Video Games Can Never Be Art - Roger Ebert’s Journal

I feel sorry for the dude. He is out of his depth here. Being someone who can’t play games (or won’t out of stubbornness) he will never have experienced the control and direct involvement that constitute their basic pleasure. All he can see is moving pictures, and taken as such, of course they don’t stack up to the great movies. Poor guy, he must be baffled.

Notice, though, that when he gets round to slamming Braid and Flower, he largely does so on the basis of not understanding the game mechanics. If we get past the grumpy swipes about fortune cookies and greeting cards, he basically dislikes them because he can’t understand how they work. With a little time and patience, he could change, but I suspect he has neither.

I think there are a few possible responses.

1 -  For the record, I don’t particularly care what “art” means, nor whether games fit the description. It’s mostly wittering. But most definitions of art at least make room for a split between high and low culture. If you can wax lyrical about Kill Bill Part 1 while saying, “the movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers,” then can’t you find room in your art-box for storyless yet witty postmodern games like Bayonetta or Portal? Let alone Shadow of the Colossus, Half Life 2… (and please let alone the usual try-hard examples of games-as-art. Braid is a good game but a bad example, Flower worse, and don’t get me started on shit like The Path.)

The Path: wants to be art when it grows up. But not art.

Shadow of the Colossus: is this good all the way through. But not art.

Finally, some art!

2 - The stuff about chess is bunk. There’s a long tradition of chess aficionados who say that style, flair and artistry are expressed through the game’s mechanics. Read about the Immortal Game. For that point, read about the history of games (not just digital) and you’ll see that gaming is a cultural activity just as ingrained as music or painting, and has always functioned as a form of cultural expression (see also the BBC4 docu Games Britannia). Incidentally, film is not fundamental in this way, not at all.

3 - Speaking of which, read this linkbait blog post I wrote for a major newspaper website called “Film can never be art”. It explains that film is too passive to emotionally involve the viewer, too collaborative to express a clear artistic message, and in any case too obsessed with sex, violence and cheap titillation  to ever be taken seriously. Here’s the money quote: “Films are, I regret to say, pathetic.” BUUURN.

4 - You’re using your status as the world’s leading film critic to axegrind and soapbox after ten minutes of research on YouTube. HOW PROFESSIONAL. You don’t care whether games are art, you just want to sneer at nerds. That’s fine if you’re just a bitter shithead with a blog (like me) but you’re Roger Ebert! Look, as someone fond of both films and games, I can recognise your competence with the former and your impotence with the latter. And I can happily conclude: screw you too, and the high horse you rode in on.