It's really an argument that deserves it's own never-ending thread of stupidity, but my two cents on games as art: a lot of people who one would consider an "artist" are doing it for their job, so it becomes work and business to them. Thus, they don't think it's art.
But all this ambiguity lies in the definition of art. If some things are "art" and some things aren't, then what decides? If you study the modernist and post-modernist evolution in art, it's exciting to watch as, over time, the traditional "it looks nice" and "it looks just like something else" rapidly fall away, and one ends up with abstraction and experiementation. A lot of the painters who seemed to just spray and slop paint where ever they wished were capable of highly technically achieved realistic portraits, but wanted to delve into what made art "art." Skip to the end of modernism, where the physical and cultural expectations of art are stripped down to the barest point: nothing. All of that philosophy and experimentation, and when art is reduced to it's simplest, purest elements, it's composed of nothing.
This is because the idea of "art" didn't exist until some time in the 1700's when a bunch of scholars wanted to talk about those kinds of things. Before there was "art," painting or sculpting wasn't far removed from baking or carpentry. The root of the word, latin "ars," just means skill or technical know-how. Essentially, any practiced trade was an art.
Skip back into post-modernism, which is all about trying to reconstruct ideas of art with the knowledge that "art" doesn't really exist. Cold, man. Cold.
There are, however, some romantic and often spiritual definitions of "art" that can persist, based, it seems, on The Book of Five Rings by the ancient Japanese swordsman Musashi, which recent translations have explained, at first, that one must submit to The Spirit of the Thing Itself, which could be swordfighting, calligraphy, music, painting, etc., but in the end it's revealed that The Spirit of the Thing Itself is really Nothing. It's as if there is some kind of undefined essence in the universe from which true art can spring, and humans have access to it, but only if they first submit themselves to it.
I always find that very interesting, since it both supports modernism's conclusion that "art is nothing" while saying that one must draw from art's "no-thing-ness" to create it. It's so Daoist that it hurts.
So there you have it. A brief history of "what is art" that argues no points.
I'd say games are in a strange position, since they are filled with artistic creations (music, models, textures, writing, sophisticated coding, etc.), but the whole package is composed of so many small things... however, certain games take all of it's parts and they sing together so exquisitely that I can't help but think that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.
If people want to carry on with this, they should start a new thread, though. It's so off topic that the Martians are wondering how we got here.
And think about how long it's taking for Comic books to be considered art. Film is art, though, so it can't be far off. My only contention with games is that there's a lack of standardized terminology to enable that kind of discourse. In a sense, games are not yet art because we don't have the language to talk about it that way. All we have is the multimedia elements broken down and valued so you know whether or not a game is worth buying.