Why Roger Ebert was wrong

There's a lot of social situations in which I'm forced to explain something about myself; reluctantly, I often resort to words.

I do love words. There's so much to be done with them, after all, and there's so much that's been done with them that is remarkable. But words are imbued with a great power, one that philosophers, critics and theorists of the 20th century spent decades prying apart. Words have the power to codify, to arrange and associate thought with meaning in ways inextricable from discourse.

For people concerned with identity, this is a problem. The individual, after all, has a hard time seeing itself as codified. I don't really want to say, "I'm a musician," "I'm an English major," "I'm a student newspaper's production manager." Sometimes I do, in the interest of time, or if I'm drunk, or if I'm just forgetful, but other times I'm careful to say instead, "I play music," "I'm finishing a degree in English," "I work at the student newspaper. I do production."

The differences are subtle, but still there. In defining myself, I dislike the use of the subject-verb contraction "I'm." It means "I am" – I exist as this – I am to be defined by this. But it's a bit more complicated than that. John Cameron simultaneously does and is all of those things – those identities are inscribed on me by myself. At the same time as I am defined by this, there is an identity beyond the role I am being defined in, one which brings together those identities and consolidates them.

It's when others choose to apply identity that people begin to run into problems. The cliché idea of high school is that everyone fits into a certain social group – nerd, jock, prep, etc. – and each group has a label which is heavily codified. For an individual, this can be damning; the use of such language can be confining, stifling, threatening to the very core of their being. Those terms are somewhat out of date – I don't remember really hearing them in high school, and I doubt that's changed in the last few years – but teachers and parents nevertheless know the dangers of applying labels to a high schooler.

Which brings me to points raised by Roger Ebert, years ago but also once again this week: what is "art?" And what is "video game?" Certainly, Ebert says, they're not compatible. A game has rules, points, and an objective. Art has none of these. Therefore, video games are not art.   

But this conversation is flawed from its outset, and it's flawed because it loads the word "art" the same way that it's loaded above – that is to say, it utilizes "art" as a weapon. It does the same thing with "game," too, while we're being honest. It uses the language applied to the form of interactive media at the very beginning – "video game" – as a tool against it, a roadblock vis-a-vis its ascension into canonical ideas of "art."

There are real problems with this, but the big one is that it ultimately stratifies and politicizes creative acts in ways that limit accessibility to participation in culture.  "The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing it as art," he says. Fair enough. So what is it being proposed as? A documentary? A film? What makes it not art, and why is it not worth discussing in the context of art?

There might be an answer to those questions, but frankly I'm uninterested because, when you get down to it, I'm not interested in art. When Matthew launched Vigigames, I wrote the following as a proposal to him and Christian, regarding the site's stated goal:

I think it might be more prudent to play down specific studies like post-colonialism and feminism, especially cause that won't always necessarily apply, and instead just focus on the fact that we'll be applying TEXTUAL theory to it – that is, reading the game as a piece of "text" as opposed to just a product, or a bunch of elements (narrative, design, gameplay) that are slammed together. I think that, rather than the specific politicization of readings, is our real goal, right?

I wrote this because what games are, in addition to being games and instead of being art, is "text." I'm not particularly fond of that word either, and I'm equally distrustful of the term "work" being applied to things that were created, but "text" became comparatively popular in academia during the post-structuralist era, and it does the job just fine.

I proposed this because, ultimately, it suggests that video games are worth our time. Anything "text" is worth discussing, because anything "text" has its own language, its own referents, its own constructions and systems of representations, and so on and so forth. It's not worth discussing because it represents an ideal of beauty, nor is it worth discussing because it evokes emotion, conveys an idea previously obscured to its "readers," nor because it represents the world in a way that some alien and mutable and arguable criteria consider it "masterful" or "artful." It's worth discussing because, as revolutionary as this sounds, it is; that is to say, it exists.

This is the principle, really, behind all criticism. Criticism is as performative an act as anything. It is the manifestation of the struggle to unravel the systems within texts. This does not negate aesthetic criticism, nor does it negate the emotions a text can evoke, nor does it negate the proposals of ideas that are inarguably intrinsic in certain texts, nor does it negate a demonstration of expertise with regard to form. What it does negate is the idea that those are things with hard and fast criteria, that those are the things worth talking about exclusively, and that those can only be found within the confines of certain genres and forms. It's as much the attitude that says "games are worth deciphering" as it is the attitude that says "fantasy and science fiction are worth our interest as well as 'serious literature,'" or the attitude that says "A Waco documentary is worth discussing and analyzing as much as a film by the Coens.'"

Someone (I'm not naming names, but I'm certainly linking to his piece) may find this an appropriate place to talk about "craft." Yet what makes craft less worthy of discussion? What, within craft, is absent in terms of ideas or systems that art has? I express admiration for texts that display nuance and subtlety and so forth, but texts whose systems are straightforward bludgeons of information are no less worthy of discussion, nor are they objectively better or worse – and, regardless, whether they are subjectively better or worse, there is ultimately nothing with the power to deny them those systems.

These systems are present within the greats¹ of human creative endeavour. From the cave paintings Ebert references to Werner Herzog, there are complicated operations going on within created works that have the capacity to spark conversation. That's as true of Bioshock as it is of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as true of Passage as it is of "In Memoriam," as true of Heavy Rain as it is of Kid A. Where it can be said that these games are worthy of comparison is in the fact that, in simple terms, we can talk about them, and we can say things about them, and we can relate things to them, and we can seek to decipher and understand complicated things about ourselves and our relations to the world and their relations to the world and so on and so forth down infinitely complex modes of discourse. There will never be a limit to the things you can say about "The Waste Land," and there will never be a limit to the things you can say about Fallout 3 – that is, unless you reduce the conversation to whether or not they are art.

What's troubling about Ebert's assertion that video games can never be art is thus not the assertion itself. Instead it's what he uses as grounds for the assertion – charged language. The piece is condescending, sure, but in its use of the word "art" it transforms criticism from a conversation about the systems inherent in a text into an outright war between those who know what art is and those who don't.

Under that system, what's worth talking about and, as is uncomfortably implicit within, who is worthy of talking about it? When you begin to define art and criticism and so forth in relation to the learned mind, you're performing an act not of criticism but of cultural dominance. There's no conversation in that. There's nothing to be learned or discussed, merely things to be asserted: this is art, this is not, this is good, this is bad. Worse: I know what is art, what is good. You don't.

There's plenty that also goes wrong in Ebert's piece – for example, the astounding acrobatics of codification necessary to restrain video games to a particular definition that obstructs them from criticism, as you can see in this quote:

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.

But even then, it's not so much a case of Ebert "not getting it," as so much of the response to his critique of the video game medium seems to either imply or state outright. It's a case of Ebert deliberately codifying language in order to disintegrate what he's spent seemingly an entire career doing: saying that, even if only to establish its quality, everything is worth talking about.

If "art" is going to be used in a way that so limits discourse, then yes, video games are not art and should embrace that. So should film, for that matter, and literature and theatre and so forth. If the way Ebert uses "art" here is what the word "art" truly means, then all these forms deserve so much better.

¹I know it's probably also valuable to my points, but do you think I'm going to get into the socio-political functions that have sustained the existence of what we consider "greats" to today? I'm not made of time. Come on.