Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be Art

[OakTable]

I honestly just think Ebert's putting on his trollface and generating some lulz for himself while simultaneously stopping the flow of emails asking him to review video games. It's like when Stephen King called Stephanie Myer a bad writer (which caused a minor shitstorm amongst Twilight fans) but she was a more acceptable target.

 

[Grin]

Art.

At least their tag line gives an indication as such.

 

[Eyenixon]

That looks like that Electroplankton game for the DS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplankton

 

[TheGM]

I honestly just think Ebert's putting on his trollface and generating some lulz for himself while simultaneously stopping the flow of emails asking him to review video games. It's like when Stephen King called Stephanie Myer a bad writer (which caused a minor shitstorm amongst Twilight fans) but she was a more acceptable target.

to be fair though....Why is he talking smack about a Chidlrens book Writer for anyway.

I don't think movies are art.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

To be fair, she rights trashy vampire books for tween girls to swoon over.

Games need to focus on getting the mechanics right before they start worrying too much about being considered art.

 

[UniversalWolf]

Games need to focus on getting the mechanics right before they start worrying too much about being considered art.

True.

It's going to take a game that is deeply emotionally involving and that makes you look at some facet of human existence in a new way. I've played interactive fiction games (text adventures) that qualify, but beyond that...

So few games actually have any philosophy or observations about the world. I don't think the potential has been explored.

 

[Starseeker]

A comment mentioned FO, is that one of ours?

I decided to quote the whole thing because it's too much of a pain to look for a comment on that page.

By Jonas Kyratzes on April 17, 2010 6:52 AM

OK, this is going to be long.

I am an independent game designer. And for a very long time now, I have been arguing that games are art. I have also been making games that are generally perceived as art. They are not the most successful games in the world, they are not commercial, but they are definitely games.

Most of Santiago's arguments are weak, and her examples are less than excellent. You have responded to several of them quite well. But at no point have you said why games cannot be art. What's wrong with games? Why cannot they have the same emotional/aesthetic/intellectual/other impact that movies, books or paintings have? What makes it *inherently* impossible for them to do so?

Let us start at the beginning, with the definition of "games". We mean here digital games, of course; but even that is not enough of a definition. Is Tetris, a game about falling blocks, the same manner of thing as Fallout, the complicated story of the survivors of a post-apocalyptic world? These are essentially different creations: one is simply a simulation of falling blocks with a set of rules, the other has story, characters to interact with, a world to explore and understand, and choices to make. Just because they both run on a computer doesn't mean they are the same kind of thing. Now, some people might argue that Tetris *is* art, and I feel that this is their right, but that's a different question, and one to which I have no answer. I dislike saying what isn't art; my purpose is to show some things that *are* art.

Your comparison to chess is simply incorrect. Not all games consist of this simple player/opponent - win/lose mechanic. Not all games force you through this kind of binary logic: in many games you are required to come up with solutions to problems, and deal with the consequences (both in gameplay and in story). Sometimes the consequences are purely moral ones.

At the end of Fallout 1 and 2, for example, you are shown the ultimate consequences of your actions, years down the line. This is a deeply powerful sequence, the result of interactivity, and has nothing in common with chess or Mah Jong. A computer game is not the same as a board game.

(Defining what art is is tricky, of course, and people have been arguing over it for thousands of years. What I find very problematic, however, is the idea of defining art as how good something is, rather than what manner of thing it is. Surely a Nicholas Sparks novel is art? It's not particularly successful art, but surely we cannot entirely discount it from being art? It fails at being good, not at being art. Anyway, this is more of a sidebar.)

Let's move on. If I remember correctly, one of your basic objections to computer games as art is that art is the result of the artist's work and vision, and controlled by the artist. It's true that this is what makes art, but who do you think makes computer games? Game designers do, and game designers are artists. Maybe part of the problem is all the misleading advertising of some game companies - "a game in which you can do whatever you want!" and all that. But the truth is that everything that happens in a game only happens because a game designer chose to create the game that way. Of course interactivity allows a certain amount of unpredictability, but all that only happens with a framework that is designed with a purpose in mind. And in a way, that certain lack of absolute control by the artist exists in every artform, in the space between the artist and the person experiencing the art. People don't always understand or experience or treat art the way the artist would like them to. The artist creates a clearly defined framework, and the audience finds in it what they will.

