…people who talk about video games, myself included, often turn to those games’ narrative, atmospheric, or aesthetic content when discussing their artfulness.

The conversation is also hampered by the fact that many who play and design sports games — not to mention athletes themselves — would sooner dive into a thornbush than say, “Yeah, that thing I do? Art, pal. Right there. Art.” But do me a favor: Go to YouTube and watch a few old clips of Jordan or Maravich. Watch Aaron Rodgers thread the needle through some impossible coverage formation. Watch Jackie Joyner-Kersee run. I’ve been doing that for the past 40 minutes or so. It’s been enlightening.

You forget, when you’ve been away from sports and sports watching for a while, how visually and emotionally ravishing sports of all kinds can be. Even football — which I have gone to impressive lengths to avoid watching and playing — can be as darkly gorgeous as peering down on warring amoebae through a high-powered microscope. Something like humanity’s cultural ancientness is revealed through sport, which reminds us of what we actually are: savage, noble, strange, playful, and, above all, creative beings.

Whatever art is, it must be, in some way, beautiful. Acts of physical beauty performed within rule-set confines are not art, but acts of mental beauty performed within only slightly less rule-set confines (like, say, a sonnet) are. Is that really how we’re going to play this? It doesn’t sit right. Here’s what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn’t deserve any art.