Why Roger Ebert was right

Roger Ebert has long been a bit of an antagonist to the "videogames are art!" crowd. He famously asserted that video games are not great art and will not be able to attain the greatness of films, paintings, music, dance, or other art forms in their current state. Many from the video game world assumed that he was completely out of touch and simply didn't understand videogames. Had he never heard of Ico, or Bioshock, or Braid, or, or, or…

Here's the thing. I'm a gigantic fan of Mr. Ebert's. In fact, in my morning English class, we're currently doing a pretty intensive study of his film reviews (the students are picking three of their favourite movies and reading the reviews that Ebert has done for them and attempting to see what his style is and how he goes about putting together his reviews in preparation for writing their own reviews of Minority Report and Princess Mononoke). The man hasn't won a Pulitzer Prize for nothing.

And looking outside of his body of film reviews, his blog is a wondrous place. He writes clearly and passionately about a wide range of topics, and none of them are ever uninteresting. I could never consider someone who writes so extensively about The Sex Pistols as out of touch.

So while it might be true that he doesn't have a lot of firsthand experience with videogaming, he's absolutely right in saying that they are, in a lot of ways, more akin to chess or basketball than to Kurosawa. "One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome," Ebert says, and he's right – this is true for most games. The end point of a film isn't to win, it's to experience the narrative or the tone or what have you. Some might contend that the winning is just a conventional device of gaming at this point, and that the objectives are just a driving force to get you through the experience. This might be true. But what to make of a game like, say, Electroplankton? That's a game that's come as close to art as I can think of, but it's still just a representative synthesis of visual art and music.

Art has always been a slippery thing to define. Some of the less erudite commenters on the flurry of posts that have since been written on this subject either use the "art is everything and everything is art" comment, in which case there wouldn't really be any furor over whether video games are art or not, or they say that art is just canned beauty. Obviously, these aren't helpful lines of thinking – CSI: Miami for instance, is not art, even though it is quite well-shot. 

Any discussion of videogames as art has to take into account that humankind's modes of artistic expression have progressed for over two thousand years. As videogames are a quite recent phenomenon, it's pretty unrealistic to expect that they would be at the level of the great artists like Picasso or Shakespeare. It's a bit of a double-edged sword. For as much as videogames have progressed, from the "cave drawings" of Atari 2600 games all the way up to complicated and emotional games like Majora's Mask, gamers have to realize that videogames don't exactly have the luxury of going through a thousand or two thousand year evolution – it all has to be compressed into a short time frame to catch up with other art forms. And unfortunately, there's only an extremely small handful of developers who understand this.

I've already outlined this in my post about the problems with interactivity in creating a singular artistic vision in gaming. Because we're offered the illusion of choice in video games, it creates the paradox of either offering a more or less straightforward story (in which case, why isn't the game a film instead?) or it offers the player a number of choices that either throw off the tone and narrative consistency (i.e., a game like Grand Theft Auto) or basically abandons the player in the middle of a not-overly interesting narrative structure to begin with for the sake of seemingly-limitless choice (like in Oblivion, for example). Choice is ultimately what causes video games to be less than great art. Of course, there are people who believe that in choice, even the illusion choice, lies the ability to emotionally create cathartic responses in the player – I don't happen to be one of them, but I know this is a stance that even other writers on this website believe.

So how can video games transcend this to become "great art," as defined by Ebert? Well, first of all, I'm not entirely satisfied that they need to. Ebert says "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." It's true that most games are just that – games. And it's fine for them to exist as just that.

But there's this level of ambition, this complexity, that basically is screaming and saying to players "look how much time and care was put into this piece of work." Yet, that's not art – that's craft. No, as I've mentioned, there's only a handful of developers who seem to have a handle on how to take the structural impossibilities of video gaming as a form and turn it into art. My candidate for a "video game as art" is the collected works of Suda51.

We've had a bit of a love affair with Suda51 on this website (you can probably tell that just by looking at our tag cloud), but the point still stands. Because if I was to define a way for games to be considered art, it would be art in the Modernist tradition. The art critic Clement Greenberg puts it like this: "The Enlightenment criticized from the outside … . Modernism criticizes from the inside." In other words, Modernist art uses the stylistic tropes of its form to make a comment on the form itself. Having played No More Heroes 1 and 2, as well as Killer7, no one does this as well as Suda51. Because the games are comments on gaming itself, and use the tropes of gaming as a means of criticizing gaming itself, this is the closest we've come to art in gaming, I feel.

I think it's right of Ebert to say that we won't see video games being championed as high art for a long time. I wouldn't say "not in my lifetime," however. Think of it this way – the main purveyors of what is considered art, or even just valuable in a more broad sense is still, still those from the Baby Boom generation, and it's not going change until the Boomers have died off and their legacy wiped clean. I'm not saying that there's no value in Boomer tastes, but video games aren't exactly high on their totem pole of interests. Once my generation, the people who are 20 – 30 years old right now are the custodians of culture, I think we could see a shift where even if video games don't change that much, their perception will. That's not for a long time, but I do envision the day.