Maybe it should just be a question of aesthetics. If tile-based stuff looks like text art, then it is. Just like with typographical and poetic experiments. I guess it's not possible to have a strict technical definition (as usual) because you can make tiles that look exactly like a traditional font.

Fair enough. Common sense always wins over coming up with / sticking to definitions

http://text-mode.tumblr.com(Should tile-based works be called text art, since text mode demos often use custom fonts? ... )

Arguably it's not text art unless you use text character sets.
If you change the font into something that's not a font anymore, then the technical limitation and subsequently the artistic challenge will change considerably.

Some years ago a friend of mine made this limited tileset tool: http://minimart.pasmas.org/
From my experience with it, yes the challenge is somewhat similar to ascii/petscii, but if you go down that road you might find that you've broadened the category too much. For example, pixel art would fit into this broadened category quite easily, as it uses a square-shaped tiles of varying colour.

Stick to abstracted text, I guess

@herr-prof: just realised that the first post is a text adv... i mean, interactive fiction. http://text-mode.tumblr.com/post/177672 … kstar-1986

Are Text Adventures game text art?

Nowadays it's called interactive fiction. So, actually it's literature!