After seeing my post on Facebook a friend said that I should post my thoughts on games and art here.

I just saw a comment on YouTube saying that games cannot be art and that the only way they can be art is by losing "everything that makes a "game" a game."

Art - [mass noun] The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

An example of the simplest game to call "art" is 'Shadow of the Colossus'. Can you listen to this song from it and not call it art? - http://tinyurl.com/bpbtvgk Can you see this digital landscape and the characters that inhabit it and not call it art? - http://tinyurl.com/d5mmxhx

If anything, games have the potential to be (in my opinion) one of the strongest forms of art there is. Why is this? Because games like 'Shadow of the Colossus' are greater then the sum of their parts.

Music is a form of art. Painting is a form of art. Modelling is a form of art. Story telling is the artful passing on of a form of art. Acting can even be considered a form of art. Anybody that says these are not art can often be expected to be called "narrow minded". But the moment you create 3D models in a computer, apply textures, digital paintings if you will, to those models, write a story for actors to voice, put music to it all, put it on a DVD and sell it to a teenager who will control one of the characters, experience the story, listen to the music and be emotionally moved by it all while still having fun. Once you do all that if you call it art, many people will call you "stupid".

Every game can be called art. However, some are more deserving of that title then others.

I will open this post up for discussion by ending with a quote from the Smithsonian American Art Museum: “Video games use images, actions, and player participation to tell stories and engage their audiences. In the same way as film, animation, and performance, they can be considered a compelling and influential form of narrative art.”