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

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

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.

I don't think he would argue that at all because of how the representation of images comes about in videogames. He would say it's the same as everybody looking at a tree, then everybody reproducing a part of that tree designed as accurately as possible. It's not conveying anything so it's more like printing than art. You can argue about whether that is accurate or not but just recreating pretty images does not equal art as such.