Are video games an art form? A look at the Argentine indie scene
Is a video game a product or a work of art? Argentina’s independent arcade scene is challenging the market with unique titles such as NAVE, Shitty Games’ political punk, and the retrospective Ficha Sucia. An independent scene that is reviving the “aura” and in-person interaction.
29 de abr. de 2026 — Ezequiel Vila
Perhaps one of the greatest agreements regarding the definitive quality of art can be found in Kant's ruling on the autonomy of art. Neither religion, nor morality, nor politics: a work of art exists as long as it is created for and by itself, without utilitarian value or the capacity for possession. While there are plenty of debates that challenge this 18th-century stance (it's not a bad standard in terms of theory), we tend to think that things dedicated to exploring the potentials of genius, the pursuit of beauty or the sublime, and the overflow of sensory excitement tend to stand in opposition to mercantile relationships and rise above the belligerence of the moment.
A series of historical, technological, and capital developments turned the video game into a consumer object, a product of an emerging entertainment industry. But what happens when a video game claims the autonomy of a work of art for itself? What occurs when this stance doesn’t come from painters of patrician families subsidized at biennials or graduates of FUC, but from a group of programmers, pixel artists, and chiptune enthusiasts who design video games just because? If we take a look at the Argentinian independent arcade scene, we will find concerns more aligned with those of an aesthetic school than with those of a round of investors.
Juanma La Volpe
Dirty Card
Between March 14 and 28 at the Fémur Gallery (Moreno 948, CABA), the exhibition Dirty Card took place, an interactive and experimental retrospective of the work of Tumba Games, the creative video game society of Agustín Pontura and Darío Georges. Tumba has been making games of all types, sizes, and colors for 20 years; from mini pixel art experiences about pogo at a concert to the comprehensive Fulbo Stars, a soccer game reminiscent of Goal 3 and featuring a myriad of characters from Argentinian popular culture and beyond. The uniqueness of this exhibition was that it was not a collection of prints of the graphics from the various games of the team nor a series of monitors running clips of captured gameplay, but rather an arcade cabinet with a joystick and a button that allowed exploration of different interactive “cuts” from Tumba's vast catalog of video games. This work (it can only be called that) by Darío Georges and Agustín Pontura separates the art of video games from its character as a product, while also recovering its history and symbols in a journey through their own careers as independent developers and, before that, within the industry (both worked for many years at QB9 Games, the company once responsible for Mundo Gaturro). Through scenes assembled like an experimental music video by the player themselves, Dirty Card chains together a series of daytime remnants of pop culture, urban imagination, and political discussion; all in the strident language and distorted tone of arcades.
What happens when a video game claims the autonomy of a work of art for itself? What occurs when this stance doesn’t come from painters of patrician families subsidized at biennials or graduates of FUC, but from a group of programmers, pixel artists, and chiptune enthusiasts who design video games just because?
One of the most frequently asked questions in 20th-century art has been about the role of the spectator. From poems that are read by folding pages of a book, to installations in multiple rooms that visitors traverse using the sensitivity of touch and color. There is a playful and challenging impulse in the experimental artist who provides others with the means to manipulate the piece themselves. “Here you go. Let’s see what you do now.”
The video game, as a device, may have dedicated its entire existence to that very principle. It has the ability to arrange and organize interactive elements with which the reader/spectator/player can operate on the work. The in cabinet presentation of Dirty Card is not coincidental. While the art gallery is recreated as a sacred space, set up to observe the piece from a distance, the cabinet is its reverse: it can be in the lounge of a train station, the buffet of a neighborhood club, a kiosk, a bar, or a barbecue area. The joystick and button encourage hands-on interaction because the essence of the video game is, above all, interaction. A principle that has nothing to envy from the numerous interactive experiences or immersive exhibitions that modern art places in museums and cultural centers with the aim of breaking the barrier between work and audience. But while the opening proposal of the art installation is a gesture in itself, in the video game it becomes an inherent mark that lacks affectation or effort. In fact, it’s curious how the term “experience” is increasingly used as a value proposition in the art world while it becomes common currency in video game design to explain the “non-conventional.” Although in this case, the tube monitor does not comfortably accommodate the obligatory selfie of a visit to MALBA.
