Game Art
Film critic Roger Ebert is one such skeptic. On his website in 2005, Ebert dismissed the idea of video games as art by saying they “simply can’t compare to great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.
“There’s a structural reason for that,” he added. “Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.”
Those are fightin’ words for game developers—especially since they came from someone partially responsible for bringing “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” to the big screen (a movie that could hardly be considered “high art”).
Roger Ebert does not think games
are art.
“I’m not going to try to guess what goes through Roger Ebert’s head, but there is certainly a media literacy problem at work here,” says Bogost, who, along with fellow developer Gonzalo Frasca, edits and maintains WaterCoolerGames.org (a “forum for the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education and other everyday activities outside the sphere of entertainment”).
“Some of us grew up with videogames; others didn’t. Just like every other medium, the previous generation has trouble grasping its legitimacy as an expressive form. This happened with the novel, with rock & roll, with comics. Over time, this will change.”
Adds Schafer: “Ebert says that games can never be art because they’re interactive. Huh? So when you’re watching a play, and it’s one of those plays where they interact with the audience, does it stop being art at that moment? Is that one, particular play not art, but the rest are?
“Games are art,” he adds. “If Marcel Duchamp can stick a urinal in a gallery and say it’s art, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say Okami is too.”
