Why Ebert Was Right

Next Generation reports has an article examining how, in some ways, Roger Ebert was right when he criticised the artistic merits of gaming. From the article: "But Ebert cannot be discounted, because, while he may not be the foremost authority on videogames, he knows a great deal about storytelling. He's not even completely ignorant on the subject of gaming; in fact, Roger Ebert is credited with at least one game review, a piece on the obscure Cosmology of Kyoto published in Wired in 1995. He reviewed it positively - he said it was wonderful."

Comments

And I'm right when I say

[snuf23]

Citizen Kane is overrated. And Touch of Darkness contains lame cliched stereotypes of Mexicans and pot smokers.
Ebert can bite me. He is probably less qualified to comment on games than I am to comment on movies. I'm sure I've watched more movies than he has played games and read more books on film and hell even edited broadcast video.
The art in games is not just the matter of telling a good story. Games are not experiences where you passively absorb a story that is dictated to you. Game mechanics and design are just as important if not more important than story, art or music.
Ebert tries to interpret games in the same manner that he does movies, as a visual and aural experience. He completely misses the point. Which isn't surprising given where he's coming from. Just wait another 30 years and games will be an excepted art form just as movies are today. Recall that when movies came out they were considered inferior to stage plays. As TV was considered gimmicky compared to radio dramas. It's just the old guard's reaction to a new medium.

Re:And I'm right when I say

[MilenCent]

Citizen Kane is overrated. (...)

No.

The thing about Citizen Kane is that, in addition to being an amazing technical and creative achievement, is that it's actually a damn fine movie. By anyone's standards, or anyone who isn't predisposed to be against it by its reputation. It's not some (f|shm)ancy art house flick, it was seriously made to be entertaining, and it is.

It's told with energy, style, and it's got a surprising number of laughs too. That musical number at the party was stuck in my head for a week. And if you watch it again, you'll catch something else. And if you watch it a third time, something else.

Ebert's seen the movie dozens of times, he sometimes watches it with film classes, and he's always finding new things in it.

I can't think of a movie that better deserves its reputation. I wouldn't part with my DVD of it for the world.

Re:And I'm right when I say

[buffer-overflowed]

Nah, citizen kane isn't overrated. It just has a hell of a lot to live up to. You go into a movie like that expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread without a bunch of context and you're going to be disappointed.

Ebert's big thing is that he favours the 'auteur' theory of filmaking(the best movies are made under the artistic control of single individuals[Kubrick, Kurisawa, Hitchcock, etc.]). Games, well, whire there are a few designers like that, it's really too drastically different a medium to really feel the individual designer truly coming through. Passive v. Active. How much Shingeru Morimotosan is in LoZ? How much does he and the game provide vs how much you provide yourself?

That's where Ebert is coming from. Disagree with that or not(a lot of people don't buy into that), does that make more sense?

subject

[Frizzle Fry]

Anyone who says "To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers" has never spent serious time playing Tetris.

Re:subject

[xenocide2]

When you speak of great dramatists, poets, composers and filmmakers etc, you speak of literature and art. Things of high social impact.

While Tetris is a fine game, and perhaps one of the best we've ever witnessed, it has nothing to say. It has as much impact on culture and thinking as the game Tic-Tac-Toe. Sure, common culture might reference terms within the game such as "Cats game" or some such, but as a work of art it communicates nothing to the player, and most if not all attempts to claim the opposite are heavily contrived and require incredibly deep thought that few who've played the game have. For example, you might that combined with the communist Russian background of the author, the game is a subtle commentary on how capitalism requires its people to work harder and harder to compete, and your ultimate demise will be an inevitable inability to match pace with the status quo. I'm sure you can do better though.

I must repeat that I deeply appreciate Tetris, and have spent many an hour on similar games like Crack-Attack (an open source openGL variation on Tetris-Attack), and plenty of other games. But Tetris does not appear to be an artistic expression of anything other than Asperger's Syndrome.

agreed.

[The NPS]

I agree. While there's nothing artistic about Burnout 3, and there's nothing artistic about countless Diablo 2 runs, some games contain sweeping scenary, beautiful music, timeless storytelling, and wonderful character developement. Sure, those games that integrate all those factors are few and far between, but they're still there.

The Problem

[Apreche]

Ebert was mostly right. His only problem was in his over generalisation. There are indeed games that I would consider great works of art. And the fact is that 99.9% of games are complete shit. Maybe you can call them art, but only if you recognize they are bad. I've played quite a few games in my time. I've had joystick firmly in hand since the Atari 2600. There have been many games I've enjoyed over the years, but very few I can consider good works of art. In the past two years I can only name Katamari Damacy, and it doesn't even have a story. That's one out of thousands.

