Games

The artfulness of games is incredibly mature, and video games are just the latest technology applied to an expression as old as humanity itself (possibly older).

Chess is art, and so is Tetris or Monopoly, or basketball. These games may involve some science, but the enjoyment is developed intuitively by a designer or team of designers who may be working in metaphor (such as chess and monopoly being metaphors for war and business) or pure abstraction (like tetris or basketball).

I also think it's disingenuous to dismiss the visual and audio art elements of a game as somehow separate from the game itself when Ebert's medium relies on the same things. "But Dessa, games appeal to the language of movies to communicate the emotional impact of the stories they may contain!" Yes, but movies also rely on the language of theater and literature to do the same (quite literally in the case of silent movies).

Ebert died saying he hated Dark Souls as though personally hating something has any relevance whatsoever to whether it should be considered art. The author of this article seems to do the same when he points out how childish gamer examples can be. Childish things can be art. Art can suck too.

Likewise, the argument that capitalism commodofies art shouldn't be difficult for readers here to break down. Capitalism commodifies movies, music books, and anything else that takes labor to create. You could argue that these products cease to be art under capitalism, but that's a blanket statement about whether art is possible at all under capitalism, not about what media are or are not valid for the expression of art.