Gary Gygax, the father of role playing games, passed away March 4, 2008, leaving behind a legacy that stretched from some friends playing in his basement in 1967, to millions of people paying monthly premiums for World of Warcraft today. Gygax didn’t just create games, he played them, and who wouldn’t want to take a peek in his game closet, or better yet own something from it?

In the October 15, 2008, issue of Wine Spectator magazine (p. 44), contributor Matt Kramer wrote an opinion piece tiled “Why Wine isn’t art – and why that matters.”

Inspired by a party argument where someone suggests that wine is art, Kramer argues that “fine wine is, at best, a high craft” and that, to call it art is “self-aggrandizing.” He suggests that by getting people to accept that wine is art, winemakers’ “salaries will rise, and producers, for their part, will start pricing wine as ‘art.’” Instead, wine is simply an “amplification” and “refinement” of the existing attributes of the grape that happens to include the grape’s upbringing (“all the forces that create ta particularity of the site”). Lafite Rothschild, for example, is not created, but the result of craftily refining grapes grown in a specific area in a specific way.

Using wine-lover Kamer’s argument, videogames are then a creation from a blank slate, which makes any game art. Even if you have a…