Roger Ebert Backs Down On Video Games As Art

Jhyrryl writes "Roger Ebert has again posted about video games. It's an apology of sorts, for having publicly said that games are not art. He wrote, 'I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games. ... My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times.'"

Comments

Early failure leads to later triumph

[suso]

Given that the man is 68 years old, has been doing movie reviews for a long time and probably one of his first experiences with video games as E.T. for the Atari 2600. I can't say I blame him for having his opinion set in stone for a while. Good to see that he's come around.

Re:He Did No Such Thing

[Silverhammer]

Roger Ebert has always stuck me as a very humorless man. He finds no real joy in anything. Gene Siskel and then Richard Roeper always provided the smiles and laughs on their TV show, while Ebert just sat and glared. And now that he's been forced by illness to turn inward and spend more time with his own thoughts, he's just gotten even nastier.

Re:He Did No Such Thing

[eldavojohn]

Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. Going to have to disagree with that one. Given his loony statements about children in the US wearing US flag t-shirts on cinco de mayo ...

People can still be brilliant and yet get other things so painfully wrong you think they're Kim Peek or an idiot savant. Although I find his stances in other realms loathsome, his movie reviews and books on movies nearly mandatory reading for enhancing your appreciation of movies. If ever there were a finer or more well known movie critic, name them. I'm not going to deny this and it's not like this is the only case where this happens. I have Orson Scott Card spouting idiot political drivel in some sort of LDS worshipping context yet I really enjoyed his novels as a kid. This has happened for a long time with perhaps the most extreme case being Knut Hamsun. Yeah it makes me think less of them and their opinions on matters unrelated to their work but it doesn't entirely remove the acknowledgment they deserve in their field.

weak arguments

[trb]

In general, I enjoy Ebert, and I'm not a gamer. I have no horse in this race.

I think Ebert's arguments here are very weak, for example:

1. He says "That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games." He already claims that he has not seen the past and present of gaming, it makes no sense to suppose that the future of gaming might change his mind.
2. He says that if you could change the ending to Romeo and Juliet, then it wouldn't be art. Consider change by addition, rather than by substitution. So Romeo and Juliet is art, but Romeo and Juliet with a bag hanging off its side is not art? What if I remove the bag, leaving the original? Have I restored its status as art? If a game contains 100 new visual masterworks and 100 new musical masterworks and a 100 levels where I frag zombies, is that art? At all?

A game is clearly a form of expression, and a media container. I don't see how you can argue that the container can never contain art.

Re:He Did No Such Thing

[depsax]

As a ten-time attendee at EbertFest -- formerly known as "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival" -- and having observed him hosting the festival, and having chatted with him on several occasions, I would say that he is the antithesis of "humorless". No one I have ever met gets more joy out of being at the movies and being with people who enjoy movies.