It was many years ago that Roger Ebert first claimed, controversially, that video games are not, and never will be, a form of art. (He wrote about the subject on a number of occasions since then, at times giving a little more credit to video game development as a creative endeavor but ultimately maintaining his stance. I don't want to summarize the whole drama, which occurred over several years, but you can still find his articles if you go out and search for them.) The typical response from a subset of video game enthusiasts was, and still is, to treat him like Hitler for having such an opinion. Although Ebert hadn't said much about video games since 2010, people never did seem to shut up about it, and his recent death has prompted a revival of the tired debate.
And, to put it bluntly, I'm a bit disgusted by how that debate is going. I've always thought that the question of video games as an art form was an interesting thing to discuss, but I've never been on a crusade to prove one point or the other, because I have things to do and because I never really thought it was a crusade-worthy issue. Some people, however, were seriously upset by Ebert's opinion... so upset, in fact, that they never got over it, and went on Twitter after his death to get the last word. To be honest, the problem with this behavior isn't that it's tasteless or childish, which it is. The problem is that they really do care this much. The problem is that they're so insulted by the idea of a video game being less culturally relevant than a famous painting or a piece of music — or even a critically acclaimed film — that they spend more time arguing about it than actually playing the video games they supposedly enjoy. They think it's their duty to defend video games from these accusations of — I don't even know what — being toys, perhaps, which is what they are.
The people who have devoted so much time to debating with Ebert on this issue, both during the last few years of his life and in the few days following his death, have almost certainly lost their marbles. They've also, I think, lost sight of what matters. Remember when gameplay was more important to video games than artistic integrity and all this other stuff? Remember when we used to play video games for fun, despite the video game's generally bad reputation as a mind-rotting waste of time for losers, without spending so much time worrying about what other people thought of our hobby?
Remember when the success of a game was dependent on more than the advertising budget because developers actually released demos instead of relying entirely on trailers consisting only of pre-rendered scenes and dubstep? Remember when video games were actually hard because the developers knew that overcoming a difficult challenge is more satisfying than watching a movie with some intermittent gameplay sequences and frequent quick time events? Some people don't, because they were too busy making fun of people like me before video games were cool, and because they never actually played a video game before the release of Mass Effect 2 (or whatever super-mainstream, over-hyped, space-marine-themed title convinced them to give video games a try).
Times have changed, and it would seem that a lot of today's so-called "gamers" can't enjoy their video games unless everyone accepts their hobby as something deep and meaningful. They're not happy unless everyone on Earth is aware, and agrees, that video games are works of art that deserve to be treated as works of art. Anyone with a dissenting opinion is dismissed as ignorant.
I've always supported the notion of video games as art, in theory. However, after seeing the absurdly desperate manner in which this position has been defended against the inevitable skepticism, by those who dare to call themselves "gamers" even though they obviously don't like games enough to enjoy them without external validation of their hobby's importance, I'm beginning to wonder if I should distance myself from these people entirely. At the very least, for the sake of clarification, I feel the need to write this addendum to my earlier post about video games as art.
Although I did write, in that earlier post, that I don't see a reason to explicitly exclude the medium from the definition of art, I do recognize that most video games just don't fit the bill. Perhaps only a few of them do. Perhaps none, if your definition of art requires that the art in question be up to the standards set by great writers, painters, composers, and performers in the past. While I've technically taken a position opposite that of Ebert, in arguing that games can be works of art in principle, I don't get offended when someone tells me that my favorite video game isn't a work of art. Even if I disagree, it's hard to care, since I don't play video games for their artistic value; I play them because they're fun. I argued that video games can be art for the sake of argument only, and I'm fully aware that we rarely see a video game that can be artistically valuable (in the same way that a movie is artistically valuable) while simultaneously being a good game.
Many will tell you that video games, as a rule, absolutely are an art form, but that this art form is at such an early stage of development that it has yet to be appreciated. To be honest, I think this is ridiculous; the video game itself is not a form of art, but rather a set of rules. In its most basic form, a video game is similar to a traditional game, like checkers, except that its rules are enforced by a computer instead of the players themselves. If and when a video game is appreciated as a work of art, it's almost always because some form of artistically creative work has been blended with that set of computer-enforced rules that defines what a video game is.
MoMA curators might disagree, as they chose some rather simplistic games like Tetris and Pac-Man for their video game collection, but the reason for their inclusion (as "outstanding examples of interaction design") is not exactly consistent with the typical justifications for treating video games as works of art. It seems to me that most video game enthusiasts would point instead to games with complex stories, visual aesthetics, well composed music, and skilled vocal performance. In the absence of these things, a video game might be an example of great design — and I can certainly appreciate that — but it's not the type of game that anyone cares to discuss when the "video games as art" debate is had. To fit the definition of "art" that people normally use in this context, a game needs to be beautiful, moving, and
worthy of critical analysis beyond a simple commentary on its gameplay.
In other words, the idea of the "video game as art" most often refers to a hybrid medium, and the video games most often placed in this category are those which imitate or incorporate other existing art forms. What makes the video game different from those existing art forms is its ability to immerse the player, and to allow the player to become a part of the experience instead of an observer. So while gameplay is important, you do need something other than gameplay if you want to convey any kind of meaning. More importantly, the final result needs to be cohesive. The inclusion of a story alone does not make the game itself a work of art unless the story is truly interactive; when the gameplay is merely broken up by occasional cutscenes, you might as well have made a movie instead. And most story-driven games fail in exactly this way.
For these reasons, I would say that video games can be art, and that such games do exist, but I don't think they're the majority. Most games are just games, to me, and even those who think I'm wrong — even those who would argue that all video games are art by definition — would surely concede that only a few of them are good art. (You can say that film is an art form, but no one says with a straight face that the average action movie is a work of art, so there's no reason to do the same for a medium whose status as an art form is already disputed at a fundamental level.)
I disagree with Ebert in principle, but as I see it, everything he wrote was entirely reasonable. He wasn't telling us that video games are garbage or that they shouldn't be enjoyed; his argument was based mostly on his understanding of how "art" is defined (which, I should mention, is rather subjective). He didn't seem to think highly of video games overall, but he was respectful. Perhaps he was more respectful to his opponents than they were to him; some of them reacted with such anger that one might think video games were their religion and Ebert had insulted their prophet.
Perhaps we should have simply disregarded his opinion, on the grounds that he admitted to having neither any exposure to video games nor any desire to change this, just as one would disregard a video game critic who says "movies are not art" without ever having watched one. But it was still an opinion he was allowed to have. Furthermore, no one should have demanded that he give video games a try, in order to validate his opinion, when he'd already decided that he wasn't interested in doing any such thing. You don't have to spend dozens or hundreds of hours on a hobby to know whether it's worth your time. I've never tried collecting stamps but I'm pretty sure I'd never enjoy it.
