Roger Ebert says: Videogames are NOT art.(And Never Will be)

[Spekio]

Source

I am not going to post the article here because of the pictures and videos relevant to the text on the source page.

Strangelly, the the thing that occurs to me is that someone once told me that before "Nosferatu" cinema wasn't considered art either(or was it "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"?)
Basically, my humble opinion is:

A)Video Games are a form of storytelling, and all storytelling is art
B) "Braid" can't be compared to chess, you moron. I would compare it to Machado de Assis' "Dom Casmurro" before I compared it to a board game, due to the fact that you take your own conclusion of the events, not just plain beat your oponent(be it human or not.)
C)Art doesn't need to be counter-culture or revolutionary, since this is the vibe I get from Ebert.

Disclaimers:
I like Ebert's movie reviews. I check his reviews on a weekly basis.
I might be an idiot.
I'm not quite sure if this is the right board, but since it's gaming related...

[Stravo]

I'm disappointed because Roger is usually spot on with a lot of his views on pop culture and his movie reviews are almost 100% in line with my own taste. But clearly this is from someone who has not played a good video game and is thinking in terms of Donkey Kong or games more in line with his generation of thinking.

Anyone who stayed up until the sun rose frantically playing Civilization knows better. Anyone who thorously enjoyed the hell out of Baldur's Gate or was moved by the story line in Final Fantasy VII knows that this view is horseshit.

Many games (good ones) can be just as entertaining or even moreso than a good movie Roger. Hell I sunk more time recently in playing Dragon Age origins than I have going to the movies in years.

I would say this is as ass backwards as saying comic books can never be art. It's silly, just because you do not enjoy (or understand) the medium should not disqualify it from qualifying as art.

[General Zod]

I saw this awhile ago, but I'm not sure why it's even a big issue. A video game isn't going to live or die on sales based on whether or not someone of influence thinks they're art. I mean there's a lot of people who don't think rap is music, but so what? It still sells.

[Civil War Man]

Someone on Cracked rebutted with the nuke level from Call of Duty 4. No points, no rewards, no goals. The only purpose of that level is to subvert the idea that the player is always an invincible superman.

[Starglider]

This is the same idiot who says that 3D always makes movies worse, and can never be 'convincing', will be a fad etc.

This is the same idiot who constantly bitches about CGI being evil and wrong and responsible for horrible cloned contentless movies etc

In short he is a prime example of why all the baby boomers need to die off post haste.

[Sarevok]

At the end of the day it does not matter if something is art or not. You like something or you dont. You adorn the things you like with flowery words like it is an art. It is so simple in the end - Roger Ebert does not like videogames and he is making up a faux excuse to justify his inherent dislike instead of just admitting he does not like them.

[Serafina]

Video games are not art. They are not supposed to be. They are supposed to be a form of entertainment.

However, most video games contain art.
That start's with the music, goes over beatifully designed landscapes, characters and levels and ends with a good storyline.
Not every videogames has these - but some do. And if all the components can be considered art, why not the whole thing?

If a video game designer creates a stunning landscape, where's the difference to a painter painting one?
If a composer makes a beautifull piece of music for a game, how is that different from a piece of music made for a movie?
If an awesome story is written for a video game, how is that different from writing a good story for theater?

One could easily compare a good video game to an opera - like the opera, it assembles story, music, acting and scenery to create a piece of art. The components are done by artists - writers, musicians, actors - and they are often made that way to express something - the very essence of art.

I will readily conceed that many video games are not art. But it is not a black/white differentiation. It is often hard to find a good answer wether something is art or not. Would you call an action-flick made to earn money art? Why? Would you call a well-made advertisement art? Again, why? Is a painting made to earn money art?
Like with any other artistic activity, the line between art and non-art is very blurry.

However, it is simply unfair to say that video games can not be art. While they obviously have to contain a game-part, i do not see how that precludes them from being art - simply becaus they can include much more works of art than any other form of game. The pieces make the whole, any many video games artistically combine many different forms of art.
That is an art by itself and should be recognized as such.

[Sarevok]

So what does huge multi paragraph posts about whether videogames are art or not achieve ?

[Oskuro]

Video games are not art. They are not supposed to be. They are supposed to be a form of entertainment.

Games can be art, just as any other creation can be. Most pieces of art were never supposed to be anyway, the status of art is usually granted when society decides a piece has a certain significance, and that can happen anywhere from the moment of the piece's creation to the end of all sentient thought in the universe.

Really, the only requirement for something to have the potential to be a work of art is for it to have been intentionally crafted or designed, rather than being a naturally occuring phenomenom.


As for Ebert, it turns out he's a human being with likes and dislikes and he has probably had no exposure to videogames beyond the general mediatic portrayal of the medium?

So what does huge multi paragraph posts about whether videogames are art or not achieve ?

Mental masturbation, mostly. And knowing that, since you're using trascendent words like "art" or "culture", people won't look at you funny when discussing the ludicrous humongousness of Cloud Strife's sword.

[Ghost Rider]

This is the same idiot who says that 3D always makes movies worse, and can never be 'convincing', will be a fad etc.

