State of the art in arts gaming

Perhaps the Language Arts offer the most telling example of a place where the arts have made an inroad into the gaming world. Some traditional board games that are based on language are popular among gamers—for example, Scrabble, Jeopardy, Password, and Boggle. Other kinds of word games—for example, Hangman, crossword puzzles, quizzes, cryptograms, and rebuses—are played by all ages, some intensively and extensively.

These games are all exercises in the language arts that stretch language skills and build arts awareness. Their popularity illustrates that the language arts can be fun.

Such games have made a lasting and significant impact on games and gamers. That is all to the good, as far as it goes, but compared with games and gaming at large, their impact has been relatively minor. When it comes to arts-related games generally, games based on the language arts (or on any of the other arts, for that matter) only scratch the surface.

If you question this observation, take a moment to think about the games you may have played that are based on arts themes or have arts subject matter. Can you remember any? An occasional puzzle or quiz will take its theme from one of the muses or will embed a few clues or questions about artists or their works; but seldom is an entire puzzle dedicated wholly to a subject taken from the arts. When looked at with a backdrop consisting of all games played everywhere, games based on the arts are few and far between.