On The Aesthetic Education of the Gamer

A serious art form demands a serious art world

Every once in a while a video game emerges that receives near-unanimous praise from the industry. This year fares no different, as critics and audience alike continue to clamor over the new hotness — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

But beneath this boisterous acclaim lies, in my view, a deeper aesthetic concern, one that stagnates the artistic maturation of the video game medium.

Developed by French developer Sandfall Interactive (a team of roughly 30 people), Expedition 33 attempts to reinvigorate the turn-based RPG with intricate action-based mechanics and uniquely synergistic characters. In the game, you follow a group of volunteers (Expedition 33) that attempts to stop the yearly Gommage, an event instigated by a being named The Paintress in which everyone over a determined age is erased from existence. You and your team must journey through the mainland as you try to find The Paintress and end this catastrophic event.

I initially had no interest in such a game. I have long been vocal about my ambivalence towards turn-based combat and even more so for anything inspired by JRPG’s, a ‘genre’ that has almost universally failed to instill within me any sense of optimism outside some of its early music. But a game that receives this level of ubiquitous praise will ultimately grab my attention. I am, in the end, profoundly aware of the medium’s potential, and any game that attempts, or dare surpasses, these expectations will receive not only my utmost respect but my dedication as its loyal disciple.

So I bought the game. Upon entering the main menu, I was greeted by saccharine piano, its C minor arpeggios supporting what I can only call melodramatic female vocals (anime vocals). I nearly launched into a fit of derisive laughter, aware of how literally the devs were wearing their heart on their sleeve, but I held it together, reminding myself that I may just not be into this kind of anime music. I could only hope that it was not representative of what I was about to go through.

The first hour of the game was not promising. In fact, it was exactly what I feared in those initial ten seconds of turning on the game. That same music was supplementing expositional dialogue that felt more appropriate for a soap opera. Everything narrative-wise was being achieved in a forced, artificial manner. The concept of the Gommage was interesting, and I have no gripes with a hero’s journey if done well. But the clichés were so overbearing that I was about to accept the $50 sunk cost.

Thankfully, I forced myself to get through the prologue and spend at least a little time with the combat, which was surprisingly superb. The mix of action-based parrying with a turn based system proved quite impactful. It was so good that I have done my best to ignore every other part of the game so I can enjoy what I think is clearly its strongest point.

But the dialogue. And the music. I’m in Act III now and I would estimate 80% of the tracks have been female vocals on top of piano or guitar accompaniment. Even moments of meditation or ambience, such as exploring the map or entering a menu, are interrupted by these musical cries of pain and grief. I would be more inclined to ignore the poor spotting/musical direction of the game if the foundation that supported these vocals was musically interesting, but alas. The few redeeming cues of the game are a couple of the boss fights; a highlight being the fight with the Lampmaster at the end of Act I. But even some of these are plagued with the same musical tropes. It utilizes its influences so openly, and so often, that what should be moments of emotional resonance are instead met with an eye roll.

So why is this game garnering so much praise? The combat is definitely deserving of its flowers, but a game that thrives in gameplay alone is not art, it is entertainment. It is the fusion of gameplay with narrative and form that transcends a work into the higher realm of Art, and unfortunately for Expedition 33 the story, the writing, the music: all of this is just, in a word — juvenile. You can’t help but sigh at any moment someone speaks. The music is hackneyed and mawkish. The themes of death and grief are explored with the subtlety of a Full House morality lesson. The two sides of a video game, narrative and gameplay, were so starkly on opposite sides of the spectrum in Expedition 33 that I couldn’t help but feel immense frustration for what could have been. Yet no one in the industry seems to share similar sentiments; they are praising every facet of the game.

This phenomenon, my aesthetic sensibilities increasingly diverging from those of the industry, has become more common in recent years. At first, I assumed the issue was with me: that I’d simply aged out of the medium. But I haven’t outgrown film, or literature, or music. No one “outgrows” other art forms; they grow into more challenging works. Why should games be any different?

Yet with video games, that maturation rarely exists. Outside of a few exceptions (Disco Elysium is often the token “well-written” game) the medium remains narratively stunted, speaking primarily to children or young adults. And when games do aspire to narrative seriousness, such as the Sony first-party titles (God of War, The Last of Us), they tend to resemble blockbusters more than any kind of meaningful arthouse cinema.

In truth, the only games that still hold aesthetic weight for me are those that abandon narrative altogether and focus instead on mechanical refinement. This is why Nintendo remains one of the few developers I still return to: they put all their eggs in that basket, and in doing so, avoid the narrative trap entirely.

