The simplest idea of the purpose of art is that art exists to represent the sensory experience of a phenomenon as accurately as possible. The advent of photography dealt a death blow to this idea. No painted art can so completely capture the facts of the appearance of the world as a photograph taken on the kind of cellphone which every first-worlder carries around in their pocket. And so, to explain our continued desire for art, we must turn to alternate explanations.
Of course, even prior to the advent of photography, there was every reason to search for expalanations of the potency of art beyond mere photorealism. There is a somewhat popular misconception that art evolved ever greater realism in a more-or-less linear fashion from ancient times until the turn of the twentieth century, when the dreaded "modern art" movement abandoned real standards. This is clearly untrue. While most paintings from the ancient and classical worlds have rotted away by now, remaining examples such as the Fayum Mummy Portraits show that considerable technical skill was already developed at the very beginnings of Western Art (though not quite matching the modern depth of ultra-realistic portraiture). Compare these to much flatter Medieval paintings. Some people may say that the classical techniques were simply lost during the calamities that accompanied the fall of Western Rome. This is probably partly true, but the subject matter of these medieval paintings, such as a frequent motif of knights doing battle with snails, suggests that stict realism was not actually the goal of many Medieval painters. Indeed, if photorealism was really the goal of most painters, it seems unlikely those techniques would have been lost at all, as surely at least one trained painter survived each successive generation.
If art cannot be supposed to serve the same function as photography, it must instead be hyperphotography. By hyperphotography, I mean that which captures a piece of reality impossible to reach by merely replicating a sense experience.
Gotcha. You didn't think you were reading a "video games as art" piece, but you are.
The relevant question, I posit, is whether a video game can capture something about experience beyond mere senses. Traditional "art games" have focused on beautiful visuals and soundtracks, but at best, this creates musical and visual art, which are well-developed genres in their own right, not video game-as-art, which is an idea still in infancy. At worst, focus on realistic visuals pushes a game towards the realm of the merely photographic, and away from the hyperphotographic. This creates those high-budget "uncanny valley" mo-cap nightmares that not even the die-hard fanboys will defend as art. Instead, in the interest of pushing ever-forward in new media of art, the game-as-art should focus on that which is intrinsic to the medium itself, the gameplay. In this sense, the game-as-art might be thought of as a form of performance art, in which the player takes on the role of the performer and the viewer at once. In the decisions forced upon the player and the thought patterns that form therefrom, we might be able to capture a sort of hyperphotography.
Ludwig Yeetgenstein on Twitter suggested that The Last of Us might be the closest thing to "real art" to have come out of the video game world, because of the way that its gameplay and story are complementary. Respectfully, I disagree. In the game-as-art, it is not enough for the gameplay and story to be in accord. Instead, they must be indistinguishable. Consider the game Dwarf Fortress, currently preserved by and allegedly willed to the possession of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fans of Dwarf Fortress love it for its arcane complexity. Dwarf Fortress has no proper "story," nor any win condition. Instead, the player simply takes a group of dwarves and controls them until they either all die or the player gets bored. The narrative of the game comes entirely from the player's choices, goals and actions. In this way the game begins to reflect the player back at themselves. When a warrior dwarf valiantly dies defending the fort, sacrificing his life to save the clan, this is not happening because the developers wrote it that way. It happens because it is a result of the way the player interacts with the game systems. This is how the game can approach hyperphotography. In the way the experience of the game forms an emergent property, and not a planned property, of the code, writing and art assets, the game transcends what can be captured by merely stating it.
If art is to act as hyperphotography, then as photography advances technologically, art must also advance into new frontiers. This borne in mind, it is imperative that we embrace and strive to create the game-as-art. The genres of painting, music and film have all already reached maturity, and so the new ground in exploration of what feeling can be captured by art must be broken. Gamers rise up! A bold new frontier awaits you.