As Judge Posner notes, video games excel when they are about struggle. Although many games are more clearly about triumphant victory in battle, there is nothing stopping game designers from creating a game about the horrors of warfare. As should be apparent, current narrative-based video games can easily meet neo-representation theories of art such as Danto's "aboutness" criterion, where an art work is roughly something formally appropriate to what it is about. By putting players in the position to make decisions affecting the lives of simulated civilians and troops, games could potentially be the most formally appropriate way to comment on war via a fictional representation.
The art status of video games has much stronger support from representational theories of art than do other disputed art forms. In The Philosophy of Human Movement, David Best argues that there is a crucial difference between sports and art: Sports fail to meet basic representational criteria. Putting the contrast nicely, Best says that "whereas sport can be the subject of art, art could not be the subject of sport. Indeed, the very notion of a subject of sport makes no sense."[19] In this way, the distinction between sports and video games is profound. As such, video games are much more plausible candidates for art than are aesthetic sports or chess.