14 DAY TRIAL // Back in April this year, esteemed film critic Roger Ebert decided to tackle the topic of the cultural importance of video games from the perspective of whether they could ever be regarded as art. Clearly, Ebert was convinced from the onset that no game so far could even dream of being considered as coming close to a work of art. But no future release could aspire to that either, the critic said, drawing over 4,500 comments from upset gamers.
In today’s post, Ebert returns to the topic to put an end to the debate that has been going on ever since: though he stands by what he believes in – namely that, at least in theory and principle, video games will never be art – he can now admit that he shouldn’t have expressed his opinion without knowing what he was talking about. And that’s his biggest mistake, as far as he’s concerned, because he expressed a judgment on a public forum without having played a single video game – and all the while insisting that was the last thing on his wish list. He approached the matter strictly from a theoretical point of view and that’s not fair to the gaming industry – or the gamers who took offense, for that matter.
“I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself. At this moment, 4,547 comments have rained down upon me for that blog entry. […] Perhaps 300 supported my position. The rest were united in opposition. If you assume I received a lot of cretinous comments from gamers, you would be wrong. I probably killed no more than a dozen. What you see now posted are almost all of the comments sent in. They are mostly intelligent, well-written, and right about one thing in particular: I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games,” Ebert writes about the post that started the debate.
Most posters pointed to him that, aside from elaborating an axiom based on theory only, he was also doing so without as much as offering a clear definition of Art. If gamers experience video games as a form of art, does that not automatically make them so, some said. Others, tired of reading what others had argued before them, were simply content to say “Ebert doesn’t get it.” And the critic is the first to admit that, yes, he doesn’t get it – and neither does he want to, which is why he shouldn’t have gotten into this in the first place, he writes in the post suggestively called “Okay, kids, play on my lawn.”
“My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art. […] Who was I to say video games didn’t have the potential of becoming Art? Someday? There was no agreement among the thousands of posters about even one current game that was an unassailable masterpiece. Shadow of the Colossus came closest. I suppose that’s the one I should begin with,” Ebert writes.
Gamers are now rejoicing: though the movie critic doesn’t concede that video games already are an art form, at least he’s going back on his earlier statement that they will never be so. The battle is won – for the time being. For the full Ebert piece, please refer here.