Maybe discussing “What IS art?” isn’t interesting to you, but I still think it’s important to the discussion because you can’t determine whether or not games are art if you can’t define what art is. And because the general consensus is vague, someone like Ebert can define it in such a way that games won’t qualify. To be honest, I think the layman’s definition of art is actually, “I’ll know it when an expert sees it, and then puts it in a museum or gallery”. I’m not saying most people can’t understand art, I’m saying they don’t bother, either because they have no interest or because they don’t think they can. I think that’s one reason people have gotten so angered by Ebert. He’s an expert, but they know he’s wrong. They don’t know how to explain why, though.

And just to clarify, I didn’t say Michael Bay doesn’t think his work is art, I said his producers probably don’t. I’m not even saying his work isn’t art, because I’ve never watched it. I may be a jerk, but I’m not THAT big of a jerk.

The points you bring up, that a “great game” doesn’t have to be art, that the developer’s voice isn’t important, that’s not arguing that games aren’t art, that’s arguing that they shouldn’t be. Convincing those people that games are art won’t change their approach to creating games. I’d say to them that trying to silence the developer’s voice is a hypocritical conceit that makes the games impersonal. Pretending that the player has full control is ridiculous, because no matter how many choices you give the player, you are still the one giving them those choices. The player can’t do whatever the hell they feel like; they can only do what you allow them to as the game’s creator. You can give them many, many, many choices, but still, the developer is the one who ultimately decides what those choices are. There is no nobility in trying to reduce a conversation to a false monologue.

I still think this whole argument is ultimately pedantic and, frankly, kind of annoying, but I will give two examples proving that games are art because proving that point is obviously very important to people. These examples are visceral experiences that occurred because of gameplay.

The first is from Max Payne; the section during Max’s hallucination when he must traverse a trail of blood while his infant’s wailing is heard. I watched my teenaged brother and his friend play through this section. They were both made uncomfortable, and my brother tried to run through the section as quickly as he could. Of course, the path being so narrow and the edges being invisible meant that rushing made him fall off the path and he had to keep starting over. After five minutes of this he dropped his controller and said he didn’t know if he could continue. His friend said, “This is shit is messed up.”

I asked him why?

He said, “You don’t think it’s sick running on a trail of his kid’s blood while you hear it crying?”

I said, “You don’t think it’s sick his wife and kid were murdered to get back at him? To intimidate him? You don’t think he would suffer? That’s what this is, his suffering.”

They both became quiet, and my brother unpaused the game and continued, more slowly and carefully. It still took him a try or two, though, and by the end the two of them were visibly shaken.

Watching a scene similar to that game section would have been unnerving, but it wouldn’t create that feeling of tension, they wouldn’t have had to focus on it the way they did on the gameplay and
I’m sure it would not have affected them nearly as much.

The second example is from the finale of Tales of Monkey Island, when a half-dead Guybrush is battling LeChuck on his ship. When I played through that puzzle I was tense and nervous and wanted to get through it as quickly as I possibly could, because I didn’t just hate having to see Guybrush suffer, I felt guilty. By not figuring out the solution faster I was prolonging his anguish. I have never felt guilty watching a character in a film suffer, because I never felt I had any control over his fate. With Guybrush, I did; it was my fault I kept seeing his poor, polygonal body get thrown around like a ragdoll.

Those are two examples of deeply emotional experiences that could ONLY happen in games. You could try to recreate them in another medium, and you could probably get pretty close, but you’d never be able to recreate that feeling of responsibility and involvement. That’s what I think is the biggest difference between games and other medium of expression. It’s not that games are interactive and other medium aren’t, because all art is ultimately an artist’s attempt to interact with their audience. It’s that games are far more interactive and gives more responsibility of experience to audience than any other medium. I don’t just think that games are art, I think they have the potential to be the most engaging form of art yet known.