Most games seek to entertain rather than to provoke. They are the Harry Potters and James Bonds of the world. Go a bit deeper and you find what you are looking for though. A hard limit of games is the fact that books let your reading experience be entirely visually unique to you. A character looks a certain way to you, their actions have your own interpretation.

For me, Firewatch was a stunning call to action about avoiding the problems in your life. Beyond direct narrative, there is the silent story seen in games that is rarely seen in books. The implied bits, the attention to detail, the care and love to the craft. For example, there are bits of the Zelda franchise that trends a hair into Jack Kerouac's ending of On The Road. The little moments where you can feel and realize the breath experience of those you interact with, the people you save and those who save you. In that moment you can feel that book-like internal narrative defining all that could have been or might have been. Zelda Wind Waker is exceptionally notable in this space. Majora's Mask defined it.

Play an Infocom text adventure. Art, computer game, no picture.

But most books are terrible, too! If we want to pick masterpieces, then you will easily come up with a bunch, from Loom and Star Control II all the way to Disco Elysium.

But masterpieces are few. For each cartridge full of second-rate mindless 8-bit games there is a pack of books by Barbara Cartland, or whatnot.

Battletoads

Try Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds). There's a lot of games that are more vehicles of storytelling rather than what is a traditional videogames.

> The writing is often so terrible

This is also true of the vast majority of books ever written.

I agree that games are not quite there yet, people who already put them on the same level of depth that books or movies earned the “art to be taken seriously” badge for in the past seem to rarely consume either (or are of the type that will try to convince you that zombie and splatter movies should be viewed as a piece of art as similar in value as Schindlers List).

However one could already say that they are the most innovative (and interesting) art form these days.

Check out The Longing, Wanderlust: Travel Stories or Firewatch for recent emotionally deep games.

Have you SEEN the utter volume of terrible books, music, visual arts, and so on? Taste and quality does not dictate whether something is an art form.

Even Roger Ebert fell hard for Cosmology of Kyoto