Could you imagine a time when games could both be sport and entertainment, and as an art form.

What about dance? That is a sport, and yet there are branches of dance that are considered to be art.   

 The black-and-white movies is worth discussion, but how are photographs and poems "limited?" You don't actually name a restriction on them. 

I'd argue that black-and-white film isn't a restriction these days either; it is, just like color films, a deliberate and important visual choice. Consider Schindler's List for example; the entire movie is in black and white, save a single girl's brilliantly red dress. Instead of being a "restriction," as you put it, I'd say that's putting the film medium's great strength -- visual representation -- to important use.

A restriction of the type we're talking about would be like a movie literally having no visuals at all to highlight the audio. See the difference? Black and white only alters the meaning of the visuals, it doesn't actually limit them, while story telling automatically does limit interactivity. And guess what a movie with no visuals is? A crappy book-on-tape. Just like a game with little interacivity and tons of story is a crappy movie. 

I believe you missed my point: I said that I could imagine that in my post (I said that "this won't necessarily be the case," implying that games could, in fact, be both a sport and art simultaneously). My point was, instead, that video games could evolve in enumerable ways, and imagining that far into the future is effectively impossible, when we can't even agree on what's likely to happen in a few years.

I'm trying to steer the discussion away from "what is art?" but you keep pulling it back towards that. Let's just agree that games can be intelligent and sophisticated, and move on.  

@Bod I think the point of the word art is that its meaning is intended to be constantly challenged and discussed. Talking about traditional art and saying we shouldnt discuss it because no one will agree is sort of missing the point.

As for cutscenes in games... I have mized feelings on this subject. I think cutscenes are a poweful story telling device, and are useful for offering sudden changes of pace etc... but i do believe with this new push for cinematic games they are being over used, or at least cinematic style is being overused and the actual game is suffering.

I have put a bit of thought into the idea behind games being art, but i didn't really get anywhere until I read an enlightening quote from Shiggy. I cant remember where i read it or it's exact words, so I'll paraphrase heavily:

"When designing a game, I watch people play and see how they react. If they dont react in the way i wanted them to, i dont say there is somehting wrong with the person, i say there is somehting wrong with the game."

Games are about interacting, which leads in turn to games being about making choices. The problem with this is if players are allowed to make choices, they can choose to not move forward or uncover more of the story by performing certain actions.

I believe the art of games is not only telling great stories with unique ideas, but also positioning the player in a way that consistantly gets the player to make the choice the game designer wanted them to make, for themselves. Might I add you hear the word POSITIONING alot whne studying major artforms, i think the difference for games is that they are simply not established, no ones written any books on artistic anlysis of games (as far as I know).

Game designers have been trying to imporove cutscenes by offering text choices for a long time, and in recent times some game designers have gotten similar ideas into their head and attempt to improve things by offering shallow moraily choices. But in the end these things are mainly superficial.

To illustrate my point further, when i was playing through portal with commentary on, alot of the comments were about how playtesters had not understood what they were meant to do, so the team had redesigned the puzzels using symbology to guide the player into making the right decisions. And that game really did have the player acheiving mind bending things with very little effort. That is artistic game design.

Games offer other artistic idea in their graphics and music thats possible in other mediums, but choice is unique to games, and I feel game designers dont celebrate this enough.

Every word's meaning is constantly under revision. That isn't a trait unique to this particular word.

It isn't that such a discussion isn't valuable (although I'm not sure it is), but rather that every discussion of this type instantly devolves into semantics and never gets beyond it. I want to get beyond it, so rather than get caught in the mire, I hoped we could simply agree that it's a problem for another thread and time. 

If we're simply going to discuss the meaning of the word "art," I hope a mod can change the thread title -_- 

Was this in reply to my post? I'm not sure.

 I simply stated the the idea behind art is to challenge the audience to think in new ways, and that includes thinking of art in new ways.

But of course that was the first 2 lines of my post. The rest wasn't only discussing the meaning of the word "art".

Edit: fixed a typo

 Quote !

I agree with Bod's posts about this argument. 

 Yes, it was a reply to you -- however, your post was quite long and I was only replying to the first two sentences, and the rest was irrelevant. 

Again, every single word in the English language is constantly evolving and changing. Art isn't peculiar in that regard. Can we please drop this now? I don't agree with your definition, and it shouldn't be important because the topic is a sinkhole. Please, please move on from this discsussion, so that we can discuss other facets of this topic. 

This topic is already a marathon -- I'm tired of getting stopped within the first half mile.  

The first two lines were the only part of my post that had any relation to the meaning of the word art. The rest was my take on games as art.

Yet you ignored all that as irrelevant and still replied to my first two lines, continuing the discussion.

Ahh dont worry about ill just go to bed, but its kinda annoying that you would call my oppinion irrelevant (it seemed to me you didnt even read it).

I just got angry because of that comment. But thats my bad.