"Video games are not art," said every wrong person ever.

So I've been playing this lately:

Goodbye social life!

It's pretty good. And by pretty good I mean God damn it's good. And by God damn it's good I mean I haven't left the couch in days*. What I'm trying to say is it's enjoyable. But more than that it's a great example of story telling. The first twenty minutes of this game do something most zombie movies never do, or just barely graze. They show the world systematically going to shit. No black outs, no coma waking up into a nightmare, but a grand tableau of the end of society as we know it. They show an event that in one moment establishes the motivations and attitudes of the main character and let you know why he is the way he is for the whole rest of the game. Talk about beginnings.

Every time a game of this magnitude comes out you get people who want to argue about games as art. Their argument is based on a game's interactivity robbing the participant of their subjectivity. You can't appreciate something as art if you're the one influencing it. Clearly these people have never gone to really great dinner theater before.

"The Last of Us" can skirt the issue based on the fact that the story is pretty firmly set on rails. You can take multiple paths to get to your destination, but ultimately events play out the way they do. But damn what events. I've always subscribed to the belief that if something that was created by somebody else invokes feelings, be they of any kind, you're looking at art. The feelings I get when looking at these digital creations make me happy, sad, scared, angry at the miseries that befall our protagonists. They tie me into a human connection with a bunch of 1s and 0s and for that I will gladly call "The Last of Us" art. Frogger can still go screw itself.

*Asterisks, as always, denote hyperbole.