Film critic Roger Ebert has been notorious amongst video gamers for writing off the form as being incapable of being art. Last year, he elaborated on his position and I responded with the following article (which is reprinted here). Now, I should note as a hopeful cinema studies scholar that Roger’s work pushed me to study film and I constantly find myself reflecting on his Great Movies books. However, I am also a hopeful media studies scholar, a field which includes video games, a form which I enjoy as both a player and a Ph.D. student (you can find a visual essay a produced on the Wii with two classmates here). That said, I disagree with Roger’s assessment of the medium and here are a few reasons why.
First, and I’m jumping to the halfway point of the essay here, as Roger is debating an analysis by USC’s Kellee Santiago during the first section of his piece. For Ebert, the accepted definition of art serves as the jumping off point for differentiating video games from art. Ebert begins with Plato’s definition that art is “the imitation of nature.” Isn’t the drive for immersion in video games concerned with imitating nature? Video game producers have become increasing concerned with photorealism and gestural play (games like Guitar Hero and Wii Tennis that seek to mimic real-life gestures). Couldn’t these aesthetic preoccupations be interpreted as a desire to imitate nature?
Ebert then goes on to cite a Wikipedia definition that differentiates game from art, as art “is more concerned with the expression of ideas.” Isn’t the popular game Bioshock (2007) an eight-hour exploration regarding morality? The player is yoked into an analysis of the dangers of free will (within the confines of the pre-determined narrative of a game) that is firmly tied to politics. Admittedly, there are prolonged moments of fighting adversaries and dodging attacks, but the narrative contained within the game is very much concerned with the expression of ideas, even going so far as to interrogate some (particularly the Ayn Rand desire for capitalist self-interest). Now, Ebert could contest that I have identified an outlier to the norm. That said, if we accept the Wikipedia definition, would a film like Transformers (2007) reach the definition of art? Do all films express ideas, making them art? How many texts practicing the expression of ideas does it take to turn a medium into an art form?
Ebert then proposes that he tends “to think of art as usually the creation of one artist,” implying that video games do not reach this definition because of the scope of their production teams. Yet, Hollywood films go through a similar production process. Thus, if a video game cannot be art because it goes beyond the ability of one creative person, the majority of films would not be considered art according to Ebert. For Ebert to try to trace back a film to one creative personnel (as he does with a tribal dance) is to take a time machine back to 1962 when Andrew Sarris proposed the auteur theory. It is a romantic gesture that ignores the actual workings of the studio system as documented by Thomas Schatz.
Ebert’s next point of analysis is that games cannot be art because the player can win and they have “rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.” Indeed, games can be won and they do have rules, but the majority of them are narratives. The tension between game play and story (much to the frustration of theorists attempting to grapple with video games as a narrative or ludic form) is part of the essence of most video games. In order for the player to keep progressing through the ludic passages of Bioshock, they require story to motivate them in the form of setting up a goal and to elaborate upon the world. For Ebert to assume games are only rules and winning overlooks the narrative aspect of games and game play.
Ebert ends his analysis that with the sentiment that art is a matter of taste and that Plato’s definition that art imitates nature is insufficient. For Ebert, art grows better as it “improves or alters nature through an [sic.] passage through what we might call the artist’s soul or vision.” For Ebert, the games Santiago proposes do not capture his taste and therefore cannot be art. I would propose he actually play the following games that might bolster Santiago’s claims better than the ones she chooses and revisit his analysis: Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), Fallout 3 (2008), and Heavy Rain (2010). Secondly, as I’ve already observed, how can the majority of films be considered as the expression of a singular artist? Film is, for the most part, the art of collaboration through which nature is altered by the talents of many artists.
Putting his theory into practice, he notes how Santiago’s analysis defines video games as “development, finance, publishing, marketing, education, and executive management” after noting “the only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.” Ebert’s closing statement, the resting of his case as he calls it, implies that video games cannot be art because they are profit driven. What, may I ask, is the bulk of Hollywood films? Let’s not be ignorant; when RKO hired Orson Welles to direct Citizen Kane (1941), it wasn’t to lose money on a film that would take decades to be recognized as a major aesthetic achievement. In the end, film and video games, as many of the video game scholars born out of cinema and media studies have documented, have multiple affinities. They are both media forms that are defined by narrative texts produced by multiple personnel with a profit motive. To call video games art is not the same as trying to call a baseball game art (baseball games do not rely on an authored narrative) nor is it a ridiculous gesture used to justify the passage of leisure time. Rather, the gesture is to validate a means of potential artistic expression. If a critic and historian of cinema can’t respect the parallel inherent in the similar position film occupied years ago, I’m not sure who can.
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