Almost any way you define art can be applied to games. Emotional reaction? Creative process? Storytelling?

The very idea of games not being art is hilarious to me.

Agreed. It seems like one of those things that's so painfully obvious that you would have to go out of your way to NOT think videogames are art. They're a creative work. Even at their most industrialized and impersonal (Call of duty), they still have a creative process behind them, and they are made to be appreciated in an aesthetic way as well as a functional way. Thus, art.

Are they good art? That can be debated, and both sides will have excellent points.

I mentioned this earlier on another thread, but the problem is overcoming the ingrained attitude that video games = toys for children. How many people are there out there who still associate video games with Pac Man or Asteroids?

Yes, they aren't art. They are an engineering piece of work.

so are cathedrals and temples, but many would consider them works of art. engineering is the nuts-and-bolts of a more complicated form of art. just because it's not on a canvas on a wall doesn't disqualify them.

Explain to me at which point a block of wood worked on with a hammer and chisel stops being a block of wood and becomes art.

It's the human input, mate. It doesn't matter what materials you use, at all.

Somehow almost everything is art. A blue square on white background is art. And everybody regards different things as art.

I always say: Let art be what wants be art, but do not bow your head to it.

Calling something art doesn't mean much. Doesn't make it better or even good.

No, a stupid console application would be built by the same nuts and bolts that could potentially create a more complicated form of art, by my reading.
Hehe, yeah, that's my argument!

Art is like maturity.

You have it when you stop worrying about it, and not before.

Art is just a word. With so much disagreement as to its definition, it's not a very useful word. I think we should forget about "art" and use more specific words instead. Concepts like exceitement, happiness, sadness, comic, tragic, visual or auditory beauty etc. seem to me an order of magnitude better defined and more consistently understood.

Also, I think trying to treat the above concepts, "art" included, objectively can be done at best through pseudostatistics like the average amount of emotion conveyed.

I know this guy named Art. He's a real buzzkill. No sense of fun at all. And he's pretty tired of being connected to every single piece of entertainment out there.

You must have missed the "building blocks" part of my statement, or not understood it. I was talking about end result.

If you do not judge your application to be a piece of art, then it isn't, if you do, then it is.

People should think from where the word "artisan" comes. Therefore, all things produced by human may be art, relative to the time and effort that went into the object. As you can imagine, this is somewhat subjective and peer revision is the best way to distinguish quality.

Video games are about as dynamic as art can be, since it can incorporate almost all known art venues.