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Game Devs on Ebert's Put-Downs
Gamsutra has a writeup of a recent Austin Game Developers meeting. Damion Schubert, Allen Varney, and Scott Jennings took the stage to discuss games as art and Roger Ebert's opinions. From the article: "McShaffry then asked the panel to consider whether Ebert was picking on youth culture in general, and assuming technology wasn't an issue, whether popular games like Grand Theft Auto would be played 500 years from now, like the works of Shakespeare are enjoyed today? Jennings didn't want to speculate that far into the future, but he admitted to still playing and liking the Final Fantasy games released for the Super Nintendo."
However, as to which game? Not GTA, not Final Fantasy. It'll be Tetris. That game will never go away, it's made the transition to every new platform that has come out since it's conception, and it will contiue to do so indefinitaly. Tetris' combination of simplicity and addictivness will give it staying power well into the time where GTA's game mechanic looks antiquated and silly.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
Actually you had to worry about that a lot. The First Folio was published after Shakespear's death by a group of his friends to help combat just that, and to cut down on the business of bad copies of his manuscripts being made. These things were great, imagine Hamlet re-written by the folks that make those howlingly bad subtitle for pirated chinese DVDs and you'll get the idea. Of course Will himself freely listed plots, characters and whole lines from his contemporaries, so who to say who would have benifited more from elizabethian copyright protection.
Not to be crass, but Ebert can suck it.
/My 2 cents, at least as valid as Ebert's when discussing video games.
He mentions that video games are typically just a waste of time; I would posit that movies are just as much a waste of time. It's like asking a classical music critic to judge whether or not a certain modern sculpture is art -- don't ask a movie critic about video games.
I've had plenty of "oh wow" moments in video games. I've also been affected emotionally in video games (which, I'm sure, was intended by the designers). I've also been stimulated to think critically about a topic by video games. All these things indicate that video games *can* be art.
Yes, there are artless videogames, just as there are artless movies and artless novels. There is also "bad" art out there, in every media. I believe that as video games continue to be developed, very many more of them will be intended as art pieces, and will succeed in being considered art.
Also, keep in mind that the movie industry is losing $$ to the videogame industry -- video games are eating away at film's cultural mindshare. Ebert, as a part of that industry, has a professional interest in promoting movies over video games.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There are many more fundamental differences between Shakespeare and GTA. GTA is a finished product, and apart from minor upgrades in performance like when you play a PS1 game on the PS2, it will look the same 100 years from now as it does when we play it today.
Shakespeare's works are only scripts and stage directions, requiring countless other artists and performers to flesh out the material into a finished product. Something like that evolves rapidly over time and in countless directions thanks to the talents of the people currently involved.
What Shakespeare on saw Hamlet's opening night may have been nothing like a recent performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the film version with Mel Gibson, the bunch of guys in jeans and t-shirts with Brooklyn accents who performed it in Central Park, or the mental imagery of the story experienced by someone reading the play out of a book. Those wildly different concepts were all Hamlet, but anyone playing "Vice City" now or in a ROM downloaded from future version of theunderdogs.org will hear the exact same music and voices, and see the same graphics.
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This is true, but the means to copy something then were not as widespread as it is now. You want to copy a Shakespeare play back then? Hopefully you're literate, which wasn't exactly the norm... How about ripping off Mozart? Well, you better be able to play as well as he can, considering there is no such thing as 'recording'.
In this day and age, exact duplicates of a work are insanely easy to mass produce. That is the biggest difference between the past and the present.
Shakespeare's plays were the prime assets of his theatrical company.
He was part owner of the Globe theater, remember, and he functioned under a patronage system that settled teritorial disputes privately.
Shakespeare's plays were never published in his lifetime.
The idea that plays could be read for pleasure, that English drama was something more than disposable popular entertainment scarcely exists before the death of Shakespeare.
I wonder if Mr. Ebert expects expects films to be viewable in their original media in 500 years. What with periodically-changing film sizes and speeds, and now digital video codecs, Ebert's own favorite art form doesn't seem particularly "eternal" either. In fact, just like video games, the only ways to appreciate old films are to 1) preserve the associated film player, or 2) convert the film to the new format. Sure, you could bust open the film reel, hold it up to a light, and look at it frame by frame, but that goes against the artist's intended viewing scenario, something Ebert considers extremely important.
Perhaps Ebert realizes all this, but thinks that the contents of the film (if not the physical medium) is safe from the ravages of time. After all, there are works 100 years old which can be enjoyed by film buffs even to this day!
Mr. Ebert might notice other points where video games are plainly different and not-at-all-identical to film:
Which brings me to my point: does Ebert intentionally ignore the obvious similarities between film and video games, or is he simply too ignorant of the history of video games to see them in the first place?