Roger Ebert, arguably the most famous film critic alive today, has reopened the can of worms he first cracked ajar five years ago -- or, to use another trite and hackneyed saying you'd never catch him using, he's decided to take up the bat and pound the dead horse with a few more strokes. In a new blog post on his Journal, Ebert revisits his assertion that games are not art...and he hasn't changed his mind over the last few years.
"I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art," Ebert writes. "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."
Ebert was spurred to return to the subject by a presentation given at a TED talk last year by Kellee Santiago, co-founder and president of flOw and Flower developer thatgamecompany. Santiago spent most of her presentation attempting to prove that videogames are already art, and Ebert, in turn, spends much of his new blog post responding to Santiago's arguments.
The blog post touches on a number of the usual aspects of this debate, including trying to define what art is in the first place, whether games have achieved a level of art comparable to early artistic expressions like cave paintings, and so on. Ebert also addresses three videogame examples that Santiago says are already art, including Waco Resurrection, Braid, and Flower. Ebert rejects each example (you can read why for yourself in his post), although in his descriptions of the games it remains unclear whether Ebert actually plaid them himself (he does write of Braid, though, that it "exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie").
Ultimately, Ebert arrives at what seems to be the fundamental point of his argument: that "No one in or out of the [videogame] field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." But he also ends with an intriguing question: "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?" he asks. "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."
So, do you still care (or did you ever?) about what
Roger Ebert has to say about videogames? Judging by the fact that his
one-day-old post already has (as of this writing) 420 comments, it seems
like this latest round of debate certainly still has some people
interested.
Originally posted on 1UP.com.
