Blow-Back From Ebert's Latest Games Assertion

Last week's new diatribe from Roger Ebert on the merits of games had some people up in arms. Commentary ranged from the respectful at Ars Technica, to the dismissive statements at GameCritics. N'Gai Croal, of Newsweek's LevelUp, has a lengthy and thoughtful look at the issue from both sides. From his comments: "It's the right of someone with the maturity of an honest and articulate four-year-old to forget the history of his own favored art form and close his mind to the potential of another. In the meantime, those of us who care about the possibilities inherent in this medium will have to rely upon ourselves and one another to keep doing the heavy lifting necessary to suss out where the art of videogames lies; to determine how the craft can enhance that art; and to continue the fight to push this young medium from squalling infancy into graceful adulthood. Let's get cracking."

Comments

At least look at his argument

[DreadPiratePizz]

From the perspective of storytelling, videogames are in fact a poor medium for doing it, for reasons Ebert describes. The physical interactivity with a game world that videogames provide add nothing to a story, and in mediums such as film, the director and editor use decisions to guide the audience. Any story you can think of telling will always be more effective as a novel, play, or film, than as a videogame. Nearly every videogame story involves violence or physical conflict. Why? Because the story has to motivate the gameplay, and guess what the gameplay entails! Interaction is limited, so the stories are as well. Unless you want to use cutscenes or text... in which case you're using another medium.

So it depends on what you consider a videogame. Games like MGS3 are pretty artistic, but it's all conveyed through cutscenes. Nothing wrong with that, but the emotion and depth brough tforward there isn't possible using only interactive elements. It seems to me like the games that are the most artistic, are also the games that are least like GAMES.

Re:No big deal

[HTH NE1]

I don't get it, why care? Does everyone have to have a favorable view of games to keep them going now? By categorizing games as "not art" in the public mindset, those looking to censor them would no longer have to consider whether they have "serious artistic merit".

In case of emergency, RTFA

[shma]

I know someone's going to question N'Gai Croal's choice of words in the summary, so let me quote this from the debate Ebert had:

Barker: "I'm not doing an evangelical job here. I'm just saying that gaming is a great way to do what we as human beings need to do all the time -- to take ourselves away from the oppressive facts of our lives and go somewhere where we have our own control."
Ebert: Spoken with the maturity of an honest and articulate 4-year old.

Re:the answer is obvious

[GarethRWhite]

Hi vpetite. You're spot on with the observation about interactivity, but I wanted to ask you about this,

"Walter Benjamin wrote that photographs could not be considered art, because they were reproductions of the work, and no longer had the "aura" that true art contained."

That's certainly true about the aura of authenticity, but I'm not sure that he said they couldn't be considered art. I thought he was rather saying that the notion of art had to be revised,

"The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question - whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art - was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child's play as compared to those raised by the film."

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosop hy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

This is Benjamin's seminal - and highly referenced - piece, and well worth a read still now over 70 years later.

As far as I'm concerned there's no question about whether games can be art or not. For my taste, however, most games aren't in a similar way that most pop music and most Hollywood movies aren't.

I contend that the difficulties which film caused traditional aesthetics are mere child's play as compared to those raised by games.

(For the record, I've been professionally coding games for 7 years, and am currently a Master of Arts student, writing on game studies in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, and my dissertation is (preliminarily) called The Aesthetics of Embodiment in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. I sometimes blog about games and culture. See also the Digital Games Research Association for extensive research on video games.)