The great conundrum you have to deal with in figuring out what art is, is what I shall dub (in a very Malstrom-esque fashion) the Magical Quality Scale.
With the Magical Quality Scale, it's possible to rate a game as being good or bad based on something besides raw sales. You just tack on a concept like "art", and then you have a whole slew of choices to rate something by. Suddenly a game that sold under 100,000 copies is brilliant because it's "art" on the Magical Quality Scale! Oh boy, that's great!
But in the real world, people state their opinion of a product with their wallets, not with their words. So does this mean that the votes of consumers mean nothing? Well, no, the Magical Quality Scale has them neatly tucked away as "Sales Numbers", and conveniently labels them as "unimportant".
Now here's where it gets ugly. Games cost money to make. If they sell poorly and don't make enough, they have failed as products. But then the Magical Quality Scale comes in to make it all better and declares that failed product as "art", meaning it was a success after all. Except that it wasn't. The product costs the publisher a lot of money, the promised sequel never appears, and the studio sometimes even folds.
So what does the Magical Quality Scale do, then? Besides make poor developers feel better about their failures and elitist gamers feel better about their niche tastes? Absolutely nothing. Declaring a game as "art" is as meaningless as declaring a cat to be a dog. Even if you convince a few people you're right, most will remain not only unconvinced, but entirely oblivious of your labeling.
Let the Magical Quality Scale go. It's a vaporous illusion, and it only means what you let it mean. Sales numbers exist and determine the fate of video games everywhere, but the label of "art" only succeeds in making a small group of people feel better when a game they like is a commercial failure.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
