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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."
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.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
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.