But the framework is very much there, in games as well as in other art. And it has a definite source: not the programmers or the executives, but the designer and the producer. It's not that different from a movie, really. The fact that there's a cinematographer, or that some movies are ruined by executives, does not mean that film isn't an artform.

Just because games are interactive doesn't mean they're not art. Games are not *random*. The interactivity is part of the design, often the very essence of the design. And think of what it allows the designer to accomplish - it allows us to draw the player in, and make their choices be choices with consequences. It allows us to create an *experience* in a way that other artforms cannot accomplish. It is different to watch someone fly and to actually control flight yourself. And when the player is truly immersed, they are not just playing a 3D version of chess or Mah Jong - they are flying. Do you not see the possibility of an aesthetic experience there? Do you not see that we may be after more than just a simulation?

There's more. Many games have stories. In many of these stories, choices can be made. These choices are a lot more complicated than "go left" or "go right." Players can interact with characters, can choose what to say to them - and if the game is well-done, if it is good art, they can feel the same amount of emotional attachment to these characters as they can in a movie. More than that, they can feel even closer to these characters, because they feel that they truly talked to them.

Games allow us to tell stories that other artforms cannot, because they allow us to show choices and consequences in a truly unique way. The player walks into a town in which multiple parties are warring for control. Which side does he/she take? What will the consequences be for the characters, for the town itself? What is the moral thing to do? What is the expedient thing to do? The player is going to see, step for step, what the consequences of their actions will be. It's a lot more than just "I won" or "They won" or "Now there's a blue flag on the top of the screen."

This isn't theory, it's what really happens in games.

And even if the stories in some games aren't interactive, if you cannot make choices that alter what happens - don't you see the aesthetic and emotional potential of an artform that actually allows you to interact with a world, that allows you to experience a place as if you were truly there? I don't know why Santiago would pick something as crude and pathetic as "Waco Resurrection" when there is so much that is impressive and beautiful. Exploring the underwater city of Rapture in Bioshock, walking through the depressing and scarily beautiful landscapes around Chernobyl in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (related to but not based upon the wonderful Tarkovsky movie), or watching a Pegasus fly around its nest in Quest for Glory: Dragon Fire, these are emotional and aesthetic experiences that are quite unique, simply because they are actually interactive.

I'll be arrogant enough to cite one of my own games as an example now. I wrote a game called "The Museum of Broken Memories." It's set in what appears to be a museum, but is something more akin to a metaphor or a state of mind; it's hard to explain in a few words. Each room has exhibits, and each room allows you to travel into another part of the game, in which you experience a story fragment. It is, essentially, a game about war and the consequences of war, about the difficulty of moving on, and about the ability of art to set us free. (It involves no shooting of any kind.)

And it is absolutely essential that this story is told as a computer game. It is otherwise impossible to create the experience of walking through (well, clicking through) a museum, of being able to take your time to look at the individual exhibits and images (which all interrelate). It is impossible otherwise to allow the audience to experience the fragments in the order of their choosing, which is essential to the experience of being stuck in that museum. And, since the story fragments are all told in different styles and from the perspectives of a variety of individuals, it is essential for the player to actually *play* these story fragments, to move through them by choice, experiencing their worlds and stories. Without these interactive elements, the very concept of what the Museum is cannot be experienced.

I'll stop talking about my own game in a second, and I'm sorry if this sounds arrogant, but over the years I have been contacted by a whole bunch of people who had extremely powerful emotional experiences by playing the game, including the parents of soldiers, who felt that it really got to the heart of what had happened to their children. Is this not art? It may be flawed, no question about it, but if it's not art, what is it?

