This entire debate is dumb.  Every single person here is a bag of meat that is going to stop existing very, very soon, and nothing they do or say will matter even a tiny little bit in the cosmic sense once the sun blows up.  And yet, people have gotten legitimately angry over defining art, which is basically anything that gives you, personally, as an individual, an artful experience.

Are you moved by the Lord of the Rings films?  Well, Penn Gillette thinks they're escapist bullshit for morons, and while he's in my top ten favorite people of all time, I'm still very emotionally moved by those movies.  At the same time, I think anyone who claims to enjoy 500 dollar wine more than 50 dollar wine is a liar, but there are people who have committed their lives to the craft of winemaking and it is very much art to them.

Some people play video games and enjoy them very much, and never get a sense of art out of them.  Some people never play video games, but can look at Niko Bellic flying a helicoptor over Liberty City as the sun sets and say "yep, that's art."  It comes down to whether you experience them as art or not.  Arguing with someone that they need to play Shadow of the Colossus or Morrowind or Half Life 2 or whatever isn't going to help, if they aren't gamers then all three of those games are going to frustrate them.  If you get an artful experience out of those games, play them, enjoy them, observe them, study them, write about them, do whatever that art compels you to do in response to it.  But unless you'd appreciate someone dragging you to modern art exhibit and forcing you to stare at a dyed-red Q-Tip stuck inside a lump of soap, with several steel flies suspended from fishing wire all around it... don't try to make someone else get the same experience out of it you do.

It's personal.  And it's kind of dumb.  And it's not going to matter when the sun blows up- which is kind of the reason our species does art to begin with, because it gives us something else to think about.

You've played mass effect 1, 2, and 3? If not lets try this. That film is crap because although i've not seen it, I've seen crap films therefore that's also a crap film.

This reply isn't designed to be antagonistic, I just believe you're potentially coming to the argument with limited frame of reference. Games are designed to be experienced, not simply observed. Watching a play through on YouTube does not equate to an emotional investment in a character, story, or experience.

There are lots of awful shallow games with large budgets, but by the same token if we use Transformers as an example, film isn't art either.

I don't even understand the question. It works like storytelling. Things happen and they cause the next things to happen and the things eventually culminate in a final thing happening and then no more things happen.

EDIT: Well, it's like you said, it comes in drips and drabs through stuff you see in the environment and stuff you hear said to you by other characters, either directly or through recordings. It's cleverly written and much of it takes place in subtext, and at each stage once you've accomplished a goal it drives you toward another goal within the context of a plot.

I haven't even actually legitimately played mario, and I know the storyline of mario.

Bowser steals princess, Mario goes to rescue her. This is the story of Marios journey across the lands to save her. It's simple but it's there, and you still get pissed off when that little fickin toad jerks you around.

When it comes to Portal it's a bit different, Portal is much more about implying a story, then just out and out telling you one. Portal 2 however is much more of a traditional story, where x happens which causes you to do y, and a story unfolds (Unfortunatly Valve seemed to think that meant it also had to ramp up it's "our audience is an idiot" factor for it's gameplay, that so many games today do).

It certainly doesn't, but if I added moments of me flying a jet around the Grand Canyon to Independence Day, does it make it better in some way? It's superfluous. But then, if you completely remove gameplay from a game, it's not a game.

I think it boils down to I don't get gaming. Probably because I don't game much.

I'm feeling curmudgeonly. Sigh. Nothing to see here.