"By what right do games suddenly demand the status of great art? If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command?"

I did not read all of what I think is the longest blog post ever - sorry, i'm a lazy jerk. But, to that particular question, which was quoted @ Sullivan...

Chess and go are rules. You can play the games with any set of pieces you can muster which allow you to implement those rules. The pieces in a chess board can be simply functional - ugly plastic, rocks, pieces of paper - or they can works of art in their own right. Either way, they can still be used to play the game. The rules are separate from what you use to implement the rules.

In video games, what you use to implement the rules and the rules themselves are bound together. The video game creator creates the pieces and the game, and they are nearly inseparable. And the implementation - the images, stories, sounds - can be every bit as artistic as a handcrafted chess set. The immersion in today's video games is as good as any interactive art installation in any museum, the voice actors are as good as most animated films, the sound effects are as realistic as most big budget movies, etc.. With video games, you get the whole thing: the rules, the boundaries, and the hand-crafted artifice which turns the rules (which are far more complex than chess or go) into a truly immersive experience.

With chess, you can have art, or you can have cheap plastic. With modern video games, the art is baked right in.