You seem to believe that the only focus of games is to win. This may be true of some games, and is certainly true of games like chess, but it's not generally true of all computer games. The rules in computer games are what allows them to be interactive - it's no more, in some ways, than the rule that in books the sentences ought to be printed one after the other. The rules allow the experience. But it's the experience we play for, not the rules or the winning. In fact, with many games, "winning" is entirely the wrong term. Would you say you "won" when you get to the end of a movie or book? No. Many games end when the story ends. You can get to the end of the game, but you didn't win some kind of contest, as in chess. You finished the game, like you finished the book.

"Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case."

Would you be surprised if a movie executive made that kind of list? Would you then discount film as a medium for art? The above list is anathema to many game designers, it represents everything that is wrong with the world today. But just because some people have - with good intentions or bad - hijacked the idea that "games are art" in order to sell more, that does not mean that games are not art. And it does not mean that there are not games out there right now, from fully commercial ones to small independent works, that truly make use of the medium to create an artistic experience.

Ebert: Your comment is very valuable.

As to your final question,: No, I would not be surprised if a movie executive made that kind of list. But I would be surprised if Bergman did.

 

[Sephis]

I honestly just think Ebert's putting on his trollface and generating some lulz for himself while simultaneously stopping the flow of emails asking him to review video games. It's like when Stephen King called Stephanie Myer a bad writer (which caused a minor shitstorm amongst Twilight fans) but she was a more acceptable target.

to be fair though....Why is he talking smack about a Chidlrens book Writer for anyway.

I don't think movies are art.

when your getting 12 year old girls hot and bothered over your weird dream fetish stuff I think you paint a target on yourself.

Art is something used to convey a message or draw out an emotion through various individual or combined forms of media.

If movies and novels can be considered artistic you better believe a game can be. In fact you can witness more of the artistic vision in a game then a movie.

 

[UniversalWolf]

If movies and novels can be considered artistic you better believe a game can be. In fact you can witness more of the artistic vision in a game then a movie.

I agree with you, but I don't think anyone has managed to exploit the potential of the medium yet.

 

[jamotide]

If this was written on a forum by some poster he would be called a troll and often banned.
He says games can never be art, then why bother criticizing the quality, quality should be irrelevant then.
And most of all, this guy considers movies art? In that case I prefer games over art, since any game is more stimulating than movies, where the brain is often less active than during sleep.

 

[Eyenixon]

What kind of shitty movies do you watch?

 

[alec]

You guys do know that pretty much everything you've put forward in this thread was actually addressed by Ebert with far better arguments?

I like the idea that art is primarily the product of the vision of one man. A cathedral may have been built by hundreds of men, the vision came from the architect. I know that this is not a bulletproof argument, seeing how musicians work or movie sets or ateliers, but even then you always have a dominant personality who tends to get his vision, his message across. Think Lennon in The Beatles. Think Woody Allen in his Woody Allen flicks.
When this is the case and monetary issues are of secondary importance to the creative process, I tend to see the end product as art. This can be bad art, mind you, but it'll be art.

It all goes awry when the creative process is no longer guided by the vision of the dominant creative personality present, but rather of finances, reaping income and media that generally do not mix very well with art (like commercials, advertisements). If you now say: Andy Warhol used advertisements and turned them into art, tee-hee, you've not been reading properly. That was one man with a vision and the media he used were a statement. With games they are a necessity because without them there would be no game.

It also seems hard to grasp for you youngsters that it does not work both ways:
good art that can be easily copied and distributed like music can become a simple mass-produced product, easily accessible for everyone who has the cash. As such good art can make huge profits. Can.
That does not mean that anything that can be easily copied and distributed and becomes popular and makes huge profits automatically becomes art. I'd say it seldom does.

Ask yourself: what was the driving force behind this product? Was it simply making tons of cash, like the gaming industry and 99% of the movie and music industry? Than chances are you are not dealing with art.
In the world of literature there is, for instance, a clear distinction between literature (vision of - usually - one man) and easy reading (vision of the publisher, the market or the audience executed by a writer for easy winnings). You could say the first writer has a calling, while the second one has bills to pay and mouths to feed (or simply wants a new car). The reason why they create is entirely different and so is the product.

