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I realize this comes down to an old discussion “what is art?” I want to point out a couple of flaws in Mr. Ebert's post but then also point out that there is not a clear and concise answer to my question nor to the challenges posed by Ebert.

“Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

To this I disagree, and if I may point to Jason Rohrer’s Passage without getting poo flung at me for choosing something so obvious then I would also comment that this simple game plays like a poem, or like a short film. It uses the decision and direction of the player as part of the changing story that is told and can in fact be experienced many ways, though the end is essentially the same. However and this is key, one must play the game to experience it fully.

This is a fatal flaw in Ebert’s commentary, he is happy to judge games by a little video, maybe a snapshot and some commentary. He would never do this with a movie.

Does it make sense to judge George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902) from a single image or a series of images? No, and in fact the proof that it is a work of art is in the exhibition and experience of the whole work.

Games are meant to be played. One cannot judge the quality of a game without playing it. Rather what kind of judgement can one make about a game without playing?

Ebert says, “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." This is wrong because I do believe that this assertion has been made. Ebert however will never be able to verify this, as he will never play these games. This is a man who has a great depth of knowledge in a field attempting to extend it and to argue about something of which he knows little or nothing.

Finally I want to comment about the idea of art because so many people are just getting this wrong. The definition of art has changed time and again and will likely continue to do so. The problem is that many people who want to say that something is (or more likely is not) art are just not experts. I am NOT saying that people should stfu or anything like that, but if a work is accepted by the community of artists, historians and museums then it IS art whether we like it or not. There is plenty of art I do not like, but that does not make it less art than the stuff I do like.

To that end WACO Resurrection is a work of art, it was made by artists (Eddo Stern, Peter Brinson, Brody Condon, Michael Wilson, Mark Allen, Jessica Hutchins) and has been exhibited at art venues
INSTALLATION HISTORY: Gamezone Festival, De Singal, Antwerpen, Brussels Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, Utah Ars Electronica, Linz, Austra Australian Center of the Moving Image(ACMI), Melbourne, Australia Grand Arts, Kansas City, MI Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, Australia Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA The Kitchen. New York, NY

and is accepted by the new media arts community and historians as a work of art. http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2005/05/so-the-winners.php

If you do not like it that is your prerogative but you are being silly if you claim it is not art. It may not be a masterpiece, but it is by a young group of artists who show a great deal of promise, whose work may eventually fulfill the challenge laid out at the beginning of this post. But these people are artists and not game designers per se. Artists will make art.

Finally I want to say that I think the whole discussion “is this art” is a dead end. I hope to find the time to post again and talk about the influence of Marcel Duchamp on the

I wonder if this is for sale, yet.

Anything you can dream, as long as it is sufficiently ugly, you can build.

You could play Pong instead..... http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/0088 83.php

Layne

to blur the lines even more http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/0088 85.php this really ends where is hte personal space and where is work

I fail to see... how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture.

This project could probably more accurately be filed under "installation", but it's not uncommon for sculpture to be a catch-all for anything that's not painting, video, photography, or craft work.

You can find some good contemporary installation coverage here.

Wow, sparky, that comment's gonna get you some SERIOUS negative karma. Think of all the nerds lucky enough to have wives or girlfriends. Women that put up with our shit on a daily basis... for this post, I'm gonna call them nerd-wifes.

Now, imagine these socially-inept nerds discovering that a regular visit by the junk fairy just takes offering to take old junkers off friends' hands. To a nerd, that sounds like a time-shifter for getting winning lottery numbers or the first chain-letter that is guaranteed to pay off.

I'm a struggling/recovering accumulator of old hardware. Haven't found a 12-point plan to join yet, but a year or so ago, I carried 6 computers and a stack of monitors, SIMM's (yeah, THAT old!) to a charity/thrift store. This took weeks of my darling nerd-wife balancing some blunt requests, coaxing, and a machiavellian blend of passive-aggressive tactics and bedroom gymnastics to convince me. And even then, 4 more have grown back in my garage.

If people started droping random hardware on my porch, my wife'd leave me. I know this. And I can't be the only guy whose gadget fetish is driving some nerd-wife crazy. So you've just poured gasoline on HOW many thousands of these nerd-wife house-fires!?

Serious karma flammage, dude. But, hey... maybe you'll come back as THIS guy. That'd almost be worth it, wouldn't it!?

That'd almost be as cool as the VU Meter shirt:
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/0057 02.php

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/0056 01.php

Its only because it ate itself!

Seriously, regardless what M$ wants to think, google will be around in some sense until the internet gets replaced which of course is inevitable. Nonetheless, the best reason google will be a force to reckon in the future is that it isnt trying to play 'flavor of the month' like so many internet portals have done in the past trying to reinvent themselves everytime share prices dropped. It remains to be seen if google will do this of course but considering the page hasnt changed much since day one (remember that story guys and gals?) its unlikely they will fall by the waist-side so easily. Of course todays winning business model is tomorrows bust in the business world so you can never be sure. Thats why i avoid the totally unpredictable business world, at least its more fun to play poker!

Maybe, but one well-placed beer could likely ruin just about an supercomputer. The Bar Bot lives for it. I have some intelligent friends, terraflops alone a friend does not make. Beer, on the other hand, is the universal ingredient in all meaningful relationships.

In other news, scientists create a robot that could replace half of my friends.

...Chickens are the future of data storage. http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/0019 18.php