The Escapist Bulletin: Ebert and the games as art debate

Roger Ebert revisited his position on video games last week in a post on his blog, responding to Kellee Santiago’s TED talk in which she claims that games already are art, albeit a very primitive form, and offered Braid and Flower as examples.

Ebert said that as engaging and passionate as Santiago was, she was wrong: while video games had the potential to be art, he didn’t think that any gamer alive today would live to experience the medium as an art form.

He seemed fixated on the word 'game,' comparing the medium to chess or basketball, and on asking why gamers couldn’t be satisfied with just having fun.

It’s human nature to be rattled when someone attacks something you love, especially if it’s someone whose opinion you respect, so a number of people were understandably upset by Ebert’s comments. The fact that he didn’t seem to have played the games he was bashing didn't help matters.

But to put this into perspective, the argument over whether games are art is not one that most gamers are going to care about. Most people are never going to engage in this kind of discussion, and even when they do it’s such a subjective and personal question that your own opinion is usually just as valid as anyone else’s.

Ebert’s comments are interesting and merit discussion, but they are not the end of the debate. Ebert has dedicated his life to movies and should be respected as an expert in that field, but when it comes to video games he’s the same as any other sixty-seven year old man who doesn’t really get it.

His voice carries weight, because he's a well-known and respected critic, but despite the superficial similarities between film and video games they're not really alike. Ebert is never going to understand the nuances of gaming, for all kinds of reasons, and that’s not a bad thing, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind when he talks about other media other than film.

We might wish that Ebert was more engaged with games, and it would be interesting to see what he had to say from a more informed position, but that’s not going to change the fact that what he understands is the passive storytelling of cinema, rather than the active storytelling of a video game.

Even if he were to play a hundred games, movies would always be his first language, and when he - or any other expert from a field other than gaming - talks about video games, he’s always going to be comparing them to what he knows best.

When people talk about video games, it’s important to consider what their biases or misconceptions might be, and to be aware that no one is an expert on every topic. Ebert’s comments are misinformed, certainly, but there is a lot of value in realising that and not getting too hung up about it.