Roger Ebert claims "video games cannot be art"; molests children.

[Solid Snake]

Guys, guys.
There is a very simple solution to this problem.

Give Roger Ebert a copy of ICO.
Seriously, that's all that needs to be done here. And how old is ICO, now? Close to a decade? Maybe more?

(A copy of Shadow of the Colossus would also suffice, though I think ICO is the more effective title for Ebert because he seems uninterested in traditional videogaming violence and would prefer a few fun puzzles and pretty pictures to stare at.)

P.S. I still think Ebert has something of a point, he's just failing to articulate his point in a way that doesn't seem utterly hypocritical (insofar as he's apparently never played video games) and unnecessarily denigrating to the industry and its fans. I think if Ebert thought harder about the issue he'd frame it this way: Art may appear in videogames (see FFVII's pre-rendered backgrounds, just about any image in ICO, Mass Effect 2's gorgeous character designs and fluid animations, brilliantly crafted storylines, etc.), but videogames themselves are not art.

And there's something of a point there. We associate video games as art in large part because we've grown attached to a medium that's included artistic elements traditionally associated with stories we'd write or pictures we'd draw. We view videogames as art because of a role-playing game's emotionally cathartic story or the beautiful level of detail in rendering an exquisitely interactive scene.

But the elements that separate video games from other artistic mediums like, say, television shows or movies are programming ones concocted through the sheer power of modern computing. The excessive programming that creates the worlds we "inhabit" in videogames is an impressive feat, but I consider it less an art and more a science. Contemporary videogames have a superficial appearance of interactivity, but they're not truly interactive experiences insofar as there's a very limited cache of moves you can make and a very limited number of ways to "solve" the puzzles you encounter. And in fact, every enemy you fight and every boss you defeat is essentially a "puzzle" -- you're still essentially pressing buttons in different fashions and with predetermined combinations.

The art stems from the fact that artists have attached these button presses to fluid movements of a vivid avatar on the screen. And that component of videogaming is art, it's comparable to Disney's animation or a series of evocative paintings. But if the heart and soul of videogames really involves the interactivity, then it's not really an artform as a whole, in the composite, just yet -- it's a series of enormously complex alegbraic equations with an outer casing of art, yet the art itself exists in large part to make the equation-solving button-mashing more accessible to an audience used to conventional storytelling. This thesis is literally proven by all the 8BT sprite and/or text-based fan-created versions of videogames out there. You can strip the art from the game and you'd still be left with the game itself, and the game itself isn't art.

In short: I think it's possible to argue that there's plenty of beautiful art in videogames, both in terms of artwork (beautfiully designed images of characters and settings) and narrative (storylines with intricate plots and evocative character development that outshine the best movies out there.) But that's actually different than saying that videogames themselves are art.