The Ebert Affair: Ebert's grumpy post and the many, many responses from the gaming community. The (varied but interesting) pieces in this month's Escapist finally persuaded me to emit a blog post on the subject. For God's sake don't expect much insight here. It's more indigestion than anything.

Let me summarise the argument a moment:

Ebert: Games aren't art because I don't really like them.
Gamers: Games are art because we really, really like them.
Gamers (supplementary argument 1): Also, games are art because, Flower Braid Passage Bioshock the Path.
Gamers (supplementary argument 2): Also, the definition of art is so subjective this whole argument is pointless.

There were a wider range of responses than that (I like Troy Goodfellow's 'Are games art? most of the games I play are barely even games') but those were the bulk of it.

What I find bothersome is the rather peevish tone of so many of the responses: like we (yup, I'm a gamer, it's 'we') are taking it personally. Why does it matter that much whether a respected middlebrow film critic thinks games are art? I think it's partly simple emotional attachment, but more, if games are art, it means I haven't wasted my time playing thousands of hours of mediocre shooters. I get the same cultural credit I would if I'd spent thousands of hours listening to challenging atonal music.

The obvious gap in this rather cheering line of reasoning here is that if games are art then not all games are necessarily art, and not all games-which-are-art are necessarily good art. Tom Chick makes this point cogently but he's the only responder I've seen who's come out and said '*these* are examples of games which are *not* art'.

A related point. Ebert said: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets [sic]." I haven't seen any of the responders take up this challenge. Never mind the comparisons to the big cultural monoliths, I haven't seen anyone step up and say, yes, [highly respected game] is a better treatment of [theme] than [minor work by respected, non-legendary artist]. I see roughly one puff piece a month that talks about how games are *going* to be worthy of comparison, but I've been seeing those puff pieces since the coming thing was hypertext novels in the nineties. You know how they say fusion power is fifty years away, and it's been fifty years away since 1955? It's beginning to sound to me like gaming's Citizen Kane is five years away, and it's been five years away since 1990.

I think we owe it to ourselves as gamers and game designers to ask *why* there seems to be less gaming art about the place than you'd expect, compared to other media. I think if we want to grow little beards and sit at the big table the onus is on us to provide an explanation.

One standard rejoinder, and one that runs under the Ebert debate, is that it's because the Man is putting us down. I don't have much sympathy with this line of argument.

Another is that it's early days for video games. I hear this point a lot. Kelly Santiago made it in the video that Ebert linked to: film started out as cheap thrills. But the comparison doesn't stand up. Pong was 1972. Melies' Trip to the Moon, Santiago's jumping-off point, was 1902. We're 38 years on from Pong. 38 years on from Trip to the Moon, we had Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Wizard of Oz. We had Hitchcock, Ophuls, Ozu, Murnau. Go on just a couple more years and you have Citizen Kane and Casablanca. There had been heavyweight, culturally respectable film criticism in the mainstream press for more than ten years. (At least in Britain, I don't know about the States, and I don't really know much about film criticism in Britain beyond blog blag level). And this is actually an unfairly flattering comparison for games: culture changes faster now. The gatekeepers of the cultural pantheon are a lot more liberally inclined. So what have we been doing with ourselves?

A refined version of the 'early days' point is that tech has only just got far enough to open up real possibilities. But we had Colossal Cave in 1976. Text is all you need: ask Ebert's novelists and poets.

Approaching the tl;dr boundary, but I suppose having got so firmly on my high horse about this I need to make some conjectures about why myself. Another post when I feel the need to procrastinate further.