In this aim, The Artists completes its work. It gives voice to three decades of creators who became trapped in company names, it puts a face to those who did the work of creation. The last episode highlights The Museum of Modern Art (Moma) and its collection of video games, established in 2012. It makes a compelling case for why we might call these early pioneers, and game makers today, “artists.” Consequently, by examining the modern state of “games as art” the conversation is brought into the present. This isn’t just a hands-off historical examination of the industry but one which ties it explicitly to the present. The move accents the series’ case for more careful consideration of games as art objects, but it leaves the narrative on IP ownership and corporate structures to fall on its face.

The issue’s with the series stem from here, however. By focusing in the past and limiting the scope to creators who have moved out of the industry, The Artists sets itself up to repeat the cycle. Nowhere in the series do we hear a challenge to today’s working practices. Nowhere do we see the people who are still creating games and still being left out of the credits.

Furthermore, the documentary seems content with the structure of studios and creative property law. One episode, focusing on Double Fine founder Tim Schafer, begins to question what the large studio structure does to the industry. The answer offered by the film? Go independent. There isn’t any follow up, any exploration of what going independent might mean in terms of struggle, intellectual property rights, or edging your way into established marketplaces.

Without this greater context The Artists never truly takes the crimes it points out to task. Recently at the Game Developers Conference, there was a push for organization within the developer community, a move this series seems unable to calculate. The move to organize is an essential one for developers who work in massive companies and the documentary presents a world where walking away to independence is the best option.

The best, and from my recollection only attempt to question these practices is in the last episode from Cindy Poremba, the founder of experimental game collaborators the Kokoromi Collective. “When the only thing you can be in games is a game developer, as opposed to being an artist, and you just happen to make games, then it changes the types of things you would be willing to make,” she notes. “My hope would be, in the next five years, we figure out a way to negotiate this relationship between the commercial aspects of independent games and the artistic and creative aspects.”

The Artists tells the story of developers who have had to fight for recognition in their craft and have, only thanks to documentaries like this, done so. But in the current state of games, as shown in the series, we ought to expect another round of documentaries in the years to come for work being done right now.