In the end, of course, it doesn't matter. It's like Ebert writes: if it makes you feel any better to regard the games you play as a form of art, then you should go right ahead and do so. But maybe you should ask yourself why it is so goddamn important for you to have them be considered artforms. Aren't they fun as is? Don't they take up enough time and space already? Do you seriously want to read fat tomes full of boring essays on, for instance, game semiotics or a comparison between the work of Milton, Hegel and Pong?

My mom used to call her horrible cooking a form of art and - loo and behold - her naivité made her smile.

Humans are easily satisfied.

 

[Ausir]

I like the idea that art is primarily the product of the vision of one man.

I don't. Why should the reception of something as art or not change based on whether it was the vision of one man or a cooperative effort?

And many great movies are great as a result of a collaboration between at least two people, the director and the writer.

 

[alec]

Sure, cooperation, I totally follow you there. And a team of men can share the same vision and work towards it. As a team. That's already addressed in my post above, by the way.

There really is so very little to say about this topic which is funny seeing as how it constantly pops up. Games just aren't considered art by anyone who takes art serious. And people who take art seriously simply do not care for little brats who would have a hard time talking about art for more than an hour without making complete and utter fools of themselves.

If you really think a game like Planescape Torment deserves to stand next to Mozart's Requiem, Walt Withman's Leaves of Grass and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, then you are simply missing something.
If you really think Fallout is fit to be compared with things like Shakespeare's plays, Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistene chapel and the Canterbury Tales, then maybe you should read and watch those things again, and this time very carefully, not half asleep like in class.

There really is no discussion. There is no theory but the game rules, the technical framework of the programmers and the language of money. I never hear anything about a gaming grammar, for instance. I never hear anything about game symbolism and the ways to interpret these game semiotics. I've never read an essay delving into the abundance of interpretative techniques to deconstruct a game. I never hear about these things because games do not work that way. If you deconstruct a game you find this: game rules and lots of cosmetics to make these game rules not look like the simple math they are. And that's it.

 

[UniversalWolf]

You guys do know that pretty much everything you've put forward in this thread was actually addressed by Ebert with far better arguments?

That's why I posted this topic in the first place: because too many people just viscerally react to Ebert's criticism without taking the time to try to refute it; and it requires serious thought to refute it.

If this was written on a forum by some poster he would be called a troll and often banned.

Thing is, Ebert's not just "some poster." He's a serious critic with a lifetime of respected work to his name. Blowing off his arguments by saying, "Well that's just your opinion and I disagree" is inadequate.

I guess the first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you care whether video games are art. If you do care, then Ebert is exactly the kind of guy who needs to be convinced.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

Ebert doesn't consider most movies art so expecting him to consider any video game art is a bit ridiculous, especially considering he isn't much of a gamer. Basically he believes that if it isn't high art, it isn't art at all.

It's going to take a game that is deeply emotionally involving and that makes you look at some facet of human existence in a new way. I've played interactive fiction games (text adventures) that qualify, but beyond that...

So few games actually have any philosophy or observations about the world. I don't think the potential has been explored.

I agree and I think Ebert got lucky with his statement that said something similar. I mean the fact that he's changed his opinion from games can't be art to games won't be art in our lifetime shows that his research has at least informed him a little. I think that part of the problem is that there aren't many good writers in the game design field and not enough developers who are interested in exploring deeper themes (the ESRB's A rating doesn't help anything).

There really is so very little to say about this topic which is funny seeing as how it constantly pops up. Games just aren't considered art by anyone who takes art serious. And people who take art seriously simply do not care for little brats who would have a hard time talking about art for more than an hour without making complete and utter fools of themselves.

You mean the jackasses who consider this shit, this shit, and this shit art? Gonna have to say that their opinions aren't worth a whole lot, least of all when it comes to excluding anything from being considered art. Art is an extremely nebulous term and the more you subjectively dismiss things which are not significantly different from pieces you do consider art, the more you look like a pretentious doucebag.

