Here is a post I have found on a blog called Arthouse games: insisting that our medium can reach beyond entertainment by Jason Rohrer a game designer and programmer well known for creating indie game Passage. The post is a collection of answers from various people who work within game design, on the question "can you give a one-sentance definition of art?"
There are some points made that I have found interesting, for example Danny Ledonne says "Art is any form of expression that can be shared with an audience." and this seems to be a general theme among these answers. Jonathan Blow says "The expression of something the artist feels important or interesting, with the hope that the expression resonates with an audience in a deep way." Rod humble reflects upon both these answers but also makes a link with entertainment "Entertainment is giving enjoyment to the maximum number of people you can. Art is that which can make at least one person a better human being. Long may they both prosper." This link between entertainment and art is very relevant to games as an emerging art form, like cinema and comics for example, two forms of artistic expression that have emerged through popular culture. Raph Foster says "we often discuss the desire for games to be art---for them to be puzzles with more than one answer, puzzles that lend themselves to interpretation. That may be the best definition of when something ceases to be craft and turns into art---the point at which it becomes subject to interpretation." So while playing a game is it subject to interpretation? In many aspects of games I would say yes, for example Bethsofts Fallout 3, you have the choice to be good or bad, you can choose a different path through the game each time you play, many parts of the game world and narrative do not even have to be explored to complete the game, thus it is a creative world that is open to interpretation. But does this make it art? I believe to answer this fundamental question myself I need to form my own definition of art, an enumerative process of my own that I could use to evaluate a game and whether it should be classified as art.
http://www.northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jcr13_1180438849_0&show_author=1&show_date=1
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
http://bethsoft.com/index.html
http://fallout.bethsoft.com/index.html
http://www.wikipedia.org/
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