"Games should just be fun."

[42]

The whole argument that game should be fun is always used without back up, but luckily i do so here goes,

When you play Minecraft, do you play it because you think there's some underlying meaning within the blocky world? No, you play it because you want to create stuff and you wouldn't do that if you didn't think it was fun.
When you play Call of Duty or Battlefield, is it because you think you're immersing you're self into what it feels like to be a real soldier? No, you play because you enjoy it, and you're there to either play online, or go through the story campaign an then move on to something else.
When you play puzzle games, do you do it because of it's art style and charming visuals and mechanics? No, because those just make up the game for what it is, and you play because you found it challenging.
When you play GTA or any other type of sandbox, do you play because it's supposed to be realistic (applies to shooters as well?) No, because sandboxes are there to mess around in. (see minecraft example above)

In short games are obviously played to entertain, and if it's not fun for the player then why bother with it at all?
It all has to do with what the person wants out of the game. Games are supposed to be an entertaining experience, and everyone has their own definition of what fun is, but as for the defence that Games are supposed to be fun, they are half right, because i mean would you play, or do something in general if it wasn't fun?

 

[Kahunaburger]

Artful = Usually the kind of games that you look at and say "Aha... I see what you did there", beyond which you might play them for a while but they don't have much long-term appeal...
Examples would be "The Path", "Dear Esther", "The Void"

Entertaining/Immersive = Movie experience, usually all those story-heavy games that you usually go through once or twice to get/play the story and be done with them.
Examples: L.A. Noire, Heavy Rain, MAFIA 2 etc.

I'd go so far as to say that something that engages in original storytelling and mechanics such as L.A. Noire has much more artistic merit than something like The Path which sets out to be art and does so by throwing a stack of imagery at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Unless they want their "work of art" to nothing more than high school curriculum forced on students who will forget it ever existed the first chance they get, instead of truly appreciate it, then the artists of the world need to understand this.

I think the problem with, in your example, teaching The Grapes of Wrath to high schoolers, is that high schoolers are generally too young to fully engage with it. There's nothing wrong with The Grapes of Wrath as a book, and there should be room for the gaming equivalent of The Grapes of Wrath in an ideal world. The issue is that the people who buy, read, and enjoy books like The Grapes of Wrath are, more often than not, not playing video games, so we don't have the market yet for the video game equivalent of The Grapes of Wrath. Give it another 50 years, and you might very well have stuff like that out there. (In fact, you're starting to see more "literary" games in stuff like interactive fiction - it's dirt cheap to make, and tends to attract a very specific crowd, so that sort of fiction is actually viable.)

The thing I'm keeping an eye on is Six Days in Fallujah. If it's actually what the developers are hyping it as, it may very well be a landmark in interactive media as an art form.