What do you think of this man's opinion on video games never being real art?

[s_bushido]

I've never read Ebert's reviews before. Did he always sound like a condescending douchebag when talking about things he disagreed with? But reviewing video games as a medium without even trying one sounds a bit like criticizing literature without reading a book.

End of the day, art is subjective. And video games have been around for, what, 40 years? If you don't think they qualify as art yet, give them a few more centuries...

[Frozenbeef]

I'm pretty sure some games could be considered art...

Bioshock: Infinite spoiler warning, image turned to link. - Endus
http://i.imgur.com/bMzHUkyl.jpg

If someone who had never played a video game in their life looked at that in an art museum they wouldn't know any different :P

[Deleted]

I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

He's quite right.

[Frozenbeef]

He's quite right.

art is incredibly subjective, what makes this that looks like it's done by a talented teenager(van gogh) "better" than any artwork produced today?

[Wildtree]

He's quite right.

yes he is right with that comparison as isolated statement...
He is wrong with dismissing everything art made by not so exceptionally gifted artists.
Art isn't just everything made by GREAT artists.. Those are just more famous and admired as great..

[Stir]

Again this all has to do with taste....

It is either high-brow or low-brow art, and Ebert's opinion... "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." is typically a high-brow opinion. I wonder how many games that 70 year old man has played in his life....my guess is that it is zero.

If movies can be considered as art, which I am sure Ebert will agree, then video games snugly fit right beside movies.

I believe old men's opinions over our modern times are overrated, just look at US's Congress.

I disagree that 'art' has to do with taste.
'Art' is anything that is created, that is not part of the natural world as not created, that is made to move people emotionally. Some computer games are not art. Super Mario Bros is not art, for instance. While there is certainly an entertainment value, the component that 'moves' you emotionally is ultimately your own success at beating the game, and has nothing to do with the game itself.

However, if you'd take the time to play games like Papers Please and To the Moon, then you're getting to the artsy bit. Not only are they fun to play, but they take you outside of yourself, into the being of this other person(s), and you get to witness and, indeed, live those moments that are surreal, captivating, and, in the case of To the Moon, tear-drawingly beautiful.

Are computer games good art? Not by default, no. And it's not really easy to distinguish 'good' art from 'bad' art. If you look at the character portraits made by Rembrandt, you'll find that, even though they are made skillfully, the only emotion they evoke is the awe at his skill. But if you look at his still-lifes and other paintings, there is far more to be emotional about because of composition. And composition may invoke all sorts of emotions, even if the painting itself is not skillfully created. An example of this is Concetto Spaziale, Atteze (Lucio Fontana). It's just a red canvas slashed with a sharp knife. And it sells for millions. Is it good art? I personally think it's a fraud, but if it does invoke feeling (and the combination of the red colour and the claw-like gashes can certainly do that), then nevertheless, it is art.

Basically: The person mentioned in the OP is a snob. That's really all there is to it.

[Wildtree]

art is incredibly subjective, what makes this that looks like it's done by a talented teenager(van gogh) "better" than any artwork produced today?
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/up...863-r-half.jpg

In this case it's the timeline that makes the difference....
Van Gogh is Post-Impressionism. He broke the boundaries of Renaissance and/or Baroque, and laid the foundation to art styles to come after him.
he opened the doors for impressionism surrealism and the likes.

[Themerlin]

He's quite right.

Video games have never existed before in human history. Only in the last 2 decades have we managed to bring splendid detail and artistry into video-games. If we were to use Eberts quote, I would presume that he places video games into low-brow category, not worthy of mention in high society. Only a 100-200 years were common folk able to see these high-brow art compilations in which before they were mainly reserved for the higher class citizen/priest/noble/etc.

With that I say good-day to you sir...


- - - Updated - - -

I disagree that 'art' has to do with taste.

I only mentioned that this discussion has to do with taste, not art itself...

[Kalyyn]

There is an art class at my college which spent half a semester making students nail pieces of scrap wood together and called it art. It literally looked like stuff you'd find washed up on the beach. Now, most video games had a lot more soul and creativity poured into them that whatever was going on in that classroom. So if that shit can be art, video games absolutely are.

[charliebr0wn85]

Whoever says video games aren't Art...have them play Journey.

[Zannis]

Roger Ebert is a relic of his time. Since his death, two major institutions have opened exhibits honoring the medium as an art form, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institute. The first of I'm sure to be many such museums and organizations to do so.

