Many readers pounce on this post:
"Blow intends to shake up this juvenile hegemony with The Witness, a single-player exploration-puzzle game set on a mysterious abandoned island." Replace "The Witness" with "Myst" and it's 1993 all over again.
Another:
I thought you might like to see a response to the Atlantic article from a journalist and writer more familiar with the history of the medium, Leigh Alexander. She notes the problems with Taylor Clark's characterization of Jonathan Blow's place in the world of games, but she also celebrates that it "does entertain a lavish fascination with the game developer as simultaneously an architect and a storyteller, the designer of an experience that — here, this is important — can also be personal self-expression."
Another:
Clark's argument against video games as art is incredibly weak and narrow-minded, in my opinion.
The blockbuster game is not art, therefore no game is art … is the weakest argument in journalism. It is akin to viewing a Michael Bay movie and declaring that movies are not art, or watching a couple hours of MTV and then claiming music is not art. A good journalist or critic should know you never look to the most commercialized aspects of something to judge whether or not it's art.
Where is the mention of the Mass Effect franchise and its amazing 100+ hour, cohesive sci-fi narrative – which has, more than once, been labelled the Star Wars of the video game generation? (It even allowed the players to form a homosexual relationship; in the testosterone-driven world of video games, that is a major step forward for gay rights.)
What about The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which unleashes the player in a gorgeous, impeccably detailed fantasy realm measuring 46 square miles (real-world square miles) in size? Players are given minimal direction and allowed to craft their own fantasy story playing the role of hero, villain, thief, highwayman, or whatever they choose.
What of games like Portal with nearly no action or token explosions but instead artfully designed puzzles to be solved and hysterical scripting of a final enemy that keeps the player interested just for the sake of hearing the next joke or punchline? Not that the game itself is lacking; it's one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
Where is the talk of high-art independent titles like From Dust, which tasks the player with playing God and solving increasingly complex physics-based puzzles to save his or her loyal followers from certain doom at the hands of natural disasters?
You can't ignore all of the most artistic offerings of an industry and then declare it a wasteland.
Another:
Yes, Blow's Braid was excellent. But there's already a movement underway in the independent gaming community for truly artistic video games. For example, the artistically beautiful and immersive adventure game Botanicula - from the team Amanita Design of the equally ambitious Machinarum - is already doing well and receiving very good reviews.
Also worth looking into is the layered paper style of And Yet it Moves by gaming shop Broken Rules (which won many independent gaming awards), the photographic surrealism in Trauma, the ultra-popular iOS game Osmos that creatively merges physics and design, and many more.
Plus, it'd be silly not to mention Bethesda's Skyrim, which has an entire hand-drawn world with focus down to the minute detail of ants-on-logs, and many plots and sub-plots that almost feel like you're reading a novel (with many novelettes). It'd be hard to argue that's not art - depicting a fantasy realm with a deep and rich story and spending years crafting it all.
Video games have always been art, just as programming is art. Now the graphics technology is simply caught up enough for it to resemble more traditional forms.
One more:
A game that came out on the Playstation 3 last month, Journey, is worth mentioning. I've been playing video games since the 1980s and I've never played anything that embodied the "game as art" concept as well as Journey. The music is fantastic and the art is stunning, but what really ties it together and makes it transcendent is your participation. It's the sum total that makes it art. It couldn't have been amazing as just a soundtrack, or as a movie telling the same story. It shows how games can represent a unique art form.
Taylor Clark acknowledges Myst and Skyrim and some other things mentioned by readers; read his whole piece here. In the following excerpt, Clark shares his interpretation of Blow's opus, Braid (previewed in the above Youtube):
"But I think what has frustrated you about people’s interpretations of Braid is that the atom bomb itself is a metaphor for a certain kind of knowledge," I continued. "You’ve been chasing some deep form of understanding all your life, and what I think you’ve found is that questing after that knowledge brings alienation with it. The further you’ve gone down that road, the further it’s taken you from other people. So the knowledge is ultimately destructive to your life, just like the atom bomb was—it’s a kind of truth that has a cataclysmic impact. You thought chasing that knowledge would make you happy, but like Tim, part of you eventually wished you could turn back time and do things over again."
The Dish 