Roger Ebert

Link

I am just one of many who was offended by Ebert's essay. And the larger portion of the Internet seems to be on the warpath.

But there are a few particular statements that I take issue with.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.

How does he know this? Where in his definition of art does it say that it must be lacking in rules, points, objectives and an outcome?

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

This is one of the most ignorant statements that I've come across recently. He asks what ideas are contained within these works of art. I'm not even sure what he's trying to get at. I have not read all of these works, but I'd be willing to bet that there is some idea to be communicated by them.

The next few paragraphs are ad-hominem attacks on several games that he says are not are for various reasons.
Waco: He is offended by the subject matter, therefore it is not art.
Braid: He doesn't feel that he would learn anything about his past from it. It is not art.
Flower: May be art, but without a user interface it isn't a game.

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

We should ignore this whole paragraph. He admits that his bias makes him unable to speak on the subject. Let's move on.

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

But this is his most egregious mistake. Fischer did not invent chess, nor Jordan basketball, nor Butkus football. So why does he consider the gamer the artist? Is the concert goer an artist? No, so why does he focus on the gamer?

What would a video game need to do to fit a definition of art?