I Meant To Write This A Long Time Ago

BEWARE: PHILOSOPHY AHEAD
The following article is the most verbose and pretentious thing I’ve written on this site.  It’s not how I would ever write a movie review, but it’s almost exactly how I would’ve written a philosophy of art paper back in my college days.  If you’re interested in the topic at hand, please try and bear with me.  I promise, none of my actual reviews will be like this.

If you've spent any time trolling the interwebs for movie reviews, you've almost certainly discovered a man named Roger Ebert long before you found my modest little blog.  That's because Roger Ebert is an excellent, critically lauded movie critic, and has been an excellent movie critic for a long time. Hell, he was famous for being a movie critic even before the internet existed.  Imagine that!

But if you've spent time reading movie reviews on the internet, you're probably also aware of the firestorm surrounding one of Ebert's most controversial opinions.  He has said, several times, that video games are not and will never be art.  And while I am a cinephile like Ebert, I have also been a gamer since middle school and, as you might imagine, I disagree. But I should say at the start that my agenda in writing this extends beyond the silly desire of a young gun to one-up one of the most venerable figures of the previous generation. As a lover of both video games and movie, I would love to see someone finally make a genuinely good video game movie (Metal Gear Solid is allegedly in pre-production, so fingers crossed that they don't butcher Hideo Kojima's masterpiece), but I don't think that can happen until the high-ups in Hollywood take games seriously as an art. So what I am about to write is directed just as much at everyone in the film world who has written off video games as it is at Mr. Ebert in particular.

Just, don't get me started...

I should also say that I almost didn’t have to write this at all, as Robert Brockway over at cracked.com wrote an excellent piece on the issue a few months back, in which he said many of the things I would be inclined to say (fair warning: I try to keep the language in my writing PG on this blog. Mr. Brockway is somewhere between a PG-13 and an R). But I think that as a student of both film history and the philosophy of art, I can make a few points that Mr. Brockway did not discuss.

So, on to the topic at hand. Mr. Ebert has made his claim on several separate occasions.  To my knowledge, the two most recent were in April of this year and July of 2007. And his position is worded slightly differently in each.  In the latter he says that anything can be art, but video games can never be “high art,” as he understands it.  In the former, he says that maybe ‘never’ is extreme, but “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

I’m not sure what to make of these two claims, but as far as I can see there are three main ways to interpret Mr. Ebert’s position: Either (1) Video games are in such a stage of infancy as a medium that it will be indefinitely long before they become art, (2) By saying games are not art, Mr. Ebert is really saying they are bad art, in the same way that crotchety old curmudgeon types say rap isn’t music, or (3) there is something inherent in the nature of video games (philosophers might say there is something ontological) that prohibits them from being in the same category as painting, sculpture, film, music, etc.

At a glance (1) might seem to be in line with Mr. Ebert’s statements this past April. But it doesn’t seem like a reasonable position to take for someone who knows film history, as I’m sure Mr. Ebert does. There are video gamers today who are under the age of ten. These people have life expectancies upwards of 90 years. And if you know film history, you know that’s just about how long it took for cinema to go from a cheap sideshow attraction to The Godfather.  (2) might seem in line with Mr. Ebert’s statements from 2007. But he admits to never having played video games. Thus, his making such a damning, wide-sweeping evaluative statement about the medium would make him, for lack of a better word, kind of a jerk. But I don’t think Mr. Ebert is a jerk.

So, both because I have great personal respect for Mr. Ebert and because (as I mentioned before) it’s good form to give one’s opponent in a debate the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to assume he didn’t mean to be understood as saying (1) or (2). That leaves (3), which if you read the articles I’ve linked to, I think you’ll see gels nicely with most of what Mr. Ebert has to say.

So what should we say about (3)?  If Mr. Ebert indeed thinks that something categorically prohibits video games from being art, it is almost certainly that they are interactive.  He comes back to this point several times in those two articles. For instance, “I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.” And again, “Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.” To this I have several responses. 

First, as a simple matter of fact, story-telling in video games is not as open-ended as Mr. Ebert might think. Yes, the player controls the protagonist(s). Yes, the player chooses which comically large weapon the player uses to blow up the zombies. But in most games, major plot points are pretty much set in stone. Yes, the player can fail at the game in which case the hero “dies” before s/he completes the quest. But when that happens the player doesn’t suddenly take control of the guy’s wife and kids as they sit around at his funeral. The player just gets another chance to advance towards the pre-scripted ending. In many ways, the major plot points in a story-telling video game are just as inevitable as those in a movie or novel; the only way for them to not happen is if the audience fails to make it that far. Someone not having the gaming skills to finish Final Fantasy VII is like that person not having the reading skills to finish Paradise Lost.  Yes, Mr. Ebert is correct to point out that you can “win” at video games. But (in storytelling modes of video games, at least) it’s not really like the other side can win. You win at video games in much the same way that you win at watching movies if you can get through Gone With The Wind without a break.

Second, even in games that are more open-ended, such as so-called massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, what about the parts of the interactive framework that cannot be changed by the audience? Imagine, for example, an intricate chess set that had been carved by hand out of marble. Even if the act of playing chess were closer to sport than art, would the board and pieces not be art? Why then would a Hydralisk, crafted impeccably out of 1’s and 0’s rather than marble, not be art? 

See? Bee-ooh-tee-full

But ultimately, I just don’t buy the claim that nothing interactive can be art. If you’ve ever been to a modern art museum, you’re familiar with the concept of installation art, in which an important component of the artwork is the order and pace at which the audience chooses to experience it. We should also note that Chris Marker (director of the obscure art-house sci-fi cult classic “La Jetee”), for instance, spent a significant portion of his career making interactive art on CD-ROM. And if that’s too new-agey for your taste, what about improvisational theater?  Are actors and directors only artists if they work within a rigid script and without any input from the audience? How about the politically-motivated mode of theater developed by Brazilian director Augusto Boal, which seeks to do exactly what Mr. Ebert disparages. That is, present a tragedy to the audience and then allow them to go back and fix things to prevent the tragedy. The idea here is for the artistic statement not to be the message of the original tragedy but rather the message that people have the ability to improve their lot. I happen to agree with Mr. Ebert that, in these situations, there is a sense in which the audience becomes the artist. But unlike him, if this is done skillfully, I don’t see how it intrinsically detracts from the art-hood of the work.

I hope I’ve contributed something useful to this debate. I have taken Roger Ebert’s most recent statements about the status of video games as non-art and interpreted them as favorably to him as possible. Then I’ve shown that, even on these interpretations, there are some important things Mr. Ebert may have overlooked. Even if I’m wrong, though, and video games are never art, I will continue to enjoy them and take meaning from them, as I do with movies. Now, for the love of art, will someone please make a video game movie that doesn’t suck?