I suppose I take the other side of video games. I see video games as art. No second guessing. Like fashion, games are a functional art. You can be as artistic all you want, but video games - like clothes - need to function. It needs to work. Now, you can create a video game that exists just for function but that would be bland, right? Bland art, that is. All acts of creation is a work of art, even if it's bland or poorly executed. So that's that. Games are art.

Now let's continue to whether games are more than just bland art. Without expression. The argument is that games 1) derive their art from other mediums and so are not entirely art in themselves - a collage of art fragments - and 2) that games are interactive and player-centered, not artist-centered. But interactivity is the key to why video games are an artform. It is what makes the video game medium unique and what threads those art fragments together. We could say that movies are also fragments of other artforms: music, sound, pictographs, and written dialogue. It is that movies thread them together through moving still images that turns it into a new art. Here, video games add the element of interactivity and programming (and game design, mind you) to turn movies into another new artform.

As for video games being player-centered, that would be denying the artist that created the game in the first place. No one would deny that game designers are artists - they design rule sets and mechanics that cause their desired aesthetics with a twist: art that sells. (Sorry but artists that don't sell their work aren't artists for very long...) But then one can say that the difference between games and other artforms is that you can create music for yourself or a motion picture for yourself, serving the purpose of self-expression. What is hardly mentioned, however, is that experimental game designers create video games meant entirely for themselves as well - games that no one else will ever experience. So games can be artist-centered - it's just not an artform readily accessible to those outside of the craft.

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