QFT
Also wanted to back that up with another point of view from a few inches over; some forms of art - let's take music, because that's really the only art I'm personally familiar with - have cultures built around them as well, even though it's still classified as 'music'.
When you start scratching the surface, 'music' covers a massive field. Just like paintings, books, and movies, there are multiple different genres involved. The same goes for video games.
Musically, I'm attracted to violins, horns, drums, pianos, pretty much any kind of symphonic instrument. I tend to gravitate towards lyric-less songs, or female soprano/mezzo-soprano lyricists. I'm not set in stone when it comes to my musical tastes; I'll listen to synthesized electronic music just as well. There are a few things I'll specifically go out of my way not to listen to, but unless it falls under certain categories, I'll try anything once.
The same goes for me and books. I like sci-fi, I like general fantasy-fiction, I like anything with a sense of humor. Almost identical tastes for movies, with a slant towards action/drama, as well. I don't make a habit out of admiring paintings, pictures, or photos, but I have specific tastes when it comes to static visual imagery as a form of relaxation.
I'm pretty sure that if you got a large enough sampling group of white males between the ages of 18 and 32 (because getting a 'large' sampling group out of such a huge range would be hard, nur hur), there'd be certain trends about where the particular preferences line up. Someone with such a heavy preference towards sci-fi movies and books as myself probably has similar tastes in video games; what that means, to me, is that a culture has a lot to do with the personalities of the people therein. Someone who plays aggressive FPS games like the Call of Duty series would probably be more likely to listen to something along the lines of rock, metal, hip-hop, or something like that, rather than
Barrage.
Now, before anyone leaps on that and says 'that's not a baseline for culture, that's just a stereotype', let me ask you exactly what stereotypes are for and how they get their start. A certain group of people from a specific culture behave a certain way. There can be a culture around Real-Time Strategy games just as there can be a culture around Country music. Waving you hand in a broad sweeping motion over games and saying 'is there culture in there?' is a little too vague, unless you're referring to the stereotypical obsessive gamer who hasn't showered in weeks, has spilled milk on himself, and is growing bacteria cultures somewhere in the folds of his flesh.
Imagine that - another stereotype. Just like 'people who listen to hip-hop wear their pants around their knees'.
So, to wrap that bit up, in my opinion,
yes, there can be culture around videogames, just as there is a culture that orbits through art exhibits while sipping fine wines and daintily eating caviar. Does that make videogames on the whole, art? Probably not. Just like it takes an extreme amount of effort to crank out a masterpiece on canvas or in a book, it takes a lot of effort to make a masterpiece game. The difference, however, is the human element. There is more than one person working on a game, compared to a painting. Even a good book has more than one person responsible for its presentation to the public; however, the more people that get involved - specifically in game production and programming - the more chances you have for error and mix-ups, delays and glitches, and a dozen dozen things could go wrong between trying to pitch a game and meet the deadline for launching it.
That's for commercial games. With Indie games, from my limited understanding, there are usually less people working on them, at a slower pace, able to take their time. Ergo, they are much more likely to be 'artistic' compared to, say, Call of Duty. That doesn't limit commercialized games from being artistic, either. I've only played a few hours of the first Mass Effect, and I myself would already say that it's artistic, in a story-telling sense. The interface and the human element, on behalf of the player, can cause the story to drag a bit and perhaps lose its artistic nature (seeing as how I spent nearly two hours wandering around The Citadel at the beginning, talking to EVERYONE, rather than pursuing the story). However, when the designers and programmers sat down to hammer out the game, they had in their minds a blue-print, a storyboard. Halo, for example, is another game with an incredible story (at least, if you play the original three games in chronological order), even though all you do is point a gun at things trying to kill you and kill them first - all the storytelling is done almost exclusively through cutscenes. It's very linear; you're given a straightforward goal. Go here, kill bad guys between you and objective, secure objective - whatever it may be.
You could argue that games like Halo and Mass Effect are limited in their artistic potential because all you do is shoot things. That's a little true, but at the same time, you don't exactly sit down to watch Star Wars expecting Han and Leia to discuss the logistics of feeding the Rebel Alliance. You watch it because they're rebels; they're rebelling, and there's a fair amount of story that goes with that. In games like Mass Effect and Halo, you're a soldier. You shoot things that the higher-ups tell you to.
Shadow of the Colossus was mentioned. That's a heartbreaking story about a man trying to get his lost wife back from the dead. It involves, somehow, climbing up giant ... giants... and giving them a Death of a Thousand Cuts (among other techniques). It is also lauded as an excellent piece of art, despite the fact that MOST of the gameplay is spent 1) crossing the wilderness to get to the giant Giants and 2) fighting the giant Giants. Why? Because the wilderness is detailed enough to cause immersion. Because the characterization is actually thought out and executed well, rather than dropping a sword in some dudes' hand, pointing him at the giants, and saying, 'Ramirez, go kill that giant with this frisbee!'
People who know me well enough know that I have a burning hatred for the Modern Warfare games because of the type of players it attracts.That's another part, as well - competitive gaming with no real point to it besides a strictly financial aspect for the developers, while needing just as much effort to put out as an artistic game, can still attract countless players. For all my grumbling about how much I hate the CoD games, there's no denying that it does well from a business standpoint. It was clearly marketed for the teenaged male demographic, and is senseless and straightforward enough to be picked up by practically ANYONE in that demographic.
But, no one plays it for the story. It's strictly for the multiplayer aspect; much like baseball is hardly a single-person ordeal, and requires multiple people for it, some games just aren't meant to be enjoyed in solitude.
Can that stop them from being art? It depends on how you want to look at it. Starcraft 2, for example, is a decade-in-the-making sequel to a Real-Time Strategy game that was so ideally balanced and competitive that it may as well have become South Korea's national sport. It, and its predecessor, had single-player campaigns. In Starcraft the original, you could play through all three of the available races to see a sweeping sci-fi tale play out. Then, you could hop over to multiplayer and blow shit up with your friends for some mindless, repetitive, but VERY competitive fun. Starcraft 2 is taking a slightly different approach, however, in that the original release copy only includes ONE races' storyline for singleplayer mode, and will be releasing the other two as 'expansions', likely to be charged at full or near-full price for an entire game, thanks mostly to the money-grubbing head of Blizzard Activision, Kotick (who has been quoted as having toyed with the idea of releasing the cutscenes that tell the stories within the games as a 'feature-length' movie and charging for that, if not just actually charging players for the cutscenes in the games). On the other hand, on the multiplayer side, you have access to all three races and the same kind of competitive, balanced gameplay that made the original Starcraft so famous - the story of which is continued in Starcraft 2's singleplayer.
Should there be a distinction that keeps the Starcraft storyline from being considered art just because most people are playing it for the multiplayer, and it's being marketed mostly for multiplayer? Does the hard drive for profit detract from its artistic value? Can a game be considered artistic simply because it draws huge crowds of players and can be used as a competitive, tournament game with cash prizes, which some people will literally 'train' for, much like a sport?
A culture can easily be built around games. Whether they're art or not is another story entirely - that has to be done on a case-by-case basis. My kindergarten fingerpaint self-portrait, hung up on my parents' refrigerator in the days of yore, likely wouldn't qualify as art when put up against a Salvadore Dali piece, but my parents wouldn't trade it for the world (or so they told me). At the same time, just because I play RTS and MOBA games doesn't mean I can't appreciate the artistic value behind games like Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Mass Effect, or Halo. Much like my parents would know that a Dali is priceless - if you happen to fancy melting clocks.
tl;dr THERE IS NO TL;DR AHAHAHAHA
