What is Art?

I knew it was only a matter of time before the conversation of "Are Video Games Art?" would be brought up. Samuel and Stan brought up this conversation on Thursday, presenting examples of video games that should be considered art.  I thought I'd quickly present my two cents before the debate became too heated.

I thought I'd start with a definition from Wikipedia. Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts – artworks, expressing the author's imaginative or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.  Certainly video games are visual and auditory objects that express the author's abilities.  The more difficult question to answer is whether or not video games are intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.

There are video games that I believe have some significant emotional power while there are others that have little to no emotional power.  There are video games that can be deemed beautiful, while others are quite plain.  There is no objective way to rate the beauty of emotional power of any video game.  All other forms of art seem to be this way too, there are paintings I find to be beautiful and paintings I find to be dull, songs that I find to be moving emotionally moving and songs that hardly touch any of my feelings. At the same time someone else could have received an opposite reaction, it is all a matter of subjective taste.

Since art is experienced in such a subjective sense, there is no objective way to demarcate art into certain forms of media.  Depending on the viewer first-person shooters could be as much of an art as oil-paintings.