I will fully concede: video games are highly structured. They can be repetitive, and this is one of the challenges against which designers have to work if they want to tell a fluid, organic story. Slashing down your 100th minotaur in God of War (2005) does not teach you anything about your character or his journey that you didn't already know from slashing down the first one. Games also tend to have recurring structural features like levels, bosses, puzzles, and powerups. Fire up a new platformer, even a highly innovative one, and you are likely to recognize its basic elements from any number of similar titles.

But the conventionality of games isn't in itself a strike against them. In fact, it's what makes them stand out from older forms of art, which have become dissipate and amorphous in the wake of modernity. We are long past the days when it was shocking for James Joyce to write a "sentence" of 3,687 words or for Mark Rothko to bathe a canvas in pure color. The traditional rules and limits of the literary and visual arts have been so thoroughly exploded that innovation in them has no meaning any longer.

By contrast, gamers were riveted in 2005 by Indigo Prophecy (AKA Fahrenheit), whose storyline depended on players' choices to a greater degree than had ever been tried. Each decision in the game led to outcomes and consequences, just like in real life. Those consequences determined how the narrative developed and concluded. There were kinks still to be worked out, but the medium was clearly advancing to new levels. "Despite its flaws, Indigo Prophecy is the definitive interactive story," wrote one critic. "Not only does it perfect the genre, it redefines it."

You can only "redefine" a "genre" if there are typical patterns it tends to follow--if its forms and conventions are understood and agreed upon by a community of artists and audience members. Virgil,  Dante, and Apollonius of Rhodes are significant epicists because of how they modify, subvert, and repurpose the tropes of Homer's masterworks. William Turner's glowing landscapes are thrilling in part because of how they deviate from the sharp precision of masters like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. When the free-form narrative techniques of Indigo Prophecy caught on in more polished games like Assassin's Creed (2016), everyone could see that a new kind of storytelling was being born against the backdrop of an established tradition.

A persistent misapprehension of our era is that rules stifle creativity and betoken a lack of imagination. A highly stylized form like the sonnet seems intolerably artificial to us, as if imposed from the top down by fusty ideologues. In fact, though, sonneteers like Giacomo da Lentini and Francesco Petrarch chiseled the form out of ballads and folk songs, honing rhythms and rhyme structures which were already common practice. Contrary to the going assumption, structure often emerges organically in art out of popular demand.

People love rules and the cogency they enable. They are part of how we express the rational order we perceive in creation. And yes, of course those rules can gradually become calcified and oppressive--witness for example the stultifying rigor of late French Baroque drama. But without any conventions at all we become unintelligible to each other, which is how you end up with a $120,000 banana duct taped to a wall (Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian, which inspired ridicule and incomprehension among all but the elect few who "got it").

This dysfunction--the total breakdown of structure and the reduction of high culture to absurdity--now plagues almost every kind of art, from painting to poetry to music. For that matter, it plagues our politics and our communal life: we no longer agree on the meaning of America, the conventions of marriage and gender, or the importance and role of religion. This leaves us completely at sea and makes us look either ridiculous or evil to one another: we caricature each other as "blue-haired libs" or "white supremacist rubes" because we do not share even the most basic premises about who we are or what the rules should be.

Video games do not suffer from this problem. They are a creative form with rules and constraints. This makes both community and meaning possible. Gamers can team up across the globe, can celebrate the triumphs of their form, can experience the heights of elation and wonder that living art so often inspires, because they are working within a recognizable medium upon whose conventions they can build. The lyrical fairytale of Ico (2001), the melancholy parable of Braid (2008), the tense and fluid drama of Inside (2016): these achievements were hailed by gamers because they used the rules--and broke them judiciously--to convey moving and truthful accounts of the human experience.

There is a word for something which uses color, light, sound, and language to convey what it is like to live a human life: we call that art. It is a structured creation that expresses emotions and experiences which cannot be expressed in any other way. "The objects of imitation are men in action," wrote Aristotle in his Poetics: events and the people who make them happen are the great subject of that elaborately symbolic communication called mimēsis.

This communication is what video games accomplish.