Edit 2024-10-20: This question is not a hot topic any more. Video game lovers wanted to use this question as a way to legitimate their medium, at a time where it was said to make people violent and blood thirsty.
But while the interest on the topic died off, I think it is still interesting to understand video games, and art in general.
This is a question that I have seen being asked a lot. And all the answers I have seen so far fell short of being satisfactory. Because they were all focusing on a text definition of art.
And art has no strict, absolute definition. Just like life.
What is life, and why the definition approach is flawed.
Let's first do a quick detour on the definition of life, to better understand why there is no definition for art.
We cannot strictly express in words what “alive” means. There is no absolute description that could split everything that is, and that will ever be, in 2 categories: alive and dead.
Instead, we identify what we feel is alive, what we feel is dead. And we construct a definition of life by identifying the characteristics that only exist in the “alive” group. Even Wikipedia's life definition is said “descriptive”:
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not, and is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction.
~ Wikipedia
We define “being alive” from what we know is alive.
But this method is flawed: whenever a new element comes into play, that falls on the frontier we constructed between the alive and the dead, we have to build the frontier again, with this new element in mind.
Back to art
To me, defining art suffers from the same challenges as defining life. And that is a big issue when what looks like a new form of art like video games emerges. Because in order to rewrite the definition, this descriptive approach requires a consensus on the matter. And there is currently none.
A new approach
We need a new approach to determine if video game is art. If we look at the similarities, we can see that video games — especially the 3D ones — in their presentation, take a lot from cinema. Just like cinema, they feature music, and theatrical performances.
But wait, isn't cinema just a form of theatre? What makes cinema its own separate art form?
Why is cinema art?
Cinema is very similar to theatre. They both involve actors performing on a set, with a script, a director, and an emphasis on acting.
To understand what really sets cinema apart from theatre, we should look at the differences in the artists involved. Both of them have writers, and actors, but the main difference is the directors. They are so different that in French, they go by different names.
But what sets apart a theatre director from a cinema director? The most important difference is the camera. The cinema director can control and manipulate the point of view of the spectator. Something that is not possible in theatre, when the spectators all have a different point of view of the scene from their seat.
And that manipulation of the camera in order to transmit new emotions to the spectator is the essence of what makes cinema, cinema. That is why we call cinema director “filmmakers”, and that is why all the cinema specific “techniques”, like the dolly zoom effect, all involve the camera.
The camera is what sets cinema apart from regular theatre.
But what about video game?
Video game is similar to cinema, like cinema is similar to theatre. They both involve a camera, actors or characters, a plot, etc. But if we can find the equivalent of the “camera difference” in cinema and theatre, between cinema and video game, we could then defend video game as a separate art form.
And to me, this difference is interaction. Interaction is a unique medium of transmission games can leverage to give new emotions to the player. Just like camera movements in a film can make spectators feel lost and dizzy, interaction can make players feel tricked, triumphant, smart, alienated, stressed, and much more.
I am not saying that interaction is all there is to video game, and that more interaction makes better video games. But if we want to improve video game as a unique art form, and improve our ability to create medium-specific emotions, we need to look at interactions.