Ebert seemed to imply that no existing games were art, which is wrong. The correct statement is that most games are terrible art.

Disagree? Make a list of which games you would put in a museum and hang them on the wall for people to play hundreds of years from now. Divide by the number of games that exist. I rest my case.

Re:The Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Shadow of the Colossus should definitely make the "art" cut as well. It's not just the graphics or cinematic treatment - every little bit of the game contributed to an atmosphere and experience that was complete and immersive in a way that few games can even aspire to. Sands of Time and RE4 certainly approach this level of immersion, though the constant pausing to switch weapons in RE4 hurts it just a smidge.

Though for my vote, Super Smash Bros. Melee is the absolute best piece of game art out there. The definition of art regarding games needs to be expanded to accomodate all the things that games ARE that other mediums AREN'T. SSBM isn't particularly atmospheric or dramatic, certainly not in the way a movie is, but the controls, design, execution, and presentation combine to make a technically and aesthetically perfect game. When film was in its youth, most narrative movies were presented in the only way people knew how; theater, with a static camera and a stage and everything! Why must video games adhere to cinema's standards? In the lifetime of the video game, it may be too early for a true "masterpiece," but if any game would qualify it would have to be Melee.

Re:The Problem

[Ayaress]

Now, do the same thing with books, movies, paintings, poetry, and plays.

It's like comparing Vanilla Ice to Beethoven. The argument could be made taht Vanilla Ice was indicative of the state of music, at least in its genre, but can the same be said of Beethoven? When Beethoven was alive, new symphonies came out like movies do now. A few new ones each week, if not more often than that. Some of them were ok, some were excellent, some didn't get the recognition they deserved because the composer couldn't get a venue to play it, some weren't that great, but were made by a locally popular composer and got much more attention than they were really worth.

What we have now is the music of that time that survived the test of over a century.

A better example would be movies. They came out even more rapidly years ago than they do now. Ask your grandparents: They'd go to the theater and watch the newsreel, a movie they'd never seen before, a few serials (usualloy half-hour TV shows, but on the big screen), and then another new movie. You can do this every saturday, and there were usually still choices. Saginaw had three theaters back then: Temple, Court, and another one on the east side that's been torn down. Often, each one would have a different set of movies running.

How many of those movies do you still see on DVD or the classic movie channels today? Not many. You see the ones that have stood the test of time and were accepted as among the best of their respective time. Not everybody agrees. Just like you find people who enjoy obscure classical music you've never heard of, there are people who prefer one of Carry Grant's hundred-some-odd movies you don't see in the DVD racks.

Books are even moreso. There are thousands of books written any given year. If you were to accept the books you see refernced in most discussions of classical literiture as the entire artistic output of their time, then it would lead us to believe that only a few hundred books were written in any given century. It's just not the case.

Some people comment that most modern art doesn't look as good as older works of art, but it's the same effect. People have always produced weird and stupid stuff and called it art. Five years later, it may still be remembered, but fifty years later, a lot of it is forgotten. Time distills the vast creative output down into a relatively small subset which could be considered best, or perhaps most representative.

Some bands were popular ten years ago, but now we're all ashamed to admit we even listened to them, let alone that we can still recite Vanilla Ice lyrics on demand. Two hundred years from now, few people will even recognize the name Vanilla Ice, but they'll still recognize Beethoven or Bach, and they'll remember some subset of singers from the last twenty years.

The same will happen to today's playwrites and authors, directors and actors, and even to our games. Some of games will be remembered some day as works of art, some just as simple fun, others may be studied to see the core aspects of the genre, the same way a professor today will pick apart Chopin to demonstrate the overall style of music, or Michelangelo's David to see the thousands of very simmilar works of religious art from the time. And then again, the other thousands of them will probably fall into obscurity, and some may even be lost entirely over time.

Heck, a few may even be remembered for being complete travesties. Some of the worst movies ever made have earned the same immortality that the greatest have.

Re:Ebert has the wrong definition of art

[MyMistake]

The reason why academics can never create art is because they never have 'fun playing around'.

Bullshit. I know plenty of academics who have fun playing around. It's just that their media is art. Mozart riffed on musical themes, Shakespeare riffed on humanity (as he saw it), and I've known academics who riff on Mozart, Shakespeare, TS Elliot, Jesus, and plenty of others, and had a ball doing it.

Your definition of academics as "people who don't have fun" is blatantly wrong.