Are video games art? A response to Roger Ebert...

Though it seems that he realizes it is a can of worms best left sealed, Roger Ebert recently revisited the question "are video games art?" or, perhaps more accurately, "is video game creation an art form?"  Ebert, famously, has come down firmly on the "no" side of the fence.  In his new article (read it here), he elaborates some as a response to a speech at the recent TedxUSC event.  I'm not sure what prompted Ebert to take that speech so seriously, but it provides pretty easy fodder.  Other than Flower, which is ridiculously hard to describe in relation to its artistic impact on the player and observer, the examples given by the speaker are poor (and even downright weird).  Still, it gives Ebert, and now me, a jumping-off point.

I find it odd that the biggest detractors of video games as an art form come from a film background. Visual artists have embraced the medium, as have musicians and writers. Film critics, on the other hand, lead the charge in the "It is not art!" brigade. Stranger still to see that one of the prongs of Ebert's attack has to do with the fact that video games are a collaborative medium.

The fact is that as the industry has grown it has modeled itself after Hollywood. There are equivalencies for nearly every job done on a Hollywood set or in post-production. Directors, producers, writers, art designers, lighting experts, story board artists, sound men--these and more work on each project.

It is this community or artists and the lack of a singular controlling vision that Ebert sees as one of the reasons video games don't measure up to novels, painting, sculpture, and bridge-building.  He doesn't see the process as auteur-driven, and, truth be told, it usually isn't.  Of course, that fact models itself after Hollywood too.  The vast majority of film is made by committee and painted by numbers.  The best films are those that provide the support for the auteur theory.

Most video games a made for the lowest common denominator and have little redeeming value, but, consistently, the best games have a single person as the driving force, a designer who is the equivalent of the director of a film. He is the auteur of the medium and the best of them are famous within the gaming community--Miyamoto, Kojima, Schaeffer, Meier, Wright among them.  These auteurs rise above the pablum of a commercial, mainstream medium to create something that, at the very least, deserves consideration as "art."  At the worst, they are the industry's Spielbergs and Jacksons, auteurs blessed with a vision that appeals to the masses without pandering.

One of these auteurs is going to come up with a concept some day that will push the medium through the curtain of bias, and this argument will cease (or at least the "games are art" side will shift into the majority). When will that happen?  I'll avoid playing Nostradamus and say that I am not sure.

It occurs to me that one of the big problems facing a wider acceptance of video games as art is the lack of a truly critical journalistic voice.  There is nothing that serves as the video game version of Cahiers du Cinema.  There is no Truffaut, no Goddard, and likely there is not any such person in training anywhere at the moment.  Video game journalism remains little more than a marketing tool for the industry.  We write what is merely another version of the "thumbs up/thumbs down" dichotomy.  We are the literary equivalent of At the Movies and very few, if any, sites or magazines provide opportunity for a Goddard or Truffeau, or, hell, even a Ebert or Kael to arise.  Serious writers taking the medium seriously and writing powerfully--that will be the first hole in the dam.  

Will this happen in your lifetime or mine? Will we see a undeniable artist take the medium to a new level? Maybe not, but I would be very surprised if my young son and daughter didn't live to see that day.  

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