Roger Ebert recently tweeted this video, calling it a “Brief, well-made video mounting an optimistic
defense of videogames.”
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Interesting point. I'm not sure if videogames themselves are art, but certainly some technologies invented for gaming can be used as means to create artworks. I don't remember the name of the artwork/artist, yet a few years back in a contemporary art gallery in London, I saw an artwork created through the use of advanced 3D graphics that are originally invented and used for first-person shooter games such as Doom/Quake.
Yes, I was thinking along the lines that Ebert likely thought this clip was worth mentioning because of the cinematic assumptions underlying the argument. Iteration, do-overs, watching the consequences of your actions, and exploring the rules are all part of the pleasure of gaming, and those pleasures don't have to be cinematic (as any text-adventure fan will tell you).
A good canned version, although the implication that videogames become more valid as art as they become more movie-like makes my hackles rise; I have seen many, many games that have been made *worse* as art because its creators were trying to make a movie rather than a game.
(You see a similar tendency in early movies, which often aren't sure whether they're meant to be theatre or still photography. Actors with bug-out eyes and great big gestures so that the people in the cheap seats can see; directors arranging shots as if they were sentimental photo-portraits.)