This is the same idiot who constantly bitches about CGI being evil and wrong and responsible for horrible cloned contentless movies etc

In short he is a prime example of why all the baby boomers need to die off post haste.

Given his love and gushing for Avatar? I'm sure, he'll respond to some hilarious exception to the rule to that movie.

As for his bit, meh on this particular and Ebert. He's one of the better critics but in this case, he's using what his particular ideas are for art and game and made a blog post knowing it will incite controversy.

[Admiral Valdemar]

His gushing over Avatar and attack on Kick-Ass were all I needed. I don't see 3D as being some super amazing revolution, and it sure didn't make up for Avatar's lacklustre plot, even if it did look amazing. But to say that videogames can't be art is missing a LOT of examples of culture influencing experiences from graphical amazement to story telling and immersion. The mediums are too different to really stack side-by-side, just like music and reading, however, there are similarities and a lot of the cinematic style games can easily rival a blockbuster film in depth of emotion or awe. Or you can enjoy the simple elegance of something like Geometry Wars or the gameplay of DEFCON. They need not be interactive films to be appreciably artistic and worth recommendation.

Sadly, his view isn't unique. You get a lot of people within his age bracket who just do not "get" games and really are thinking along the lines of Pac Man or something, which was so popular at the time I bet a lot of critics hammered it for this fact alone (just look at some of the old TV shows regarding computing, and how the snooty presenters saw games as a waste of a valuable home accessory).

Actually, just watch this.

[Vendetta]

The only coherent argument I've ever heard which supports the position that (most) videogames are not art is, ironically, one that was put forward against movies. It is Alan Moore's argument that since a movie is such a massively collaborative project, every scene has the imprint not just of the director, the actor, the screenwriter, but also the sound man, lighting technician, cinematographer, second unit director, and so on, that it's hard to pick out an individual artistic stance for the movie as a whole (though it will usually be argued that the director is providing this, he's only able to do so by compounding the artistry of many other people with varying disciplines).

And that applies to many games as well, there are so many influences on art design, level design, gameplay design, etc. that even the products which cohere best (like, say, Rez) are really a result of strict management of quite a large number of artistic visions not the expression of a single one.

Of course, since there are one man game productions like Braid, Touhou, Flow, etc and some of these are highly artistic both in terms of visual and sound design and in terms of gameplay design, games actually come out better than movies in that regard.

So Ebert is wrong, and he's a hypocrite for crticising games when the strongest point he could make applies more strongly to the field of his special interest.

[Oskuro]

Ermh, is Moore saying that art needs to be individual? That whole bit about artistic stance I keep hearing, specially from actual artists, and it sounds like bullshit to me, like an attempt to claim that the only valid art is the one they do by themselves, and anything collaborative (and thus beyond the reach of the individual) is no longer art. How convenient. As for Moore, doesn't he have this massive grudge with movies? Hardly an objective statement there.

All this is really a no-brainer. I can walk right now into a museum and find out that pieces widely considered to be of artistic value just mean nothing to me. Does that make them not art? Or could it be that appreciation of the artistic value of a work is subjective, and as such it cannot be measured or quantified?

[Stark]

Someone on Cracked rebutted with the nuke level from Call of Duty 4. No points, no rewards, no goals. The only purpose of that level is to subvert the idea that the player is always an invincible superman.

And have a boring level where you do nothing.

The invincible superman thing is so pervasive you can judge a game based on how many hyperbolic statements it makes about the player's equipment/training/unique powers.

Since I wasn't aware anyone considered videogames art, this article merely confuses me.

[Bakustra]

Someone on Cracked rebutted with the nuke level from Call of Duty 4. No points, no rewards, no goals. The only purpose of that level is to subvert the idea that the player is always an invincible superman.

And have a boring level where you do nothing.

The invincible superman thing is so pervasive you can judge a game based on how many hyperbolic statements it makes about the player's equipment/training/unique powers.

Since I wasn't aware anyone considered videogames art, this article merely confuses me.

Frankly, I'm more confused that some people apparently believe that art isn't entertaining. In any case, I consider videogames art only because I use an inclusive definition that includes all media of communication. Technically, this means that conversation is art, although weakly.

[Starglider]

Since I wasn't aware anyone considered videogames art, this article merely confuses me.

There's a whole community of 'art game' developers. Most of the games are free, some of them are made by professionals in their spare time, some by amateurs. There are hundreds of mostly insufferable 'art game' blogs that are fully the equal of art critic and literary critic journals in their ability to spout nonsense.

By the most reliable metric, degree of pretension in the creators and critics, at least some video games are 'fine art'. They just haven't gotten to the stage of selling single copies of surrealist games (that play like crap) to rich idiots for millions of dollars yet.

[Stark]

I guess I meant 'nobody thinks mainstream games are better due to pretentions as art', then. Of course you can make 'arty' games, but since I don't consider 'artyness' a necessary or positive element of gaming, taking it away doesn't bother me.

As people get old, maybe there WILL be a market for those crazy games as fixtures of art or patronage.

