Just being modest?

Modest for sure. Many creators don’t really consider their work art, but if the aesthetic (or even mechanism) they’ve created gives rise to some flicker of emotion or reflection then their work essentially qualifies by most definitions. I’ve had that in plenty a Miyamoto game, even if they’re designed as toys primarily for direct pleasure or challenge. In fact I’d say many a Miyamoto game mesmerise or even evoke a sense of beauty.

If anything I might even say this modern push for ‘games as art’ is precisely not that, because the interpretation seems to be that to evoke these feelings we need to create an FMV sequence of emotional exposition. That’s ‘cinema as art’ which is redundant. At best we’re recently making moral choice switches, which is in many ways the artistic equivalent of a ‘chose your own adventure’ book. All the other dressing and creative and evocative use of play mechanics has real artistic merit – perhaps even more because it involves the observer actively rather than passively, but it’s the same thing Miyamoto has been doing for years (and he plays with what it means to be game far more than – well – the entire industry combined).

The only new gaming dynamic I see with an artistic quality that’s difficult for other mediums to replicate is the active involvement of the observer in the creation process with the advent of user generated gaming – ala little big planet, and hey, even WarioWare DIY. Maybe we’ll see something really new and unique to games come out of augmented reality – art spontaneously made out of literally nothing. Heh, maybe we’ll even see the first recognised AI artists emerge from the video game field.