Game as art and copyright subject: digressions on the legal nature of digital games

Abstract

This article travels through concepts of general theory and philosophy of law, philosophy of art - aesthetics - and intellectual property rights in order, together with the theoretical bases already set out by theoretical texts on video games, to make a digression on the legal nature of games as analogous to that of audiovisual works, as exemplified by the very convention of generating for such titles the so-called and notorious "credits", as in cinema or television. It starts, for that purpose, from the difficult goal of conceptualising "art", linking its definitions to "GameArt", passing through the nature of digital games and addressing dialectics on the meaning of "value" for the law and how it fits into the perception of an "aesthetic object".