Video Games and Art - Defending Roger Ebert

You may have noticed the disappointed and defensive noises video gamers made last April when film critic Roger Ebert wrote that video games can "never be art" in his regular column for the Chicago Sun. A small community of gamers who read the Sun Times or follow Ebert's blogs spread the word to a much larger community of gamers who, in all likelihood, can never remember whether Ebert is the fat one or the skinny one (and probably aren't aware that "the skinny one" died 12 years ago), who promptly kicked up the standard call-to-arms that you might hear ringing across the internet's hills and dales whenever someone has the gall to express a subversive opinion. That description may not necessarily be fair, but I'm exercising my editorial rights here because, despite an initial surge of indignation, Roger Ebert is a man I greatly respect and I have actually come to realize that I agree with him in a way.

"Video games can never be art." This is the most-cited quote from the article. Ebert refers to art as defined by Wikipedia and compares games to the works of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. This is, of course, the statement that caused all the uproar, and I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I think it's true. One could certainly point to games like Shadow of the Colossus, Mass Effect, or Little Big Planet in order to make a case that video games are as deserving as A Midsummer Night's Dream to be called art. There is, at least, art in video games. The Assassin's Creed series pays very close attention to detail when designing the fantastic vistas - views of such places as ancient Acre and 15th century Italy - that are, in part, its hallmark. It's difficult to perch atop the iron cross crowning Florence's tallest church and be unaffected by the beauty of the game's design, even if, directly afterward, you dive into a hay bale and leap out suddenly to stab a soldier in the neck. The soundtrack and the storyline in the Mass Effect series rival those of many of the big screen features on which Mr. Ebert has made his living. From one perspective, how can anyone say that, in the wide realm of art, there is no place at all for video games?

But there is a deeper question here. Who is really qualified to make objective statements about what is and is not art? Few would argue that the Mona Lisa, King Lear, or Paradise Lost are not works of art, but there are styles that straddle the line. Dadaism is one such example; it is anti-art. The dadaist movement, which began around 1914, intentionally defies artistic conventions in the pursuit of generating works that can effectively comment on art itself or on the artistic process. Is this art? If it could be said, objectively, that van Gogh's The Potato Eaters is a work of art while it can also be said that art can arise from a movement which aims to create "non-art," as it were, then we should be feeling a little bit of cognitive dissonance. My point is that the definition is ambiguous, and I don't agree that Roger Ebert is in any place to tell us what can and can never be art. I tend to think that games are art, but I won't go so far as so to say that my opinion is the only right one.

There is a resolution to all this. Ebert has apologized for speaking out, though he still maintains that he is correct. We should now be quoting this passage:

"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. 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."

And this, at long last, is my point: we don't need to reach a consensus. Whatever video games might or might not be, those who enjoy them should and will go on enjoying them. It doesn't matter whether or not video games can be objectively said to be art, and it doesn't matter what Roger Ebert thinks about that issue. Thus, though he seems to render his entire argument meaningless with the above statement, I defend him. I defend his right to opine about something that I cannot imagine he really knows much about, because he does so with the caveat that his word is not law and that his opinion shouldn't be too terribly important to us anyway.