Alright, let’s get real for a second. Imagine a kid spends three hours trying to line up a headshot in Call of Duty. Is that an artistic experience? No. It’s muscle memory and pattern recognition. If we call that art, then we’d have to say a chess grandmaster is a performance artist and a stockbroker is a sculptor of portfolios. That’s absurd. Video games are interactive systems built for play and challenge, not expression. Sure, they have art in them—graphics, music, story—but that’s like saying a sandwich is a work of art because the bread came from a nice bakery. The game itself is a tool, not the creation. A paintbrush isn’t art, and neither is a game. It’s a medium for art, sure, but it’s not legitimate art on its own.

So if I spend an hour rearranging my bookshelf by color, is that an artistic performance? Because that's where we're headed. You're saying deliberate design choices about color and pacing make something art. That applies to a well-organized pantry. Look, I get that Journey makes people feel things. But so does a really good roller coaster. That doesn't make it art. It makes it a well-designed experience. The interactivity isn't a tool like a brush—it's a constraint. You can't control the pacing or the meaning when the player is jumping around ignoring your "artistic intent." A painter doesn't have to worry about someone skipping their brushstrokes. Games have art in them, sure. But having composers and visual artists doesn't make the game itself art, any more than hiring a chef makes a restaurant a work of art. It's a product with artistic elements, not an artwork.

So let me get this straight. If a game can make you feel something, it's art. That means those "sad violin" videos people post on YouTube are art too. A sad song over a cat video—that's deliberate emotional manipulation, right? But we'd laugh if someone called that high art. You keep pointing to a few examples like Edith Finch. But that's the problem. If the medium were truly artistic, wouldn't the best examples be more obviously art? Instead, you have to cherry-pick the one percent of games that have a deep narrative. The other ninety-nine percent are about collecting coins or shooting zombies. That's like saying fast food is legitimate cuisine because a few Michelin-star places exist. The medium itself is designed for play, not expression. A game that's "like art" is the exception that proves the rule.