visible brushstrokes find a digital equivalent in rendering techniques that lend texture and motion.⁶ The Baroque?’s taste for dramatic diagonal composition and theatrical lighting shapes how games stage narrative moments, most visibly in cutscenes and character poses.⁶

The reverse traffic is also documented. The critic Henry Jenkins observed that games increasingly influenced contemporary cinema, defining the frantic pace of Run Lola Run, supplying the role-playing metaphor of Being John Malkovich, and shaping the reality-and-illusion themes of The Matrix.⁸ Artist Matthew Barney transformed the Guggenheim into a giant video game for one of his Cremaster films, sending his protagonist up the ramps “boss by boss”.⁸

Debates over games as art

Whether games can bear this kind of analysis at all was, for decades, contested. Jenkins framed the question through the divide between designers who saw themselves as artists and skeptics such as Newsweek’s Jack Kroll, who held that games “can’t transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art”.⁸ Miyamoto himself argued that creators are artists who must also be engineers because of the skill their work requires.⁸ Designer Warren Spector likened the medium’s maturity to early cinema, saying the industry was still remaking The Great Train Robbery or The Birth of a Nation and had perhaps only reached its “talkies period”.⁸

Writing for Game Developer? in 2014, Oscar Barda argued that treating games as an art form does not make every game art, most commercial titles being kitsch? — a dumbed-down expression of the form — much as most mass-produced landscape paintings were in industrializing Europe of the 1860s.² Barda drew a distinction between the “movement” a work belongs to, the genre it inhabits, and the techniques — pixel art, chiptune, 2D — used to make it, comparing these to paintbrush and charcoal or to the instruments of music.² Institutional recognition followed the critical argument: in 2012 the MOMA? in New York added fourteen games to its collection, including Pac-Man, Tetris, and Portal?, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum? mounted the exhibition The Art of Video Games the same year.⁵

A shared visual lineage

Historically, games absorbed the visual conventions of the art around them from their earliest years.⁵ Early laboratory experiments such as Tennis for Two (1958) and Spacewar! (1962) established interactive space with the simplest of graphics.⁵ The 8-bit systems introduced by Nintendo, Sega, and Commodore from 1985 gave rise to pixel art?, a blocky, hand-drawn style dictated by strict resolution limits and seen in The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. 3.⁵ The wider color palettes of the Sega Genesis? and Super Nintendo enabled the painterly look of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and the move to 3D in the late 1990s — in Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — opened new ways to move through and view space.⁵ In the 2000s games sustained a widening range of styles, from the ink-brush look of Ōkami to the open-world abstraction of Minecraft.⁵

Named movements in individual games

A number of games have taken a single art movement or artist as the explicit basis for their visual design. Ōkami, an action-adventure game developed by Clover Studio? and released in 2006, renders its world in imitation of ink wash painting?, the traditional East Asian technique in which ink is diluted with varying quantities of water to create depth and gradation, and combines it with imagery drawn from Shinto? mythology and traditional Japanese art.⁹ Transistor, an action role-playing game set in a cyberpunk world, was designed in an Art Nouveau style — a movement characterized by flowing motifs, plant forms, detailed patterns, and flat colors with thin outlines — and draws in particular on Gustav Klimt?’s signature use of gold.⁹

Other titles reference specific painters and printmakers. Blasphemous, a gothic-horror game, takes its religious and medieval Spanish imagery from Francisco Goya?’s A Procession of Flagellants, echoing the artist’s heavy contrast and violent imagery.⁹ Apocalipsis adopts a monochromatic look modeled on the woodcut engravings of Albrecht Dürer?, reproducing their intricate line work alongside medieval themes of sin, punishment, and redemption.⁹ Manifold Garden, a first-person puzzle game, builds its gravity-defying, impossible architecture from the illusionistic interiors and mathematical precision of M. C. Escher?.⁹ The Master’s Pupil, a hand-drawn puzzle adventure played from the point of view of an artist, bases its twelve puzzles on the color palette and brushwork of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet?.⁹

Modern movements are equally well represented. Disco Elysium takes its bold, simultaneously realistic and stylized brushwork from abstract expressionism?, and in particular from Jackson Pollock? and Willem de Kooning?.⁹ Thomas Was Alone reduces its cast to distinct geometric shapes, sharp lines, and a limited palette in a minimalist? idiom indebted to Piet Mondrian?.⁹ Gris, a platform-adventure game about grief and healing, mimics the layered shapes and soft colors of Alexander Calder?’s mobile sculptures, while The Medium, a psychological-horror game, models its nightmarish, oppressive environments on the dystopian surrealism of the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński?.⁹

Surrealism and the Franco-Belgian comic tradition

Surrealism?, with its dreamlike atmosphere and preoccupation with the unconscious, has furnished a recurring reference point.¹¹ The Japanese visual artist Osamu Sato? conceived LSD: Dream Emulator (1998) for the PlayStation less as a game than as a work of contemporary art, its liminal spaces, ominous ambient noise, and acidic colors making exploration rather than combat the point of play.¹¹ Other surreal titles include Garage: Bad Dream Adventure, a Japanese point-and-click adventure developed by Kinotrope and published by Toshiba-EMI for Windows and Macintosh in 1999, set in a dystopian world of grotesque contraptions ¹², and Flower, Sun, and Rain, developed by Grasshopper Manufacture? and first released for the PlayStation 2 in 2001 with cel-shaded, low-polygon graphics.¹²

A distinct lineage runs through the psychedelic fantasy of the French illustrator Jean Giraud, known as Moebius?, whose comic Arzach (1975) established desert landscapes and dragon-riding imagery that recur across video games.¹⁰ Moebius first worked directly in the medium in 1992, producing illustrations for Fade to Black, but his most consequential contribution was to Sega’s 1995 rail-shooter Panzer Dragoon, for which he created cover illustrations and influenced the development; according to director Yukio Futatsugi?, the game’s desert vistas and flying dragons pay direct homage to the artist.¹⁰ His influence persists in later titles whose visual styles are indebted to his work, among them Heaven’s Vault (2019), Sable (2021), and Aquamarine (2022).¹⁰