Games are toys, drugs, greedy exploitative capitalist products, martial arts, AND art. It's unfair to expect all games to correspond to one of the motivations/contexts for making them.gavinmcinns said:
Of course the games industry is terribly corrupt from the standpoint of absolute artistic integrity, but that's by no means a bad thing. It's good that game developers have the freedom to make games for any reason, any purpose, and many great games have been made with little artistic value. The toy called Tetris is far greater than the Rubik's Cube toy.
Games as a medium emerged in this totalitarian age where human behavior is controlled, and games are enabling humans to behave in new ways, albeit always through the medium of a machine in cyborg fashion. This exploration of human behavior in video games is more a matter of game mechanics than art, yet is still justified in terms of hopeful future outcomes.
Video games as a medium is partially a response to television and radio, which are considered more totalitarian with less consumer freedom. As Admiral Ackbar says, this might be just a trap, and as Portal says there may in fact be no cake, but that has yet to be determined, and there are still many hopeful game developers and players out there.
As behemoths like Electronic Arts teach us, the medium doesn't matter so much as who controls it. There are massive differences in game possibility based on whether creatures like Electronic Arts or indies have the greater control over the industry. So rather than focus on whether games are art, our primary focus should be on enabling people who can truly make great games to have the control they need to make them. Kickstarter is a part of that, but we also need to work outside of gaming for such things as egalitarian wealth distribution, to enable regular gamers to have the power they need to improve the system.