"Video games are not art." --Roger Ebert, 2005 and again in 2010
Roger Ebert knew a lot about movies, and I'm sure he knew a lot about other forms of art. I watched Sneak Previews for a while when it played on my local PBS station, but since my family didn't really watch very many movies (at least, not the kinds that they covered on the show) I didn't pay close attention to the reviews themselves. What did I care what the guys on the screen thought about a movie that I was probably never going to see? I just wanted to watch the previews and just sort of imagine what I thought the rest of the story could have been like.
I never really pay much attention to reviews of anything. Sure, it's sometimes useful to know what a person liked or didn't like about a thing, but I'm also pretty good at knowing if the things that the reviewer did or didn't like would be things that I like or don't like, or vice versa. And I still don't watch many movies, so I mostly ignore all movie critics and reviews.
It was surprising, then, that Roger Ebert made headlines in all the prominent video game blogs and news sites because he declared that video games are not and could not be art. His reasoning seems to boil down to the fact that video games require input from the player, which changes the control of the narrative from the author to the player1A. Such authorial control is necessary, he argues, to elevate something from a mere thing to Serious Art™. This, of course, opens up a rabbit hole. Is a kid gluing macaroni to construction paper art? If I, as a full-grown person, make a design on a piece of construction paper with glue and dredge it through glitter to make it sparkle, have I created art? What if I frame it and put it on my wall? Is there such a thing as bad art? He doesn't answer those questions (the response is only a couple of paragraphs), and I won't go through them here, either, but he does make a ridiculous point: that hours playing video games are wasted because instead of playing a video game, a gamer could use that time to learn about fine art and literature and et cetera. That's true of any endeavor, and really only holds water if you assume that people who play video games do nothing else. Those people certainly exist, just like the person who watches nothing but popcorn movies and ignores all the classic films exists. I dismissed most of his discussion shortly after reading it and went on with my life. Until 2010.
In 2010 Mr. Ebert decided to poke the hornet's nest. He wrote a much longer article 2,A, I think partly in response to people giving him grief over his previous statements, but mostly because someone linked him to a TED talk and he felt remained unswayed. Throughout the article he never defines what art is, only that video games aren't art, and can never be art. The reasons are pretty much the same as before, just expanded a lot more. He says that video games can't be art because you can win a game, you can't win art.
He also digs deep into semantics to insist that games can't be art because games have rules and points and objectives, and if a game doesn's have those things, then it's not a game any more, and then it might be closer to art, but since it's not a game any more, then it can't be art, because games can't be art. It's an argument so circular that it makes me dizzy. It's kind of a slog to read, especially since he's mostly refuting points made in a TED talk that I haven't watched and probably won't (I have nothing against Kellee Santiago, but she's not who I'm talking about today) with examples that don't make much sense. There are roughly six billion comments on the article telling Mr. Ebert why he's wrong and providing a million examples of games that the commenters consider art. I have no interest in reading these, because I'm not interested in someone trying to prove to me that video games are art.
A few months later, Mr. Ebert wrote a follow-up3A, which was just as dismissive as the rest of his commentary so far. He concedes that he hadn't played any video games in decades, but none of the evidence that was submitted in the epic comment section of his previous article swayed him. The article is wishy-washy, and he said that he realizes that his earlier opinion was still correct, but he should have never shared it so people could yell at him about it. He didn't show here that he was willing to be open to changing his mind nor that he was willing to do what it might take to have a more informed opinion on video games. He said that he agreed with someone else who said that Shakespeare couldn't have made Romeo and Juliet as a game because there's a possibility that you could get there faster and prevent Juliet from taking the poison, resulting in a happy ending. In fact, he argues, that the mere possibility of multiple endings with differing emotional payoffs devalue them all.
Why am I bringing all of this up? Roger Ebert is dead now, so he can't respond (I'm sure he wouldn't have responded to some guy with a small-time website anyway), but his position is still debated endlessly, mostly by people who really like video games and seem to have been personally offended at his remarks. I remember disregarding his opinion back when he made it, which I still think was the right thing to do. Nevertheless it's one of those things that lives in the back of my head and finds its way to the front once in a while.
It's very tempting to just leap around and scream that he's wrong. What about Final Fantasy VII? What about Super Metroid? What about Animal Crossing? What about Tetris? It's easy to come up with a list of games I enjoyed or memorable moments, but not every game is art, some are just activities. But because some games aren't art, that doesn't mean that no games are art and that no games can be art. I also think that having a rigid, inflexible definition of something as slippery as the concept of 'art' serves no purpose. And gatekeeping what can and can't be art is completely pointless.
I'm just not interested in what criteria some guy thinks is required to elevate something from not-art to art, and debating with a dead man is a waste of time. Not that debating him when he was alive was a better of a use of time. I have better things to do than to argue with someone when they have shown no interest in learning about the thing they're against.
As for me, I will continue my practice of seeing the artistic value in as many things as I can, and I won't bother getting caught up in the semantics of whether something is technically art or not.