i dont know if interactivity plays such a role, at least not in reality, but i do think it is used as a scape goat for academics to pretend they aren’t art, that’s literally the argument roger ebert used. sure, it can make it so that it’s harder to make a good video game, because you need to consider something that never before existed into the medium as the basis for how you will make the experience pan out. the number one rule in cinema is show, dont tell, in video games is play, don’t show. sure, it can be a bad synthesis, but that doesn’t discredit it from being art, there are thousand and thousands of films that do a terrible job at that, yet they are art. what’s more, one could argue interactivity is not only present in video games, performance art is very much interactive; the process of play is present in pretty much every creative process in art, with photography even having analogue buttons, screens, and whatnot. playing has a lot in common with acting (i remember tim rogers saying you didn’t play well a video game until you played it a second time; the first is a rehearsal, the second a premiere). the point is there are so many parallelisms, its just so obvious, or maybe we’re just people trying to pretend our hobby isnt a waste of time and value