When the abstract rules themselves on a list of rules are art, then and only then will games be art. You may continue to implicitly vaunt art above games by claiming categorical symmetry, but you are doing no service to games or art, and are only perpetuating the (quite wrong) belief that art is superior to games, hence the need to justify the latter by insisting it is the former.

@Bek – I also like focus on the celebration of the team as a whole, although I think that is a different (albeit related) conversation. Few single people could make an entire game, and I think the best multi-person creative projects have a need for the director to encourage and include other artistic influences from the team, but regardless of public perception and reaction, I think games tend to have greater artistic value when they are ultimately reflective of a single person’s vision. A Sibelius symphony could not be played without the incredible talent and dedication of the instrumentalists, the conductor, and the many people who make the instruments and organize the space and the payments and all the other jobs nobody ever thinks about, but ultimately the symphony is an expression of something out of Sibelius and that vision is at the centre and all other work is best served pursuing that vision.

No game, taken as a whole, is art. A game may have individual aspects which are artistic. There are areas in the lovingly built pixellated world of Final Fantasy VI that are certainly art; the music of Final Fantasy IX is art; the narrative and dialogue in Final Fantasy XII is art. There are some games which are chock-full of art. But, the games where these things are found are not, themselves, taken in whole, art. They are games. And despite bizarre, wrong-headed morons thinking otherwise, the one is not somehow better than the other. Art is not better than Games; Games are not better than Art. They are simply categorically different things. (I just got through that whole paragraph without mentioning Final Fantasy VII. Until now.)

Games are far more like Sport than they are like a painting, a novel, or a symphony, because their nature is wholly grounded in the systemic, and their whole ludic narrative (not the same thing as the narrative of dialogue and story action) is generated purely (and often individually) through user interaction. Again, this does not mean that they cannot have artistic aspects. There are aspects of Cricket which are, for example, artistic: a ground may be beautiful, a particular stroke by an excellent batsman may have a classical aspect; there can be symmetry to the field placements which are aesthetically pleasing–but these are aspects, not the whole ‘Sport’ itself. The whole does not become art simply because it possesses aspects which are artistic, in the same way a house does not become art by virtue of having paintings inside of it, or a person becoming art by memorising a great many poems, or an evening with the wife become art by taking in a Symphony as part of it: and yet, no one would dispute the value of such a house, such a person, or such an evening.

(This is not to say that Games are Sport (they’re not; Games are Games, and I am being reductive about the differences for the purpose of the analogy); but rather to point out that they exist in a different category of thing than Art properly considered.)

So it turns out that Roger Ebert was right after all, God rest his little soul, but he was right for the wrong reasons. He held up art as somehow ‘more’ than games, which he perceived as uniformly Pac-Man-like. Instead, Games are just as valuable as Art, for some of the same reasons that Art is valuable, and for some different reasons to which Art itself can never aspire. We need both! But we also need to stop conflating them, because so to do creates a false hierarchy which diminishes both even as it confuses both.

I personally like the, for lack of a better term, precedent in the gaming industry that gives recognition to a studio for a good title as opposed to the way most other media distribute their praise. In films and television, the focus is typically on a few key players, mainly the on-screen cast and the director, sometimes a producer or composer. These people should be recognized, because they’re typically the most visible in any given production. But I like the way gaming doesn’t necessarily focus on a few key players and instead praises the entity as a whole, because that doesn’t, whether people do it intentionally or not, diminish the effort that every single member of the team put forth.