I think I can agree with you on most of your points.

To claim all of video games as art is simply ludicrous. As you pointed out, not books or songs are necessarily art. While I wouldn't consider some stories art, I would consider some novels forms of art, such as certain sci-fi novels and story lines where the author is asking a question of society and posing what s/he believes is what could happen and how society can change that from happening.

While I don't believe that video games as a whole are art, I do believe in the possibility that there are games or potential for games to be art in the same respect as the example mentioned above. I will admit that I am neither an art critic nor a journalist. I have also not attended schools for either of these. Nevertheless, I do believe art is what challenges us and moves us, and can encourage us or chastise us.

I agree that most games are not art (I refrain from using "all" here simply because I have only explored a minority of games personally), but I would argue that games do have the potential to be art.

(If someone else has previously expressed these words and I did not give due credit I apologize.)

I once went to the MoMA museum in NYC with a friend who by every conceivable standard was better educated than I was. In every way, he had a considerable advantage on me regarding brains, at least book-smarts. When we went through the more controversial exhibits, he had no problem sneering at certain works and labeling them as "frauds" and "scams." I was horrified and aghast, as I found a good few of the works he despised and denigrated quite beautiful, and yes, I considered them art.

We disagreed. So what? This whole argument make idiots of people on both sides, but particularly those who claim video games aren't art. Who are they to judge? Who is Ebert? Who is Suciu? Lots of educated, cultivated men in Nazi Germany condemned most of the artistic output of their century in Germany as trash (along with the men who produced it.) Rudy Giuliani and other conservative New Yorkers condemned controversial and perhaps blasphemous works shown at the Brooklyn Museum. Were they right?

Obviously video games are art, but it's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? When you first emerge from the train station and meet your first vista of the dessicated city in Half Life 2, or when you take your first griffon ride in World of WarCraft, are those experiences art? To me, yes. Perhaps not to others.

So then what's the point? My point is that neither Ebert nor Suciu have a point.

That was a poor article. It doesn't seem that the author knows what art is, as he never defines it for the reader, but sides with the anti-art camp. That's a baseless approach.

Art is something that evokes feeling that is shared between the creator and the people viewing it.(see bottom link)

I imagine that certain games, I'm thinking of Call of Duty, were designed to make one feel what it was like to be in WWII. Other games which have parties to take care of tend to make me become invested in the characters want to keep them alive and I feel sadness if they die. This is on par with a quality movie, for me.

That's art at least according to Tolstoy, who said real art does this: "#25. There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who are also infected by it)."

I believe that people who don't play certain kinds of games can know the shared, and intended, feelings that they evoke. So, a nongamer can't judge the value of them as art.

http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html

"#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena."

It has been said already in more eloquent words then I have to offer. To state that videogames are not art is a greatest fallacy. It is to say that photographs are not art because so many of them are merely vacation snapshots. Paintings are not art, have you seen the water colors in playboy. Poetry is not art, for there once was a man from Nantucket.

Pure simple sophistry, and to no purpose. Video games. Truth, the entirety of programming is an art both in the classical sense, the same sense that inventors mean when they refer to their own work, and in the the sense that they have the avility to influence how we think, what we think about and how we feel. Some are shallow forms of populist art(Resident Evil), some touch on the political and philosophical (Metal Gear Saga), some seek to tell a story(Final Fantasy), and some are abstract works of art in and of themselves(Rez).

To treat the product of programming as merely a way to divert yourself is, to my mind, an insult both to the medium and to the artists and artisans who crafted your entertainment.

On the other hand, not every sketch every drawn was a masterpiece.

Myst

I love this photo! Hilarious - Suddenly I actually want to go to an art museum.
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Max ... Out!
http://www.cmyos.com - free online operating system

It seems to me that any serious article discussing whether video games are art should first include the definition of art that is being used. Once the definition is clearly stated, one can then argue which video games fit this definition and which do not, and agreement between people will be much more likely. The real discussion should therefore be focused on the merits and shortcomings of different definitions of the word art.

I was hoping to read an article stating the reasons why video games cannot be high art Instead it reads that some video games are not art. Duh. Some movies (most) are not art. Some photographs are not art. Some paintings are not art.
So my question is, do you feel the medium itself cannot be used to produce art? Please clarify and explain why.

Really?...How can you say videogames aren't art, some aren't art but some are just way to amazing.