Axel Bosso
Loss and Recovery of the Aura
But what happens outside the gallery or museum? In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote one of his most read and reread texts, “Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility.” There, he argued that the industrial possibilities of disseminating works of art such as photography and cinema were fundamentally changing the auratic value of images. Through the concept of aura, Benjamin characterized the unique quality of works of art prior to modernity, where the contemplation of the work itself required presence, a physical encounter with materiality (be it a theatrical representation, a Chagall painting, or the execution of a symphony). In modernity, not only did “copies” of original works become possible for dissemination through photographs or other techniques of mass reproduction, but works began to be produced that directly lacked a singular identifiable material origin: a film, a record, a photo, are pieces made to be copied and distributed to a wide audience from their very conception. It goes without saying that this panorama has only deepened over the last 90 years, and the arrival of video games occurred in the midst of the digital age. In fact, since the advent of home internet connections, the gaming market has dispensed with physical support, which has made the ubiquity of games, increasingly liberated from platforms and not to mention physical media, only enhance their capacity to saturate us.
The joystick and button encourage hands-on interaction because the essence of the video game is, above all, interaction. A principle that has nothing to envy from the numerous interactive experiences or immersive exhibitions that modern art places in museums.
In response to the overwhelming feeling of "there are millions of video games available everywhere," Videogamo proudly counters, "not this one." NAVE is a video game developed by Hernán Saez and Maximiliano Balestrini that can only be played on a single machine. There is no other copy of NAVE outside the custom black cabinet that the Videogamo partners built in 2012. The only way to play this game is to show up at one of the dates published by Videogamo, wait in line in front of the machine, and enjoy its endurance challenge when it's your turn. To this anti-market gesture, we must add that NAVE is a game of remarkable depth, experimenting with a series of hyperbolic variations on a well-known and foundational genre in video games: the space shooter or bullet hell. In NAVE, we control a little ship that takes off from the tip of the Obelisk towards the stars, shooting down UFOs and navigating meteor showers, but with a twist: every time we grab a power-up, the ship grows larger until it nearly fills the entire screen. As it gets bigger, the chances of getting hit increase, which also makes the ship shrink in size.
Juan Ruocco 🧙♂️
Moreover, the game never really ends; waves of enemies and the same scenario unfold before us for as long as we can hold out. NAVE somehow amplifies the basic component that anyone who has ever played in an arcade has felt: you have to make the token last (something, by the way, very peripheral and Argentine). It’s an endurance game that is very difficult to master since there is only one machine, and the time you can use it is limited by the dates when NAVE is available. These conditions have created a phenomenon of fans who follow the machine wherever it appears to stand in long lines just to get some time at the controls. Every year, around the first days of December, the World NAVE Arcade Tournament is held, bringing together its loyal players and new contenders in a competition that lasts an entire long weekend (currently, the record for a game of NAVE is nearly 9 and a half hours, without any breaks or bathroom trips).
Daniel Link pointed out in his text "Orbis Tertius: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Digital Reproducibility" that the current paradigm of cultural circulation has shifted from an economy of necessity (typical of analog art) to an economy of desire, where the limits are not seen in the impositions of supply but in the exhaustion of the audience. In a saturated market, where players flip through their libraries of Steam filled with unopened games, the existence of a game like NAVE is certainly countercultural and endows the video game with an auratic component that it never had in its natural state. In addition to NAVE, Videogamo produced the party game suitcase known as DOBOTONE and GOL-E-GOL, both also pieces of mandatory presence.
