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

[Kerensky287]

Exactly one half of the topic line is speculation on my part, but I'm not going to pretend to hold an unbiased stance.

So hey, guess which aging movie critic doesn't like the newfangled games encroaching on his territory?

Originally Posted by Roger Ebert

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken.

I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It's only 15 minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.

She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "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." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.

Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may be closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.

She then says speech began as a form of warning, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, speech probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even now filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France should only be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, 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. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, 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.

She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Branch Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a great game, but as potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, She defends the game not as a record of what happened at Waco, but "as how we feel happened in our culture and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in contrast award the game a Fail in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing it as art.

Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

We come to Example 3, "Flower" (above). A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?

These three are just a small selection of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into artistic expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Braid" has had a "great market impact," she says, and "was the top-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclaim."

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-up gamers" hope for games that reach higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already being made) "are being rewarded by audiences by high sales figures." The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.

The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "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."

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.

I think I can agree that Waco Resurrection (which I have never played or heard of, but sounds like a garbage shooter) doesn't really count as art.

But dude, Braid? Part of his support for it "not being art" is the fact that you can turn back time, which he apparently feels is cheating. I don't think that he has any right to say a THING on the subject until he actually plays it (which I know is hypocrisy on my part due to my earlier comments on some dumb shooter). He wouldn't exactly be a good movie critic if he reviewed movies without seeing them, why can he claim that level of knowledge about games he has never played?

Goddamn aging windbag.

[Mesden]

By his reasonable definition of art he is right on every count. Just because Braid is really good or captivating doesn't make it art.

[Viridis]

Jerry Holkins brings a few good points:

There are many, many replies to Roger Ebert's reeking ejaculate, from measured Judo-inspired reversals of momentum to primal shrieks which communicate rage in a harrowing, proto-linguistic state. Thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago chose to respond to him, which gave the whole thing a kind of symmetry, seeing as it was her TED speech that drove that wretched, ancient warlock into his original spasm.

That was very polite of her, behaving as though she were one side of a conversation. For what it's worth. Which isn't much, honestly, because this weren't never a dialogue. He is not talking to you, he is just talking. And he's arguing

1. in bad faith,
2. in an internally contradictory way,
3. with nebulously defined terms,

so there's nothing here to discuss. You can if you want to, and people certainly do, but there's no profit in it. Nobody's going to hold their blade aloft at the end of this thing and found a kingdom. It's just something to fill the hours.

Also, do we win something if we defeat him? Does he drop a good helm? Because I can't for the life of me figure out why we give a shit what that creature says. He doesn't operate under some divine shroud that lets him determine what is or is not valid culture. He cannot rob you, retroactively, of wholly valid experiences; he cannot transform them into worthless things.

He's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the human drive to create, and dreadfully so; a monument to the same generational bullshit that says because something has not been, it must not and could never be. (CW)TB out.

[Amake]

Admittedly there has't been a single defining title you can rub in the face of people who say "it isn't art", like Maus for comic books, but then comics took about eighty years to get to that point. Give it a little time, and stick with Ico for the moment.

Although on a conceptual level, you have to wonder if a form of artistic expression can actually be without artistic merit.

[Wigmund]

Summary: Hey you damn gamers! Get off my pretentious lawn!

It's like arguing with one of those damn street preachers - no matter how you go about your counter-argument, they'll change their end of it so that they're always right.

Besides, if Kellee Santiago wanted to give examples of games-as-art she could have mentioned Ico or Shadow of the Colossus.

[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.

[Bob The Mercenary]

If a damn piece of rope nailed to the wall of a museum, or a canvas splattered with random streaks of paint can be art, I submit that video games can be also.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

The definition of art always changes.
The greek definition of art was different to that of the romans to that of the renaissance to that of the enlightenment to that of the modernists to that of today. Giev it some time and our current conception of art will be outmoded.
The problem is that while the videogame industry is not interested in exploring its medium and is interested in generic titles that make the most money the movie industry is pretty much the same at the moment.
The point about the number of artists is important though. Art is about conveying something, some emotion, some response to the world and if your story- the most "art" type section of the game- is banged out by 100 people trying to fit some game mechanics, it doesn't really work. Still art just really really shitty, muddled art.

[Deborah]

Ugh, I remember when he was first spouting this bullshit when I was back in fucking high school. I think back then I tried to write a big rambling email rant about it... aw crap, I feel another one coming on.

One aspect that I appreciate most about video games that I think justifies them as art, and which I think is pretty much unique to games, is how it can require true interaction to look into its hidden layers. Most interesting works of art have subtle details that you start to appreciate the more you study it. In a film or book or comic, this could be subtle references and hints and ironies that give you new insight to the characters, to the story's theme, or to the setting and world of the story itself. But you get these by... just watching the film again. Reading the book again. Nothing wrong with that, but in video games...

In video games, a lot depends on HOW you get to these details. When you re-read a book you might notice new things and skip by others, but in a game this can be much more literal. You can save time on your quest by walking right past an NPC that has nothing mandatory to listen to. But if you do choose to talk to them, they might mention something that shows you a little something more that helps you appreciate another aspect of the story. If you go on certain side-quests a different character might get some more time in the spotlight. They don't all have to be big serious weighty drama bombs either. Jokes hidden in Easter eggs could count too.

In games, a lot of these special optional details that add depth to the story can be optional in a much different way than other media. Sure, in film or books too you might need to "go looking" to bother catching the more subtle things, but in a game environment there's a whole different set of mechanics and a much different feel to the way you go about your explorations and investigations. Hell, if anything, the music in video games, which is art in itself (music is okay to be art still, right?) gains a new dimension beyond just the notes themselves by the way it becomes associated with different actions or characters or locations.

So yeah, how about those inferior mediums like film and books and comics, they think they're all deep and shit, but do they honestly give you a challenge to notice those subtleties, I think not! When you're flipping through Watchmen there isn't some code inside forcing you to fly to the right location or do the right task if you want to catch that aerial shot of the smiley face on Mars. You don't need to make the conscious choice of buying a pirate comic book and then use it as an item to open it and discover that whole Black Freighter business. They just spoon-feed it all to you! You want to get elitist, I say books and films are for simpletons too lazy to even push a couple buttons!

Yeah yeah, I know, not worth replying to him, I meant to just give a two-word reply:

MOTHER FUCKING 3, BITCHES.

Damn, overshot again! Okay, how about:

CHRONO TRIGGER.

And that's from back in '95.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

The problem is that while those potentials exist- the videogame can easily be the most post-modern medium of all time and challenge the player in ways that books/film/art can't, the vast majority of them don't and it is very difficult to find games that actually present themselves as this rather than just a test of your game-playing skills, not your emotive response to themselvse.
While you could say the same thing about movies (sort of anyway) there are established classics of movie-making as art that can be used as counterexamples whereas videogames not so much.