So last week Roger Ebert once more opened the floodgates in the discussion of whether or not video games are, or can ever be, art. Mr. Ebert still rather adamantly asserts that they never can be. Obviously, plenty of gamers disagree with that assessment, and even disagree with the assumption that games aren’t already art.
I’m not going to go to the trouble of really addressing this argument. I have before in the more general sense, and likely will again. What strikes me about the discussion this time around is not the subject but the tone.
Mr. Ebert does not claim to be an expert on video games. Clearly he does not care for them either way, but this seems to be more apathy than it is active dislike. To that end he claims that his position is not one he’s going to go to the trouble to defend – he just doesn’t care.
But this being his stated position on the entire matter, why does he bother to write a blog about it, when he is fully aware of the response such activity has gained before? Why does he bother to track how ineffective he finds the responses to the blog, and hold up that fact via his Twitter feed? Something doesn’t add up.
His argument is also somewhat unconvincing, and certainly not reasoned with anything resembling the sort of care that a truly persuasive argument would need to be. Ebert is a highly intelligent fellow and I find this out of the ordinary in his writing. Again, he self-admittedly doesn’t really care about the topic, or to making the topic one that can really be discussed. Indeed, the definitions of both “art” and “game” which he offers as his basis appear very nearly designed to eliminate large swathes of what we call video games these days, leaving only a narrow selection of options, and few of the usual suspects when it comes to this debate. Ebert, it seems, would call The Longest Journey (as a for instance) something that is not played (ergo, not a game) but experienced. I don’t know what label you’d give it, then. But I digress.
And then there’s the rapidity with which he dismisses those examples people offer. He addresses Braid and Flower in this blog, but clearly never plays them. He doesn’t claim to. Yet he speaks with absolutism about their value, not just as art, but as something worth spending time doing. This would be very much like me dismissing a film’s quality – let’s just say, for kicks and giggles, Up in the Air – based on, at best, the trailer, if not a few production stills. Which, yeah, is all very well and good – I can choose not to see a movie based on whether or not I think I’d like it. But unlike Ebert, I’m not then using that suspicion as a basis for an argument.
Not that the counter-arguments are wholly compelling. To a point Ebert is correct in pointing out that many of them amount to “You don’t get it.” Which is hardly incorrect – Ebert clearly doesn’t care to get it and hasn’t tried – but it’s also hardly a counter-argument of any validity. And there’s of course been plenty of games held up as art that probably shouldn’t even enter the equation – God of War, for example. Using that title as a sign that games have become art is something like espousing the artistry of movies as epitomized by Pirates of the Caribbean. Competent? Yes. Technically proficient? Certainly. Entertaining? Extremely so. But art? Not so much.
But Ebert fed on responses like this, and waves them about like they are proof-of-concept – or at least that’s the tone he takes via Twitter. But this is provocation at best: hardly provocative in the least, not really, but rather driven by the argumentative nature of the gaming community (and, yes, we gamers are highly argumentative – this is why we have console wars). But nobody seems to notice, since Ebert’s got a reputation for something quite unlike this; and yet here we find ourselves, essentially wrapped in a large-scale example of trolling. More sophisticated, perhaps, but trolling nonetheless, designed more, it seems, to get a rise out of people and delight in the destruction than to make an actual point.
Some will no doubt think that’s extreme, or perhaps name-calling. Maybe. But think about it: am I wrong?
