I play a lot of video games. As I’ve mentioned before, this often feels more like an admission of guilt than anything; video games have something of a stigma attached to them. This isn’t entirely fair: as games grow as a medium, they are gradually starting to attract an audience beyond the stereotypical “basement shut-in.” Smartphone games, in particular, have dramatically expanded the audience of games in general.

But games as a critical medium, a means of making a point about culture, as a mirror to examine ourselves ––in other words, games as art–– have gained little traction even as the markets which video games reach have expanded dramatically. In fact, it is this very expansion of the market which has so set back the artistic development of interactive media.

There is a tension between economic mass-market viability as a commercial product and artistic value. We can look to film as an example: most film studios are uninterested in greenlighting the massive up-front expense of a blockbuster title without a minimum guarantee of success. Hence the trend towards endless sequels of safe, high-performing properties like Marvel’s cinematic universe.

But while in film there are producers willing to go after the best of both worlds, combining high budget with a creative spark, games have yet to find a Spielberg or a Hitchcock, capable of combining commercial appeal and artistic merit. Video games don’t yet have the kind of singular talent and vision needed to create a game comparable to “The Godfather”, let alone “Apocalypse Now.”

It’s not for lack of trying. There are many games that attempt to reach such lofty heights. Most have failed. The ones which succeed are buried under an avalanche of follow-the-leader cash-ins. This prevents a game becoming a truly timeless classic.

Take “Bioshock,” a brilliantly directed art-deco wasteland in which the player pieces together the fall of an experimental Objectivist society and eventually discovers their own lack of agency in one of the most effective twists in any medium. Ten years on from its release, the success of Bioshock has been diminished by the ubiquity of “story breadcrumb” systems that exchange coherent narrative for a smattering of tape recordings, or worse, walls of dry expository prose.

And this does reflect poorly on “Bioshock” on replay. Games as a medium advance so quickly that even daring innovations are almost instantly copied, proliferate through the market and become tired. The fact that a game used a system first won’t ameliorate the irritation that a player feels on encountering it in its original. So even the most creative games become weaker on replay years after release.

But the worst damage the market has done to the artistic viability of video games is just now becoming apparent. Triple-A release or smartphone timewaster, the most highly visible games of the past few years are increasingly transparent about their role as both consumer product and revenue machine. The extreme controversy over 2017’s “Star Wars Battlefront II” arises out of pushback against this phenomenon, but it is largely too late for the games industry.

Explicit, unironic consumerism is anathema to art. It’s why we generally feel that art can’t be mass-produced, and why there has been public pressure for art museums to eliminate admissions fees. That’s not to say artists and creators don’t deserve to be paid for their work.

However, psychological manipulation to encourage purchasing a product is more than allowing an artist to make a living; it’s explicitly trying to squeeze as much revenue out of a consumer as possible. There is something so crass, so ugly, about that fact that it disqualifies any game with a micro-transaction model from ever being art. Regardless of how innovative a Skinner box it is, it’s still a profit-maximizing tactic.

There is still hope in some areas. Nintendo has had a breakout year, with “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” and “Super Mario Odyssey” both pushing the envelope of creative game design. Assuming “Breath of the Wild” manages to avoid the pitfall of endless follow-the-leader, it may yet become the kind of timeless classic gaming needs.

On the personality side of things, Japanese director Yoko Taro is shaping up to be a revolutionary leader in game direction, with a bombastic, unorthodox approach to both design and to public relations. Taro makes games that are unapologetically weird and don’t kowtow to anyone’s expectations of commercial viability.

But on the whole, the relative market share of these more meritorious titles is limited compared to the endless parade of “Call of Duty" and “Assassin’s Creed,” all featuring their own microtransaction models, pushed out by faceless publishing conglomerates, and using the same systems we’ve seen for years now.

Without significant changes to the market model of video games, there will be no serious critical conversations in the public consciousness about their artistic merit.