[Vympel]

Sadly, his view isn't unique. You get a lot of people within his age bracket who just do not "get" games and really are thinking along the lines of Pac Man or something, which was so popular at the time I bet a lot of critics hammered it for this fact alone (just look at some of the old TV shows regarding computing, and how the snooty presenters saw games as a waste of a valuable home accessory).

My parents are like that. They have no conception of what video games are like or the age bracket to which so many of them cater, and so my Dad constantly derides my playing them as being "baby stuff".

[Feil]

Art, so far as I can tell, has four definitions:

1- 'something that a person or people made, with the intent being the creation of an mental response, rather than strict utility'
2- 'stuff that I like from definition 1'
3- 'stuff that some idiot who makes baseless claims to authority on the subject likes from definition 1'
4- 'everything, lol, I am so enlightened'

Video games handily fit definition 1 and 4. They will sometimes fail definitions two and three, depending on the idiots in question. Given that 4 is useless and 2 and 3 are utterly arbitrary, I prefer 1 intellectually...

...Although I tend to opt for 2 for everyday use. As the idiot writing this here post likes (some) video games, they are obviously art. The ones that I don't think are artistic aren't art because I say so. And as I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut what some idiot named Roger Ebert likes, his contrary definition can go fly a kite. I like kites. They are art.

[Kuroji]

Eh, I've seen enough games that were made for the purpose of also being art. Some of them come close to approaching their goal. About the best example of that I've seen up to this point would be Eufloria, but there have been others in sufficient number to be recognizable.

It's just like movies, in the end. Any grad student can whip something up and call it 'art' but most would not call Half-Life or Avatar art.

[Eleas]

Video games can never be art

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. 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.

This is the introductory part of Ebert's article. This, by journalistic convention, is where Ebert's supposed to articulate his main argument. But it's not a meaningful one. It boils down to three arguments, if that is the right word to use.

1. A lecture on the things that various people might equate with artistry, concluded with his personal notion that winning (the ability to branch into a certain story path due to player input, presumably) naturally removes the possibility of something being "art",
2. a claim that (although none of these examples, not even Braid, were known to Ebert before this point in time) through watching brief clips of gameplay and interpreting them through past familiarity with 80's platformer games he now fully understands the games being discussed, and
3. his judgement on the entire field of video games and their status as art, presumably formed upon cursory examination of these three games.

Well, it's certainly a valid opinion, in the sense that you're free to believe what you want about subjects you've neither studied nor experienced firsthand. When you assume that your lofty opinion by itself has to matter because it is yours, well... then apparently, you're named Roger Ebert.

(In point of fact, Ebert pisses me off. Not because I feel the need to defend "video games" as a whole; that too is a ludicrous notion even had I been a gamer, sort of like arguing over the artistical merits of pigment-upon-surface application. No, what is aggravating to me is the tone of the article, this smug complacency that Ebert maintains through the entire screed. It practically drips with that age-old WASP assurance, comfortable and not subject for debate, that because he wishes to debate something he's heard a rumour about, his word on the subject is final, and anyone professing actual knowledge on the matter may be safely dismissed as unworthy of being taken seriously.)

Anyway, the fact remains: Ebert's about equal to that of a fifth-grader (factoring in said fifth-grader's weaker vocabulary vs a proportionally greater gaming experience) when it comes to speaking about computer games. For insights beyond grade school level, the Chicago Times might want to look elsewhere.

[adam_grif]

Since I wasn't aware anyone considered videogames art, this article merely confuses me.

What exactly do you think art is?

Video games are not art. They are not supposed to be. They are supposed to be a form of entertainment.

However, most video games contain art.

I hope you're not meaning to imply that things designed to entertain are "not art"? Videogames contain things that would be considered art on their own; visual representations, music, stories. Even without this, game-mechanics and level design are things unique to videogames that can be considered art in their own right.

This always degenerates into semantic shitfests. Five seconds of searching yields the following definition for art: "Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions." This neatly encapsulates music, films, plays, and literature. Videogames also fall under this umbrella, as well as some other things some wouldn't consider art like cooking or decorating.

The primary source of resistance to the ideas of games as art comes from the notion that art is an adult thing, and that videogames are for children. There is also an unconscious bias in many people because videogames have not been thought of as art until very recently, so the operational definitions of the word "art" that they work with explicitly excludes it, although for no rational reason. They've just never heard of it as art, so they automatically reject it as art. Finally, many people also seem to think that "art" means "high class", or "of high quality". These are the same people who think that bad paintings and movies aren't art. This stems from colloquial uses of the word.

[Sarevok]

I would go further and rate certain videogames like Halo as higher works of art than turds such as mona lisa. Seriously, art is relative. What is artistic to someone is excrement to another (literally see the various art projects involving shit).

[adam_grif]

Halo is as much art as the Mona Lisa, there isn't some sliding scale of "artiness". There is just good art and bad art.

[Sarevok]

Well I think its not about art. Art is just an adjective to describe something To quote what I said earlier art is just another fancy word to wax poetic about things you really like. So a Halo fanatic who invested hundreds of hours playing the game would use words like art to describe his memorable experience of dealing death to the covenant with needler explosions !