My big point of disagreement here is that there is a problem with the terms “game” and “play”. If I understand, the problem that you see is that these words are too intertwined in the public’s mind with enjoyment. But this isn’t anything specific to video games. Outside of the art world, most people think that “music” must be enjoyable to listen to, and that “paintings” must be pleasing to look at, both of which are completely false assumptions. We still go on using those terms.

We as humans have evolved to enjoy “play” because, as a critical learning tool, it’s advantageous to our survival. The industry capitalizes on that by focusing on games that are enjoyable to play. This doesn’t invalidate “game” and “play” as representing something more.

If you haven’t already, you should check out Raph Koster’s “A Theory of Fun,” it goes a lot farther than the title suggests, and explores the nature of not only fun, but also games, play, and how they relate to learning.

Nietzsche once said:
“words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common.”

Words are the pins that we push into the butterflies of the human experience.

It seems to me that there is an inherent conflict here; you want to pin down the medium with a word, but in such a way that it stays alive and free. Unfortunately this is not possible. The real solution is not to define them at all, but instead to allow each to define themselves, free of any labels.

1) Interactive software as art – what to call it? Can it be art? Well, yes, clearly it can, and already is. So we do need a name.

2) Games as art, whether digital or not. What are games? Games occupy a strange little niche in our entertainment, one that has enjoyed a lot of academic study but not necessarily from an art criticism perspective. I think that I need to do more research on the subject, but people have already seen Go as an analogy for war, life, love, etc, and it’s very easy to see it in many other games.

To reject that second question is, I think, ignoring something critical about the medium, whatever you want to call it. Interactivity is arguably essentially linked to games, depending on your definition of game. All art is, to some extent, interactive; there must be an interaction between the text and the audience. But a piece of software is essentially different, in the same way that representation in moving film is essentially different from evoking imagery and emotion in text.

The properties of this kind of medium in an artistic context are enormously untapped. We can barely conceive of what there is to do with this kind of thing. It’s so caught up in the traditions and rituals of “gaming” that it is hard to escape that mindset, and you’re right, that IS a downside. But at the same time it has created its own culture to reference, its own allusions, its own experiences to evoke. There is something about “videogames” SPECIFICALLY that is even different from whatever other interactive software art that might exist, and a connection to this origin is inevitable.

Literature still predominantly exists as entertainment, as do all other art forms. Most people will look at or buy paintings because they are pretty or awesome-looking. Most people watch films for interesting or dramatic plots. They watch for the craft of it, which is a form of the art but not the “real” (ha) artistic guts of it. These media never leave those roots; literature, at least, initially existed as low-culture pulp entertainment, and that’s what it mostly still is.

Likewise, interactive software as an aesthetic, entertaining, stimulating medium will always harken back to being a game, and that’s quite possibly connected to something fundamental and essential about the medium and the nature of interactivity. In 50 years, the software art “scene” will be making allusions to the games we played in our youth, I guarantee it. Already, games “subvert” the video game tropes that exist, in a sort of Uroborosian cycle.

I don’t disagree that the medium is wide open for non-game, non-fun modes of performance and creation, but I think you are actually underestimating how tightly the “game” aspect of the medium may be woven into it. And I say this as the snobbiest art snob that ever snobbed, who wants nothing more than “unfun,” thought-provoking software art to interact with.