Frank Lantz

“I am using the term aesthetics partly to avoid the contentious and confrontational word art with all of its problematic associations. When you say the word “art,” some people will close their eyes in respectful reverence, others will roll their eyes in skeptical exasperation. Either way, you can be pretty sure that no one will be simply looking at whatever it is you are talking about. Art is often used as a sacred superlative, a badge of seriousness and status. Aesthetics is more simply descriptive; it denotes the full spectrum of creative endeavors from the rare and precious to the common and disposable and everything in between. The aesthetic domain is broad—it includes operas and soap operas, classical music and classic rock, performance art and stand-up comedy. To say that something belongs to this domain is not to make grandiose claims for its qualities, it is just a straightforward way of understanding what type of activity it is. We are comfortable thinking about music, for example, as a realm that contains the difficult, the abstruse, and the profound, as well as the simplistic, the accessible, and the cheaply pleasant. Let’s talk about games the same way.”
― Frank Lantz, The Beauty of Games