But this discrepancy between narrative and gameplay cannot go on like this forever. No one is addressing this narrative lack with the severity it deserves. That is why I feel impelled to write this piece, not to mock games as an inferior art but to instill a call to action, to introduce the parameters that elevated other art forms to the pillars that they deservedly hold. This requires what I believe is a proper aesthetic education for the video game art world.

‘Art world’ is a term I have borrowed from American sociologist Howard S. Becker to describe the joint human activity that goes about creating a work of art. For a video game in particular, this goes beyond those developers, writers, and composers — people that make the aesthetic judgements. An art world encompasses anyone in the ecosystem that helped bring that work of art to life, whether it be the creator of the game engine or the publisher supporting the game or the QA analyst testing the game. You can go one layer further and say those that designed the TV or even those who delivered coffee to the team.

Though I understand Becker’s conception of the art world, I am not going to focus on who is or is not a part of the art world. My issue is focused on three parameters in general — the developers, the publishers, and the audience. It is within these three that I believe hold the power to elevate the medium to what it can be, for each of them hold the potential for an aesthetic threshold that can help elevate the medium into true Art.

Friedrich Schiller, in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, famously wrote:

The artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion.

This, to me, is the obligation of the artist: to stand above the political, cultural, and technological conditions of their time. Art that endures is not merely a product of its historical moment but a revelation of something deeper — the spiritual core of the human experience.

A central problem with video games today is that they remain chained to the very age that produced them.

The publishers, driven by a capitalist logic, shape the direction of the medium not as an art form but as an industry, dictating its boundaries through profit.

The developers, often enamored with the latest technologies, frame their work as technical achievement rather than as a continuation of artistic tradition. And when they do attempt to engage with that tradition, it is too often an act of mimicry, a surface-level reproduction that lacks the balance, intentionality, and depth needed to push the medium forward into a genuinely new aesthetic realm.

The audience, lacking a shared aesthetic education, willfully embraces passive consumption: seeking not works that elevate or challenge, but those that deliver comfort, easy gratification, and compulsive play. And those in this audience who write about games do so not with the knowledge of pure critique but as hobbyists who desperately try to emulate those who came before.

In this current art world, the video game ceases to aspire to true aesthetic ideals. It is not an authentic Art but entertainment; in its current form, a toy.

The question now stands before us, then, stripped of its illusions: what would it mean for video games to ascend, to reach the highest peak where the daredevils of the Spirit reside? What conditions must be met for us to join the others — literature, cinema, music, architecture — at this almighty summit?

The conditions are elaborated in what I call the Aesthetic Education of the Gamer.

By Aesthetic Education, I do not simply mean the cultivation of taste or the ability to distinguish well-made from poorly made games. I mean a rigorous and spiritual formation, a kind of Bildung, one that is both academically grounded and inwardly transformative. This dual cultivation, combining historical literacy with spiritual perception, is the only path by which the individual within the video game art world may approach higher artistic realization.

The one who undergoes such an education studies Bach and Bergman, Tolstoy and Kubrick, Plato and Kandinsky, not out of mere reverence, but to understand how past forms expressed the spirit of their time. And they must apply this understanding to the distinctive properties of video games: interactivity, systems, spatial design, immersion, and temporality.

This academic rigor, though more literal in its methods, prepares the soul for its next phase: spiritual literacy — the ability to perceive not just what a game does, but what it reveals.

Art, in the end, is a revelation. In its fullest embrace of humanity it discloses to us a world that transcends our own. No, not in the literal sense of a “game world”, but one of ontological resonance. One may call it The Experience, harkening to my other essays. Regardless, it is a deeper entrance into our soul that allows us to understand our existence, our place in it all, through the very methods that define what it means to be human.

I do not claim to have fully cultivated this aesthetic education within myself, though I strive toward it as best I can. Still, I have learned enough to recognize when a work, despite its merits, has not entered this higher realm of Art.

And though I’ve enjoyed my time with Expedition 33, I do not believe it crosses that threshold. The gaming industry has shown, time and time again, that it can produce mechanically engaging experiences, but this must not be the ceiling! A video game has the capacity to contain everything that Art has ever represented, and perhaps even more.

Should we not, then, ask ourselves why it has failed to do so?

This is not a dismissal; it is an invitation. This is a call to everyone who makes and loves video games, those who play with reverence, to demand more. The medium does not lack potential, it lacks the conditions: the education, the courage, the vision.

But those can be cultivated! And when they are, video games will not merely join the other arts. It will stand on its own peak, with a voice unmistakably its own, and offer its hand in return.

Perhaps, then, we are not so far off.