2. Authorship
The answer to that question is authorship, and the biggest distancing factor from video games being immediately placed with their fellow new-age contemporaries. I already mentioned the fact that games will lock away content to inexperienced players, but even if you are a struggling player, the game is relying on you to navigate through its levels in a certain way. However although the detractors of the Games as Art debate would seek to say that no experience whereby authorship is taken away from the creator can be art, the counter-point would be that all elements that are open to interaction are coded by the designers in the first place. When playing Grand Theft Auto V, there may be occasional glitches or bugbears within the game that take away from the overall experience, but anything the player can do is forever governed by the coding of the game. As obvious as this is, at no point in any game can you alter things to make them better fit your idea of how a game should play, and that is the true sense of authorship prevalent in video games; the designers. Those who would say that the experience is authored by the player would be correct, if said experience was not fully governed in the first place by the rulesets programmed into the game. Obviously Im not accounting for people who spend their time breaking down code for the sake of finding out how to make their character briefly take flight or how to pass through a building in one step. Even so, the assets they are interacting with were put there by the true authors of the experience, and must be dealt with through stringent reliance on how that game animates and controls before anything else can be changed.