Are video games art? Or are they entertainment? Let's see what Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.

Last week, Miyamoto was in London to receive a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Fellowship at the GAME British Academy Video Games Award, reports the Associated Press.

"It's a great honor that my name might be listed as a fellowship member along with such a great director as Hitchcock," Miyamoto told AP. However, when discussing video games as art, the famed game designer replied, "I have never said that video games (are) an art."

This sounds like Miyamoto simply being humble and less about the debate on whether video games are art are not. Video games are art. Truth!

Elsewhere, Miyamoto mentions how it is his top goal to get Nintendo consoles in classrooms as learning tools. Nintendo has been moving forward on this aim since 2006 in Japan.

Source Kotaku

Well its not art, its entertainment... Don't see how you could class a video game as art.

I don't see how entertaintment and art cannot coexist. Most of the time they are the same.

And I am just talking about Heavy Rain here. In every single RPG, in Deep Space, Resident Evil, Bioshock, Assasin's Creed, Muramasa, God of War or No More Heroes there are so many references to culture from a certain perspective...

It all actually comes down to your definition of art. Mine is broad. Interacting with art shouldn't be an issue as you do it with music, painting, literature or scultures as well. The fact that it becomes merchancy shouldn't be an issue neither or else we wouldn't have art at all as things are these days.

I think it says more about his approach to game making than it does about whether or not he thinks video games can be art.

When he makes a game, he makes it to be fun. That's all.

Who knows what Miyamoto has or has not said? The main speaks jibba jabba.

This. He doesn't try to make art, he makes awesome games.

...which later happen to be art.

What's the big deal?

He's not trying to be niche, eletist or whatever. He's trying to make fun games.

The problem is that some people think that "popullar" and "art" do not go well together.

I didn't deny that. I just say he doesn't try to be, which works out a lot better than those that are too full of themselves to remember they are making a damn video game (or even proclaim they've elevated their game beyond being a video game).

Art is what the creator intended it to be, then.

So... Nintendo games are not art confirmed?

Though that is what i feel. I could make an old-fashioned spinning wheel for the purpose of making an evocative statement about 19th-century Americana, or i could make it so i have a spinning wheel. The fun part would be that the former could be worth exponentially more than the latter.

Games are Art.