Screw it
Shitty Games made headlines across the country when their game Gendarmer went viral in September 2014, a pixelated experience that reconstructed and denounced the incidents that occurred a few days earlier during the blockade of the Pan-American highway by workers from the Lear factory. There, a Gendarmerie officer had "suffered" a supposed hit-and-run, which was revealed to be a staged incident (the officer threw himself on the hood of the protester's car) in a video that surfaced later. From that point on, the folks at Shitty Games (artists Robosepu, Ber Sektor, and Nahuel Moco) have continued to create games about the most bizarre and tragic news of our national reality. In these games, they criticize the role of the media that gloss over and distort reality at will, but they also reveal their love for classic video games, their violent and scatological trash style, and obligatory references to hallucinogenic substances and dead politicians.
Following Gendarmer came gems like Keku Liao (a video game that projects the bloody orientalism of B-movie cinema and Mortal Kombat based on the news of a Córdoba resident who defended himself from a robbery with a katana in April 2015), Wonder Pity (a psychedelic platformer depicting the escape of singer Pity Álvarez on a bicycle after shooting a neighbor in Lugano in June 2018), or Sunset Gauchers (a reimagining of the classic arcade game Sunset Riders during the clash between gauchos and vegan protesters at an event in La Rural in 2019). Since their inception, Shitty Games has not stopped releasing game after game in response to current events, surpassing 40 releases. In 2024, they launched a compilation of their "Great Screw-ups" in a big box format that included a USB drive with all the games and a diaper, among other gifts.
Francisco Calatayud
Additionally, Shitty has its own exclusive arcade title, Captain Menopause, which, in Moco's words, "is a little ship game where you control an interstellar penis and have to go to a vagina planet to destroy a menstruation; in the meantime, you face off against pizzas, shoot semen, consume W40, Viagra, condoms, Santiago Maldonado appears, the moon explodes, Menem congratulates you, and things, many things." The punk sensibility of Shitty is akin to that of Tumba Games, but perhaps their aim to intervene directly in the current situation makes it a much more denunciatory effort and, in the initial terms of this note, less autonomous (this is where we draw the line, Kant). Far from being the first to use video games as a tool for social criticism, they are indeed the most prominent example in our local scene in this regard, and this interest has already placed them alongside some (more solemn) experiences that media like the New York Times highlighted in the 2000s. Video games can not only be an escape route but also a critical discourse on reality and a proposal for change.
The arcade as subculture
The common denominator of these three experiences is not coincidental: the arcade as a space for gaming, abandoned by commercial circuits, is the preferred refuge for the independent development scene: an invitation to move towards a physical space and to have a collective gaming experience. The struggle for the high score, peeking over shoulders to learn, and chatting to share impressions are phenomena that build a community around the video game apparatus and become a way to overcome the isolation that single-player gaming at home or even online gaming in front of a screen can often create.
Video games can not only be an escape route but also a critical discourse on reality and a proposal for change.
Over the last decade, new projects have been continually added to the national arcade scene: the quirky pinballs from Trucho Toys like Cacaborg, violent sidescrollers such as Chacal, the chameleon-like Thunderball by Nando Sarmiento, the dual-screen proposal Pamp! by Jupitrón, the standout alternative controls game Manija by Hausxr and 2BAM, the wooden mechanical game Mecanibol by Juan Becerril, and the refreshing Ventilastation by Alecu. Even last year, the gem The Rise and Fall of Mecha Perón, a treasure from Hierophant Games that only existed on Itch.io and Kongregate, was re-released (!) in cabinet format. Where can you find them? At Club 404, Bar El Destello, Perro Negro, Local bar, at exhibitions in CCK, and now also in your favorite art gallery.
From the autonomy that rejects market impositions, to the reclaiming of in-person interactions as a tool for building community, and touching on social critique and parody, the evolution of the independent video game scene in Buenos Aires over the last 15 years suggests there’s an alternative closer to an authorial and artistic vision than to simply hitting it big with international sales. Perhaps these expressions are, in fact, a return to the essence of game development, doing it plainly just to have fun.
Enjoyed the read? The Wizards are who keep 421 alive. Join and get the digital magazine, exclusive content, and more.