There really is no discussion. There is no theory but the game rules, the technical framework of the programmers and the language of money. I never hear anything about a gaming grammar, for instance. I never hear anything about game symbolism and the ways to interpret these game semiotics. I've never read an essay delving into the abundance of interpretative techniques to deconstruct a game. I never hear about these things because games do not work that way. If you deconstruct a game you find this: game rules and lots of cosmetics to make these game rules not look like the simple math they are. And that's it.

People have deconstructed the plots of games before. Hell, the gameplay of visual novels and text-based adventure games is all writing so it's not like there isn't anything there to work with. Yes, most games have more to them than just the plot but not all of them do (for example, visual novels don't). What makes a visual novel any less art than a book?

Thing is, Ebert's not just "some poster." He's a serious critic with a lifetime of respected work to his name. Blowing off his arguments by saying, "Well that's just your opinion and I disagree" is inadequate.

Ebert isn't an art critic, he's a movie critic and he doesn't play enough games (don't know if he plays any these days) to really make any sort of judgement about games in general. Hell, his original reason for why games aren't art was interactivity, a point which he's backed off of. It doesn't help any that instead of choosing a good argument about the subject he chose some random youtube video of an idiot with a shitty presentation that some other idiot on his blog sent him. I don't think that Ebert is looking for a serious discussion, I think he just wanted to complain about something and then complain about people complaining about him complaining about it (as he always does when he brings up his "videogames are not art" crap).

Really it's all about saying, "My favorite form of entertainment is better than yours! Neener neener neener!" just like it was when people said that film wasn't art. Really, if you like that form of entertainment when who gives a shit whether or not people want to call it art or make up ridiculous reasons why it's not, most of which apply to other forms of accepted art.

 

[alec]

Art isn't entertainment per se.



You also fail to see the bigger context of the "shitty" art you mentioned. The cultural climate at the time. You also do not seem to take into account the philosophy behind these works and you completely forget that these belong to an oeuvre which gives a bigger meaning to each single work of art these artists made. You fail to understand how an artist is in constant dialogue with reality and other art. You fail to see how art transforms and interprets reality. You fail to see the extra baggage it contains, how art is layered like an onion. And above all you still do not realize that not all music is art, that not all movies are art, that not all books are art, that not all paintings are art, that even in the classic media professors and critics make distinctions between art and crap. And finally you fail to see that the whole philosophy behind gaming is economics and consumerism. What game has ever given you a deep and profound insight in life comparable to, let's keep it simple, the classic Greek philosophers? What game has ever INTENTIONALLY tried to be anything but a game? 'Cause that's art, mate. Let's see how much you enjoy your artform if you buy New Vegas and your dear artists have gone dada on you and filled your dvd box with nothing but dried up rat guts. Will you be able to appreciate such a bold artistic statement?

 

[generalissimofurioso]

Killer7 was pretty artistic using alec's standards.

Plus it had severed heads that talk to you with emoticons and Mexican wrestler assassins.

 

[.Pixote.]

Would anyone consider shit in a can to be art…well Italian artist Piero Manzoni did, but it was an exercise in skepticism, but nowadays those cans sell for $200,000 US. They were titled "Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.

"It is a joke, a parody of the art market, and a critique of consumerism and the waste it generates."—Stephen Bury

So are computer games art – no – just as a car isn’t art, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful and interesting. Nice tin by the way.

 

[Ausir]

In the world of literature there is, for instance, a clear distinction between literature (vision of - usually - one man) and easy reading (vision of the publisher, the market or the audience executed by a writer for easy winnings). You could say the first writer has a calling, while the second one has bills to pay and mouths to feed (or simply wants a new car). The reason why they create is entirely different and so is the product.

Not really, it's not as if both these reasons cannot coexist. Or are you saying that only books that no one buys and reads are art?

Sure, cooperation, I totally follow you there. And a team of men can share the same vision and work towards it. As a team. That's already addressed in my post above, by the way.

And this is how it works with video games, just like with movies, so I don't really see your (or Ebert's) point here.

Anyway, much of it comes down to whether only high art is art. To you and Ebert obviously it is. To me, not necessarily (why the fuck even have the term "high art" if you're going to call only that "art")?