Video games can absolutely be art, and many video games display great feats of ingenuity and creativity!

• So much goes into the creation of a video game. Even for short-form games, there’s usually some sort of character design and story arc that requires artistic thinking and processes.
• Video games such as Flower, BioShock infinite, Dear Esther, Minecraft, and many, many more show just how beautiful digital art can be.
• Even video games such as Call of Duty have art within them, from the graphics to the design of the weapons. Though the scenes of Call of Duty are rarely "aesthetically pleasing", they still have a distinct artistic element to them.
• Video games could definitely fall under the category of interactive art. They invoke a reaction in viewers and players, they serve a purpose, and each person experiences a game differently.

Although the exact definition of art can be subject to variation, one pretty solid description might be 'a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination'.

• When we say that video games can't be art, we are in a way speaking from a kind of snobbery. There is a definite extent to which art as a form has been made elitist & moved to this transcendental realm, set apart from everyday reality and immortalised in galleries.

• A book I love that explores the nature of art is [Jeanette Winterson's 'Art Objects'] (http://www.olinda.com/Art/artobjects.htm). In her exploration of what distinguishes good and bad art, she writes: "The true artist is connected. They study the past, not as a copyist will study the past: those people are only interested in the final product, the art object, signed sealed and delivered to a public drugged on reproduction. The true artist is interested in the art object as a process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy that has found expression in a particular way."

• She also writes, "If the true artist is connected, then he/she has much to give us because it is the connection that we seek. Connection to the past, to one another, to the physical world... A picture, a book, a piece of music, can remind me of feelings, thinkings, I did not even know I had forgot."

• Video games are a distinctly new form of creative expression — and they are, undoubtedly, an expression of skill and of imagination. Some are better than others because they aren't designed purely to appeal to "a public drugged on reproduction". And some are better than others because they create more of a reaction in us, more of a feeling of connection or recognition.

• But those arguments that resist the classification of any video games as 'art' are subscribing to a very limited idea of what art can be. By its very nature, this view doesn't allow for the much-touted [Ezra Pound declaration] (https://www.guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/) to "make it new!" Video games are a kind of art that is unique to our modern position. 'Art' as a classifying term is necessarily adaptive and always shifting and expanding as we develop more modes of expression.