Let’s Kill The “Video Games are Art” Debates

Let’s put all the “video games are art” debates to rest, everybody.

Roger Ebert finally threw up the white flag on the whole video games as art debate and basically admitted what we knew all along: he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Ebert is my dude and all, and easily the most renowned and respected movie critic there is, but when he dropped the infamous “games can never be art” line on the world he turned into the bad guy from Ratatouille for gamers everywhere. Just like Anton Ego though, it appears Mr. Ebert knows when to stand up from the table and just walk away.

“I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.” he said in a new blog post dedicated to the topic. He never really retracts his statement, choosing to instead clarify that games may “someday” be art, but he does acknowledge that he knows very little about gaming. The damning part about the post is how he admits to not just having no desire to play games, but dodging them in the heat of the debate partly to avoid being proved wrong. In the end he caps it off simply: “I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place.”

I’m not here to bash the man, though. Bioshock designer Ken Levine in the newest issue of Game Informer criticized Gamers for getting so worked up over someone outside the medium. With good reason. Roger Ebert is a movie critic, which puts his credibility on the subject somewhere between Wolfgang Puck and the white guy with the fro who paints on PBS.

The whole “video games as art” debate needs to be put to rest. You have people arguing over semantics when art is supposed to be the opposite. Yes, you can slap a dictionary definition on it, but that ruins the the entire point what art is and does. Art is something presented to you that makes you feel, whatever that feeling may be. That means whether it’s Kanye West rapping about his dick or Michelango’s Sistine Chapel, whatever moves you emotionally in anyway is art. It’s about getting across something that only that can only been conveyed a certain way.

Now my name’s not Webster, but I feel like just being human makes my explanation as good as anyone else’s. This also makes Roger Ebert’s as good as mine or anybody’s. It’s completely subjective what is and what is not art. When the definition of something can be argued, it’s the kind of concept that has no business being defined in the first place. It’s definitely not worth flooding some guy’s blog over.

I thought we were past kissing everyone else’s ass as an industry. If Adam Sessler said Citizen Kane wasn’t art you’d maybe get a chuckle out of Ebert, assuming he’s still listening past the “wasn’t”. My gamers, we don’t need everyone else’s approval anymore. People who are still living in the stone age where video games are just a children’s fad and black people can’t be President are the weird ones here, and anything past a chuckle and “the crazy look” is giving them more credit then they deserve.

Help me out here. Let this be the swan song for “video games as art” articles. In reality, we’re the only people who make it a debate, and we’re pretty big deal now. Let them say what they want. I take pleasure in knowing that I can enjoy Blade Runner and Mass Effect all the same. My boy Ebert is just missing out.

*Remember the time: Jaleel’s workin day and night to bring you the off the wall Combo Breaker every Friday. It would be dangerous to miss out this time around. You’ve got to be there.***