Roger Ebert: Video games can never be art
Joystiq.com linked to his blog about the topic today. I am familiar with his previous comments on the subject. I wanted to mark my comments in Mr. Ebert’s blog:
Roger Ebert’s blog on the matter
One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. 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.
Seriously? Because a movie certainly doesn’t have rules, points, objectives or a (predictable) outcome?
There are movies that you call art that I call a story on rails, where the “artists” have created nothing more than a pedantic trope that other movie makers have done before, and better, and will do again (See: Avatar).
Games allow you to explore a world, one point of view or many, and the viewpoint of someone trying to tell the story. It may be the story of a man fighting terrorists (Die Hard), it may be the sensual experience of riding the wind into an impressionistic landscape, or it may be an open world in which you are given the freedom to do whatever you desire, but that makes it no different from modern art exhibits that allow just that freedom – that insist that the person EXPERIENCING the art PARTICIPATE in the making of art.
Frankly, you may consider the actual stories being told by The Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy to be simplistic and predictable. I think that hanging a giant red dot on the wall doesn’t make it art. It’s not art until you interpret it as such, and it remains art even if it was painted by a 4-year-old or a bitter old painter laughing at how desperate his audience is to prove they “get it”.
In other words, just because you’ve reached the end of the era you’ve come to understand doesn’t mean that another way of communicating, relating, and expressing emotion isn’t beginning.
I leave you with this comment about Talkies from 1930: British cinema pundit Paul Rotha declared, “A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronised and coincide with their visual image on the screen is absolutely contrary to the aims of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted as coming within the true boundaries of the cinema.”
What I should have added was that you can break down any art as a “representation of a story” – it harms games none to say that you can reach an ending, nor that they say something you could perhaps represent in a book. You would lose that part of it that makes it a game just like a book is not a script is not a movie is not a game is not a story you told to your children one evening.
He’s hung up on this idea that a game has a winner. Even if a win isn’t really a “victory”. Even when you’ve made great sacrifices to make it there. Even when winning is losing. Even when the game has no end, no winner, no final victory.
I don’t need the equivalent of Beethoven in games to show me it is a worthy storytelling medium – I simply require that it touches me, that it expresses something about the experience of living, and that it captivate me in the expression that another human designed for me to experience. That’s more than the second Matrix ever did.
He’s hung up on this idea that a game has a winner. Even if a win isn’t really a “victory”. Even when you’ve made great sacrifices to make it there. Even when winning is losing. Even when the game has no end, no winner, no final victory.
I certainly felt like I had won a major battle when I got to the end of Avatar…
I’ll preface this with the statement that I believe that games can be art. But I want to play just a touch of devil’s advocate here.
In the post above, there are at least two movies (Avatar & Matrix 2) that are used as examples of how movies aren’t always art. I say that these comparisons aren’t useful in this context. It’s not useful to say “oh, look it, these movies aren’t art, and these games are better than them.” That does little for the argument at hand. What we need to be doing is taking the best of what games have to offer, and comparing it to the best of what movies have to offer, and show that they’re equivalent, or better.
Ahh, but see that is the exact opposite of my point. Games don’t need to compete with the very best that traditional art has to offer in order to be art – they simply need to meet the basic requirements of art. Which are pretty nebulous, granted, but the definition of art is NOT “not videogames.”
Ebert is weirdly obsessive about this topic – every so often he dredges it up again. I usually respect the man quite a bit, but in this case always take exception.
I’m sure his first missive on the topic has probably earned him an unending stream of emails about it.
Has he ever actually played any?
I do believe he is basing his verdict upon three things: His understanding of playing Chess, his understanding that sports are games and sports are also videogames, and Grand Theft Auto.
I loved Avatar; I don’t care how predictable it was.
That is all.
My point wasn’t that Avatar sucked, it was that Avatar was an entirely predictable movie where the ending was clearly predetermined, and it won Oscar after Oscar. It is, except in the absolutely most elite definition, art.
If Avatar is art, so are videogames that make you question your understanding of the world, that teach you about other people, that even question what “winning” is.
Frankly, I think people spend too much time arguing about what is and isn’t art, when art is by its very nature both highly personal/subjective and indefinable.
I’m pretty sure that a lot of people have some strong opinions on whether it is or isn’t definable. :D
Ebert’s previous piece about art and how videogames aren’t art. Well, in that case, that they can’t be “High” art.
And an article about an even earlier piece.
His myopia is unfortunate, but obvious.
“Games can’t be art because this example game is bad. It is bad because it looks bad to me. No, I haven’t played it, I’m basing my comments on the trailer.”
or for the actual quotation:
“Braid … is a game ‘that explores our own relationship with our past…you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there’s one key difference…you can’t die.’ You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.”
SO, taking a page from the “everything I don’t understand sucks” version of art appreciation, let’s look at movies as art. Ebert’s list of top ten movies includes The Godfather.
“Movies can’t be art because this movie is bad. It’s bad because it’s about glamorizing a bunch of Italian criminals. It’s basically a cheesy ‘True Crime’ story. And what the hell is wrong with that fat guy’s voice? No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen the trailer.”
Re: games as art
Here is an opinion piece suggesting that the argument about whether games are art misses the point, which ought to be that game designers should always be trying to create art.
(It probably says something about me that, after seeing this article and thinking, “Ooh! I should post this in a comment on that recent post about games as art!” I couldn’t immediately recall which of my LJ Friends had made that post…)