Roger Ebert tells video gamers to get off his lawn

I’m a little late on the ball here - two months and ten days late, to be precise - but I have recently had my attention called to an article Roger Ebert wrote for his Chicago Sun-Times blog in which he says, quoth:

“No video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

A little elitist, no? Ebert already demonstrated long ago that he was losing it when he gave the first Harry Potter movie a four-star review.

But this is too much. This isn’t just losing it. This is the equivalent of an old man standing on his lawn with a shotgun, yelling at passersby to stay off the grass.

Even in response to the most explicitly arty video games, Ebert sees absolutely no merit. Sayeth Ebert, of the game Braid:

“You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.”

Braid is a game which is trying to make an artistic statement. “Time” is clearly a theme interwoven throughout, and it comments heavily on its affects on memories, relationships, and people in general. The fact that the game has a mechanic which allows you to go back in time or “take back a move” is exactly why it’s art. It’s a great example of a game using its interactivity as another element of storytelling - using its own mechanics to reinforce its themes. It’s not just “taking back a move,” it’s adding another layer - it allows the player to interact with a created world, and it uses the methods of that player’s interaction as a way to express itself.

And it’s my opinion that that’s f###ing brilliant. That’s as incredibly innovative as moving pictures was 100 years ago. That’s not just changing an existing art form: it’s adding an entire level of experience that never existed. Ebert’s comment comparing video games to chess is bafflingly ignorant and, besides, totally unrelated to the point. Sure you can’t take back a move in chess, but that’s like saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to punch someone in a boxing match because punching is unacceptable in soccer. It’s a totally different game, and the two have nothing to do with each other.

On top of that Ebert’s missing so much of what video games do that physical games don’t - which is that video games create an entire world, including visual, aural, story, and dialogue aesthetics, all of which - at least in good games - work together to create a dramatically and intellectually effective experience. Denying the legitimacy of all of that simply because it incorporates a level of interaction completely ignores the beauty of intelligent game design.

It’s sad, really. I used to love Roger Ebert. Growing up, my family would buy every year’s edition of his Movie Yearbook and I would read every review in it, and then go back and read all of the interviews, essays, and glossary definitions. He was a smart man who loved movies and who had enough of a sense of humor to know not to take them too seriously: he loved comedies as much as dramas, and while he thought Citizen Kane was the greatest movie of all time, he was also capable of realizing that fluff like The Goonies should still be respected as a decent film. He could be both funny and thoughtful, cutting and respectful. He was a great critic.

Though at the end of the day I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been argued about before, and I’m not saying anything more eloquent then Yahtzee already said here. Most of all, though, I agree with this guy: who cares? Why does it matter? If a person has a dramatic experience through a video game, nobody can take that away, regardless of their semantic opinion on the definition of “art.” Art is what you want it to be. Well, to a degree. I just saw the musical American Idiot, and I have to say, if you like that, there’s something wrong with you.