First, nothing I said was about video games being or not being artistic achievements. What I was saying what that that illiteracy with other mediums shows in comparisons like these. It's pretty much always Citizen Kane, Schindler's List or The Godfather. Why not say, 'Gaming has really reached McCarthy's harrowing portrayal of human savagery like seen in The Road,' or 'This is so much like Mary Shelley's The Last Man in its intensity.' Obviously, part of that is because he knows that comparing it to Schindler's List would get him more attention (based on his tweets, it's obvious he likes to do that), but I also think it shows that sort of rudimentary knowledge of the content from other mediums, many of which, ironically, The Last of Us takes from directly or indirectly. People keep bringing up that Cannata was talking about emotional impact, but everyone understands that, it's just meaningless. Anything can have emotional impact on anyone. People cried when Iron Man died in Endgame. People cried when The Undertaker's Wrestlemania streak ended. Yet, I don't think most would call either of those things the Schindler's List of superhero movies or wrestling lol.
As far as the rest, I don't see what Jason said as trying to protect movies from the 'video game loving' masses at all. I think he was just pointing out that comparing the two is just not a good comparison for the reason I outlined above. In the end, even though TLOU2 is a dark game that is more challenging than the average AAA blockbuster, it's still one that's still designed around excitement, "normal" people doing extraordinary things in an unrealistic setting featuring fungus headed zombies that fart acid when they die. It's not to downplay the artistic side of the game, or gaming in general, but you can't compare that to something like Schindler's List, which strives to recreate real life death and genocide and how people reacted, and didn't react, to that.
There's so many other ways to communicate how TLOU2 communicates itself as a piece of art, but that ain't it. It was never about protecting films, it was just a bad fucking take by a guy who really likes to make outrageous takes. But people are so defensive of Naughty Dog's output and The Last of Us specifically, that people really put up their shields when anything is even seen as the slightest of negative reaction to it.
