Critics... Critics never got nothing nice to say, man. Critics never ask me how my day was... Well let me tell 'em!
I may be a fool for even attempting to set foot on this terriority, after all, I'm no well-educated, highly admired and well-paid man. I'm not the author of a million-view blog, or part of the higher class of society. I'm just a gamer. Just a regular, lazy teenage gamer, who has an opinion, and all too much free-time entirely. But when I have an opinion, I want to share it with someone, or everyone, in this case. The target of today is Roger Ebert, possibly the most renowned movie critic in history. But this is not about movies, not at all.
You may know that back in 2006, Roger Ebert chose to mouth his opinion on video games being considered art or not. He didn't think so, and he still don't. However, that opinion got him thrown into a lot of bad press from the gaming world, and understandable that is. Today he released a new blog post touching on the subject, where he admits that he was mistaken for speaking about aforementioned opinion (even if that is still his opinion). He acknowledges that his expertise on the area is rather... Inexistant, and basically apologises for being so ignorant back then. He tried to make a definition of art that wouldn't include video games, but realized that that's a lot harder than it seems, if not impossible. But you can read the article for yourself, can't you?
Anywho. As I respect a man like Rogert Ebert, and I find his writing to be quite enjoyable in fact (even if I don't always agree with his reviews, giving "Eclipse" 2 stars always makes me giggle), and from reading about this, as a gamer, I started to try and compare video games to other forms of art; storytelling, musical composition and visual style. Storytelling is obviously a big part of all games, and how well-written a game is can really set it apart (or below) it's competition. Music to accompany the story is equally as important as it is in movies, and the same goes for the visual, in form of camera angles, graphics and scale. But video games has something that no other genre of art has: gameplay. You won't judge a book by how it's read, but what you read. With a game, how well it plays and how well you play it is as important as anything.
To take an easily accesible comparison-example, let's take a look at Black Hawk Down. A classic, and brilliant, warmovie, telling the story of a group of soldiers in Afganistan during a special mission. Now, let's take a look at a game that's somewhat similar in settings - such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The movie tells a tale and let you watch as an outsider, grasping every aspect of it, with all your senses. The video game is similar. It has a story that won't change everytime you put the disc in the drive - as the movie. It tells a story of a few characters on a mission, and it uses cinematic cutscenes to underline this - as the movie. In many ways, it's really quite similar to the movie, the only difference is really the "in-between". While in the movie you'll be comfortably resting, possibly even sleeping (hardly, when it comes to Black Hawk Down), the video game puts you in control. You're a living remote, and if you sleep - it's on pause. You know what to do and when you should do it, and there's no real control other than what you're told to do - you can't change the course of the story. The movie and the game has the exact same elements, with hardly any differences, aside from the obvious.
So why can't a video game like that, that so closely resembles a similar movie, be considered a work of art? Many artists nowadays uses computer programs such as Photoshop to create or alter their work, and as far as I know - no filmmaker would ever be releasing anything without the help of a computer. So it's not the proces of creating it, and it's not the elements of it. Is it because you can't enjoy it passively, and you have to actively interact with it to make it come to live, and reveal it's true self? It must be this, musn't it?
Games can be considered art in many ways. A beautiful image from Crysis, a fantastic view of Dustshallow Marsh from a World of Warcraft screenshot, or a 3-minute replay of a track run from DiRT 2, all of these are pleasing to the eye and/or ears. To me, art isn't about making me think, it's about enjoying the imagination of the human mind, materlalized in anything, be it a video game, a record, a book or a movie.
Mr. Ebert, you were indeed right. You should never have touched the sacred grounds of video games to begin with.
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