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

[Toast]

Jerry Holkins has the right idea. There really is no point in engaging in a dialogue with Ebert about this since he wasn't willing to engage Santiago or any gamer. Hell, he's not even willing to engage and experience a single game from start to finish, which makes him sound like Cooper Lawrence.

That being said, there are a few things I'd like to respond to for intellectual reasons.

Whether something is art or not is as nebulous a subject as whether something is creative or not. I've read a lot of theoretical work on creativity and it really does depend on who's writing whether there's a physical product or whether that product is popular within its genre before something is considered creative. And I disagreed with all of them because that's too narrow of a definition.

but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them

I think here he's using some kind of arbitrary hierarchical structure just so he could say that even the story of a game can not be considered art, merely a representation (i.e. not the real thing) of something that can be considered art. There are some games that have had novelizations of them (Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment come to mind) and the books generally suck because they can't encompass the array of choices possible. They're less than what they started with, but they're still art. And if that's the case, then it makes a sort of sense that what they were derived from is also art.

"No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

I find this statement kind of disingenuous. I can think of several games that I would willingly compare to the stale, boring works I was forced to read in high school because someone deemed them "Classics". Whether they fail, match up, or exceed those works is a matter of personal, subjective taste. But to say they can't even be compared smacks of elitism. You may not be able to compare them on all the same criteria, but there's enough similar ones you could work with.

Anything that has a narrative can be considered art. It can be bad, it can be mediocre, it can be good. That part doesn't matter.

I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose.

I really don't see how video games couldn't fall under his own definition.