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The Epic Ebert Videogame Debate
Via Kotaku, a column at Ebert.com going into some depth on the are-games-actually-art debate. Ebert engaged in a public debate on the subject at last week's Conference on World Affairs. From the article: "Going in to the videogame panel, I'd been hoping the audience (mostly students) would be fired up about the subject and challenge the panelists, but they were unfortunately pretty passive. Maybe they were intimidated by the rather formal (for Boulder) theater setting, I don't know. Ebert began by explaining why he felt a game (particularly the shoot-shoot, point-scoring kind) was not an experience equivalent to that of reading a great novel like, say, 'The Great Gatsby,' because games don't delve very deeply into what it means to be human."
Why is this even a debate? One of the definitions from dictionary.com for art is listed as "The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium."
Going by that definition, videogames are MORE APTLY called art than a photograph, painting, sculpture, or anything else considered art by the mainstream. If you consider that a videogame combines the elements of sounds, colors, forms, movements, AND other elements for the production of the beautiful in a graphic medium, it seems logically sound to count at least some as art.
Of course all videogames aren't art. It's the same concept behind not considering a headshot art, or some jackass banging his hands on a piano as art.
This debate is asinine.
"...games don't delve very deeply into what it means to be human."
So Max Payne didn't delve into how people manage (or fail to manage) grief? And Deus Ex didn't force you to face the moral out come of your actions?
There are plenty of games out there that deal directly and indirectly with human emotions, ethics and morals. IMO, that is dealing with what it means to be human.