IGN: Rebutting Roger Ebert's "Video Games Can Never Be Art"

One of the great thrills of being wrong comes during the moments after having made a demonstrably false assertion. You can begin to feel the adrenaline flow as you try and defend your position while your claimed territory constricts around you. I remember one night on the eve of a friend's wedding when I'd made an off-hand remark about Charlemagne having played a crucial role in the American Revolution. My friend, now a tax attorney in Texas, spat out a mouthful of beer in disbelief. I could see the gathering relish in his eyes as he realized he had me pinned to a wall. Charlemagne obviously had nothing to do with the American Revolution. I had been thinking of Lafayette, but the difference between Charlemagne and Lafayette had, after five hours of celebratory drinking, passed me by. As I saw his coming antagonism, I didn't stop to think about what I'd said, I simply entrenched myself in the idea that I was right. After having my stupidity corroborated by literally every person invited to comment on the matter I was left to embrace the awful idea that I had been wrong, even while trying to say something positive about the long history of Franco-American cooperation.

In recent years, Roger Ebert has become a significant critic of videogames. Not of the industry or the aesthetics of any particular game, rather he has disavowed the medium itself. Videogames can never be art. Ebert recently reconsidered the question after a reader forwarded him Kellee Santiago's recent TED presentation arguing that games are art. Five years ago, Ebert made his original assertion that games could never be art in the same way as "serious" film and literature can. He has now revisited the subject by issuing a decree, in part, on my behalf, "no video gamers now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."

Consider me Exhibit A in the case against Ebert's assertion. I experienced the medium as an art form from the very first moment I played a videogame almost thirty years ago. Ebert says no critic has ever forwarded a videogame that could be compared to the great works of the old, canonized art. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, he's wrong on this count as well. I did just that six months ago when I described my experience playing Metroid Prime as of equivalent emotional and thematic value as my time watching Citizen Kane. I invoked the moral anarchy of Richard III when I wrote about Haze. I wrote about Mirror's Edge as a sublime memento mori, comparing its self-directed sensoria to the novel's shift from plot to internal narrative with writers like Knut Hamsun and Virginia Woolf.

If you're unwilling to take my arguments, consider Tom Bissell the award-winning contributor to the New Yorker who wrote of Grand Theft Auto IV, "There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years." Or else you might consider Steve Poole, author of Unspeak and Trigger Happy, who described his experience with Shadow of the Colossus. "For me, the aesthetic pleasures weren't enough to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering. If a game of violence is so effective in its message of anti-violence that you actually stop playing, does that mean it was a success or a failure?"

Or consider Brenda Brathwaite, the game design veteran who is now working on a series of games intended for play in art galleries. I saw her standing at a podium at the Art History of Games conference in Atlanta and break down in tears describing her experience with Tale of Tales' The Path while recovering from an attack in real life. She pointed out Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey who were in the audience as her voice wavered and her eyes filled. "Thank you," she told them.

Is there a purpose in not allowing these experiences, ideas, and feelings to be considered alongside those provoked by Nabakov, Dostevsky, Stravinsky, Joyce, Lang, Bergman, Kurosawa, Beethoven, or whomever you'd like to include as an emissary of great art? Does it enrich us to exclude Smerdyakov from a conversation about violence and Colossus? Are we better for having bucked at the suggestion that Prime's ethereal isolation could have the same human fingerprints as Kane's loneliness?

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