Rather, I think they are not accessible enough. A picture on a wall, a movie or music can be experienced by hundreds or thousands of people all at once. Games in an art gallery have a much lower natural limit to the number of people who can interact with them simultaneously (at least in the same physical space). Sure, you can watch others do it, but that's not really the same thing (it's more like watching performance art than playing a game).

I have in fact been to art galleries which had interactive game-like exhibits. I basically never got to interact with them because, lo and behold, there was a long queue.

Except perhaps the most well known contemporary art museum in the world: https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/798

The Smithsonian has a traveling exhibition specifically about Art in Video Games: https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/games

Maybe actually go to an art gallery/museum sometime instead of assuming you know what one is

Don't most art museums have free days for city residents, etc.?

Almost every game requires an expensive hardware purchase and often a separate $60-$70 for the game itself

The Museum of the Moving Image has had video games in its collection since the 1980s. https://movingimage.org/collection/collection-spotlight_vide...

Hauser & Wirth have had essays on video games in their magazine: https://www.hauserwirth.com/ursula/too-late-for-earth-too-so...

I've seen and played games at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in NYC. Maybe I got lucky but it's one of like three museum visits I've ever done as a tourist in the city.

Not NYC, but in 2002, I saw Quake 3 Arena at the Documenta 11 in Germany: https://www.documenta11.de/data/german/index.html

I was surprised to see a video game, especially a Quake game, at an Art exhibition.