[the_af]

This isn't it. Mainstream movies are often analyzed and reviewed as art -- whole books written about them! -- even though they are primarily done "with an eye towards the economics".

Modern tools can help make (admittedly small) games even by people who aren't programmers and who don't necessarily want to make money. It's been a while, but I remember the early days of the Adventure Game Studio; there were people trying to make something to sell, but also plenty of people writing pretty decent games solely because they wanted to. Also see the awesome Interactive Fiction community.

[Kalium]

And I think that such analysis has similar flaws for similar reasons. You cannot hope to understand a thing meaningfully if you choose to ignore huge influences on its creation and creative choices.

[nosuchthing]

Art and creative design are not necessarily invalidated due to motivations of economics. Some people might have something to say of their opinions on how financial aspects of creative projects influence the final 'product', but that's all mostly irrelevant to the main experience of the end user. If a single person created Splatoon in their basement and released it for free, it's interesting to think about, but the experience of the creation remains the same as it is that the game was intended to sell for $54.99 a copy.

[Kalium]

No, art and creative designs are not invalidated by economic motivations. However, art and creative design cannot always be fully and properly understood without considering economic motivations.

The experience of the creation might be the same, but how the creation came to be and how it is best understood are very different.

[the_af]

That's a non-standard view of art. I don't know of anyone who uses the term like that; of course an analysis of art must take into consideration its "huge influences".

For example, when people review classic movies, they take into consideration what studios were willing to fund; executive meddling; whether the movie bombed at the box office; the political situation at the time; the moral codes of the time; budget limitations that forced directors to be extremely creative; problems between the lead actors; etc.

[Kalium]

I say this because of the people I know who attempt to treat video games as art. They examine social aspects, political aspects, and so on. There's a tendency to either ignore or gloss over economic aspects.

That said, it's probably easier to do that with classic movies about which there is a sizable body of knowledge. You don't have the same production information about a video game released last month.