Well, just like movies and painting and books, they're not all art, some are "products" or whatever...

The only person who can say if the person who made it, did they feel some inspiration? or were the goals purely mercantiles? The people who do the concept art will most likely tell you games are art, however the guy coding the low latency input routines will probably tell you it's more aking to engineering... 

Well, for sure the micro-transaction based games are not more art than the slot machines at the casino... but that's a different topic.

again, not at all what i said.  take hynad's post for instance.   ...an engineer comes along and creates a urinal.  s/he puts a lot of though into the design but approaches it from a very pragmatic focus: how do I make it easy to install, minimize back splash, easy to clean, cheap to manufacture.  this engineer creates a thing but at no point considered how a person will emotionally react to it.   not art.    along comes r. mutt and s/he uses that thing and puts very specific thought into it's placement/presentation specifically trying to cultivate an emotial response from it's audience.  art.

games are not art.   tic tack toe: not art.   hopscotch: not art.   hockey: not art.

video games are kind of a unique beast because it's a mix of game but also visual and audio media.  i don't think anyone will even try to claim that tetris is art.  but i think echochrome was very much trying to be art. 

it comes down to intent:  is the creator crafting the gameplay invoke some artistic vision or is the creator using using audio/visual to establish the rules of a game.  there is, of course, a grey area.

nothing in what i said has any relationship to commericalability.  a game can be very commerical, as can art.

Looks like your girlfriend's art teacher doesn't know what art is, but don't worry most people don't.

Video games are art in itself. By that I mean mostly the assets in a game.

But playing video games are not art. When people asks if video games are art, many people think about *playing them* which makes the wrong impression.

This question will never, ever be satisfactorily answered, because even high flown are critics and writers can't agree on a definition of what "art" is.

Personally, I choose to ignore this question, and instead ask not is this game art, but where is the art in this game? For example I recently played Ni No Kuni and though I really don't know if I could call the whole thing art, certainly some of cutscenes (especially the Studio Ghibli ones) and other aspects of the presentation, like the score qualify in my opinion. Rather than ask such a wide and possibly unanswerable question, why not simply look at the parts and not the whole, for that way things can be even more inspiring and artistic (IMHO,of course)

Well, games can have incredible music, incredible stories, incredible art styles, and exclusively to them they can have incredible mechanics. If that's not art then I think I've been living under a rock since 16 years and two weeks ago

It depends on the game.

I don't consider random splodges of coloured paint on a canvas art either. I think you and your fellow computer networking students should give that pretentious poo a piece of your mind.

Video games are art. They can covey messages and feelings in ways mediums such as flim and literature can't. Just look at Brothers.

Artistic value is not dependent upon the medium of the object at hand. A piece of work is art if the creator uses that work as a vehicle to express personal emotion. Further, art and entertainment are not the same thing. So no, not all video games or movies are art. Though I guess if you dig too deep into semantics, the meaning of art starts to become a bit subjective. At its most general. however, almost everyone would agree that art is used to describe a work that expresses emotion. Any particular human-created arrangement of matter has the potential to be art; though no arrangement of matter is guaranteed to be art. What's important is whether the creators & audience believes there to be an expression of emotion. If they do, then its art.