I think you’re mixing a few things into the same pod even though they aren’t fully compatible.
Art is hard or even impossible to define in general, but that doesn’t mean, that certain things can’t be clearly called art. How you then categorize said art is again a different topic.
As such it’s evident that games are art. You can take various “definitions” of art and apply them to games. Just because some shitty art is being called art, shouldn’t invalidate the whole realm of art.
Creating an “art game” is something different than thinking of games as art. If you set out to make your game as art, then I can see how you’d run into the problem of “what IS art”, but it doesn’t disqualify games in general from being art.
I don’t see the gain you’d get from picking a new label and in my book “experience” is equally vague as “art”, though maybe less pre-loaded. Plus for me “experience” brings time onto the table. When you experience something you have to be in the present and since everyone is under the time, the experience itself becomes bound to time. But art should in my opinion not be bound to time.
As a side note, wanting to unlabel games as art can also be a bit dangerous. When something becomes the status of art, it becomes special legal “rights”. Many countries respect and nurture art and go a long way to protect and archive it. It’s something that becomes part of our culture, part of our society. Games have been fighting for many years to be recognized by most as art, to exactly get that protective and respectful status (and possibly the attached funding).
