I was wondering if somebody was going to post this. Particularly interesting is that DF ranks higher than all the "story based" games, which is really where I feel video games shine as expressions of art.
Honestly, I believe that's actually where games are at their worst.
I think the best way to explain this is to use
Errant Signal's video on why there is so much violence in video games to set this up.
Computer games are great at simulating spacial problems and complex mathematical algorithms as a type of game, and awful at managing to make its great advantage as a storytelling medium (the interactivity) actually play well with the desire to tell a story.
Hence, games that try to tell a story are often crippling how well they play as a game by forcing a player to drop their controller and just sit there listening to the game lecture them for a few hours. (I'm looking at you, XenoGears and Metal Gear Solid.)
It's games like The Sims, Mount and Blade, and, yes, Dwarf Fortress, that try to move beyond trying to just ram a narrative down the player's throat, and instead let the player create the narrative of their own choosing as their own reaction to the world around them.
And that's not exactly the same thing as giving up on the notion of having a developer have a say in what narratives get told, or even if some messages get through, either: It's hard to play any sort of game of DF or any mod thereof without coming away with a real sense that this world is a violent and dangerous place, and that understanding the way the world will react to your changes before you do something is the key to survival.
Games can tell a fantastic
message without having any sort of
narrative. (Just as visual art does.) Shadow of the Colossus is constantly brought up as a great art piece, but it has a
severely limited narrative and chain of events where basically everything that makes it artistic are the aesthetic choices that create the sense of scale, wonder, and isolation you feel while playing it.
There's also a much more subtle way for a game to be artistic, however.
Spec Ops: The Line is semi-famous for deconstructing the whole notion of how violence is handled in a First Person Shooter. (
Errant Signal has a great video on that, as well.) One of the things that's really critical to its message, and what it's saying the message of the other FPS games, whether they realize it or not, is that when you reduce all your interactions with a game to different "kill things" buttons, it fundamentally colors the way in which you see the game world. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you can do is kill things, every in-game problem is always presented to the player as though the natural reaction is to just find the right "bad guy" to kill. But the real core underlying problem in that game was a sandstorm and a lack of water... and you can't shoot those things. Trying to kill your problems only made your problems progressively worse because they weren't problems that violence could solve.
Now, compare that to Portal. The tagline of the game is "Now you're thinking with portals" for a reason. You don't have a (regular) gun. You have portals. All your problems are solved with portals. The player is trained through that game to immediately start looking for ways to use portals to solve whatever obstacles they are confronted with in those games.
Portal, notably,
is an FPS. Just like those Call of Duty games that Spec Ops was making fun of. It's an FPS where you cannot take any direct violent action. The whole point is that the standard rules of the genre don't apply, and it forces a complete change in the way that you even start looking at the problems around you. You can't shoot your problems to death, you have to portal your way around them.
That's just the way that the mechanics of the game make you play it - In Dwarf Fortress, you can't directly order your dwarves, so in a disaster or a panic, you may lose all control over your fortress, but as long as you are in a state where you are in control, you can modify the land to preemptively engineer the solution to the problem before it even arises. (I.E. build your fort with only one heavily fortified entrance to forestall most of the danger of a siege. Chain guard dogs to the entrance to prevent thieves from getting in. etc.)
In Dwarf Fortress, there's this giant, complex, interactive web of cause and effect. There's this huge well of information about the real world waiting for you to discover because you suddenly have an interest in why hematite is found limestone but not basalt to fuel an interest you never would have otherwise had in geology.
Dwarf Fortress is art not because of any story it tells, it's art because of the story it lets you construct with what you can unearth from within its mechanics - it's a sort of treasure hunt, where the joy of the game comes through the act of discovery.
I would also like to end this by referencing the
Aesthetics of Play video by Extra Credits. (DF is even mentioned in that video.) We fundamentally approach games (and prefer different genres) because of the ways in which we can experience or express ourselves through that game. This is something a completely-scripted movie or book or painting can't do, and as such, is the greatest set of tools in gaming's arsenal to overcome its great weakness of spacial dependency.
I just referenced why I love DF for its Discovery and its (player-created) Narrative. There are also plenty of people who love Expressing themselves with construction projects, and those who play for the Challenge of making increasingly more difficult sieging hostile monsters attack their fortresses, and so on.
I think it's actually a straight-jacket we put on ourselves when we talk about games as only having meaning through their narratives. All those core game aesthetic possibilities have artistic merit, but it's because we have this "a movie, but with interaction" mentality that we cripple ourselves to forcing players to sit through cutscenes after going through scripted, linear levels.
Skyrim, for example, has shit for a narrative. It has fantastic aesthetics and an open world to explore, along with the massive freedom to be whoever you want, and change the game through modding in incredible ways. It even has a tremendous amount of backstory lore that completely puts the supposed main game narrative to shame (and actually puts the whole of what you have done into completely different context and warps the meaning utterly when you realize what it means to be in a mythic subjective reality and take on the mantle of a God). Skyrim is much better art than most games trying to lecture you for hours (again, I'm looking at you, Metal Gear).
So I'm going to say that there's two paths (that are not mutually exclusive) towards creating games that are great art that actually focus upon the strengths that a game has - the aesthetics (I.E. Shadow of the Colossus) and the meaning that the systems/the mechanics instill into the player without having to tell the player anything. (That is, Portal and DF.) Leave the narratives to books - the book will always be better at that.
EDIT:
Most games take on a zero-sum aesthetic: To gain anything, you have to take it from someone else. Want to get rich in an RPG? Kill monsters, take gold. Want to create an empire in a strategy game? Steal the land from someone else.
Environments exist in most games either as static and automatically renewing (all damage you do in Grand Theft Auto is invisibly repaired, and no amount of casualties inflicted ever has a consequence), or exist for you to destroy and thoroughly plunder. Even in the current state of DF, the game world can only entropicly decay as named characters get bumped off.
In the Patrician series of games, however, there's a far different set of mechanics that forces you to think about the game world in a different way the same way that Portal changes how you think about tackling the problems around you.
Patrician has you primarily cast as a merchant trader who sails ships around the Baltic Sea during the dawn of the Age of Exploration. You trade and deal your way to wealth and power and respect.
There is a slight (unfortunately, a little too anemic) city-building aspect to the game, as well. You can build factories that expand what trade goods are built in a city, but it requires hiring some of the town's unemployed... and there might not necessarily be enough of those people around.
And here's where the game suddenly does something ingenious that completely alters how you look at the game - When you trade with any of the cities, they become more prosperous, which means that more people move into the city looking for work.
This isn't something where you're a greedy merchant exploiting buying high and selling low to make the most profit at someone else's expense, the higher the price a town is willing to pay for a good, the better the effect of your selling goods to them will actually be to the town, and the more respect you gain. (Basically, if the food prices skyrocket because people are starving, they'll both pay you double for your grain shipment and thank you for the chance to do so.)
The more you trade with a town, the more prosperous it becomes, the more trade goods its people produce, the lower their prices go, and the more lucrative it becomes as a place to buy cheap, exportable goods.
The game never slaps you in the face with any sort of plot at all, it just sort of dumps you down into it with a tutorial that simply tells you how to work the interface. However, it's core message is one of extreme optimism in capitalism to make the world a better place in general and glorifying unfettered free trade in particular.
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