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibition...ve/2012/games/
http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_o...-for-starters/

I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

I disagree with this. Most of the great poets and artists of any day and age are defined by their entire body of work, not just a single piece or composition. Rockstar is to video gaming what Scorcese is to film. A game like Grand Theft Auto III was mind blowing to those who played it at the time, even if Roger Ebert couldn't grasp that. Games like Portal, Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, or Journey show that this medium is barely getting started. In comparable terms to the film industry, we've barely left the silent era and are looking ahead to technicolor.

[Deleted]

He was probably the best known film critic in North America, if not in the English-speaking work. Haven't you ever heard of "Siskel and Ebert"?

A film critic... why would a film critic have the authority to decide whats art and what's not?



Why is this considered art?



And this not?

[Kakokun]

The problem with this discussion is that the answer is so incredibly subjective that trying to reach an agreement is impossible. I mean the definition of art is as generic as you can make it so people just use their own opinion of what they like and call that art.

[Puck]

I think he's dumb.



How is that not art?



How is that not art?

[Longview]

i think the problem isn't whether or not it would classify as "art"

i think the problem is that very few if any video games are made with intentions that make them worthwhile art pieces. the craftsmanship alone isn't close to being up to par in the games that i have played.

it's probably closely related to how companies develop games under dead lines to maximize profits, not like a concept album or an art exhibition

not so much the medium i think

[Zannis]

Bear in mind that as the video game generation matures into their 50's and 60's and become the movers and shakers of our society, it's their acceptance of video games that are going to propel it into high art status. And I'm not talking about Pong and the archaic cabinets of the early 70's. I'm talking about the Atari 2600 kids and the people who cut their teeth on the classic Nintendo/Sega/Sony/Microsoft/PC consoles and platforms.

[Deleted]

I could sh*t on a piece of paper and call it art and I'd be justified in that, does it make it good art to the majority of people? No, but regardless it is still art.

In the end it's a semantic thing, books are art, films are art and pretty pictures are art, as are video games. Look at top end graphical pieces of each generation of gaming and you see how stunning the world looks, from a visual perspective video games are most definitely art.
If we use story telling and voice acting, both of those are art, as is musical compositions that are used in games.

I would say that games are a virtual instillation complete with multiple mediums of art all merged together. Sometimes they're terrible and sometimes they're of the most emotional, thrilling and/or breathtaking experiences we've had.

I don't feel I'm the right person to give examples since only play a few games, however I am sure than many people on these forums could reference experiences they've had while playing games that could back up most of what I've said. All the same there are many experiences I'm sure we've all had with terrible games, just like when we see terrible movies though and entire genre of art shouldn't be ignored the right to be called art just because of that.

Off topic: The part about the guys opinion on anime in my opinion only serves to further my point, as there are unsurprisingly just as many people who think anime is just children's cartoons as there are people who think that games are just for children. If anime can be viewed as art, then why not games too?

[Wafffles]

Only skimmed it but I have two immediate thoughts.

First, which he may have addressed, is employees working on video games aren't "videogamers" the way paintings are made by painters and poetry is made by poets. Video games are made by a vast team that includes writers for the story and dialogue, graphical artists for the style and design and decorations etc. of the game, coders (I'd love to hear what he thinks of those who believe coding can be "beautiful" and "an art") to make the game run on a computer, the list goes on. As with any medium, the writers may not be writing Shakespeare ("We have to save Peach!" is no worse than a quote from Human Centipede), but it can also be elevated to a beautiful and endearing level (I've gone to YouTube to watch my favorite lines from Bioshock Infinite almost as frequently as I've gone to watch my favorite lines from No Country for Old Men). Same with the art, the coding, the voice acting, etc. What's more is that the team effort that is so appreciated in movie making is almost identically transferred to video game makers. If the Oscars can praise an entire movie's worth of art by claiming a best picture, they can certainly imagine the same for a video game. Which, I think, begs the question: is art a spectrum or a state? That is, are video games 35% art, cuisine 57% art, and then movies 100% art, or are movies ART and video games NOT ART? I would think - though obviously not with those arbitrary percentages - that the first is more logical.

The other thought I have is that he's making this judgement based on a few decades of video games at best, and that's only if you're going to make video games at the potentially artistic end of the spectrum carry the burden of years in which games like pong were, by virtue of technical limitations, the pinnacle of the medium. I think the analogy would be to condemn "film" and it's artistic aspirations in the year 1820, based largely on "photos" from the very earliest attempts that are little more than dark patches and light patches. From those attempts it would be logical for 17th century critics to eliminate the potential for a Citizen Kane in the future, just as critics in 1973 may never have believed in the possibility of making a Bioshock Infinite and beyond. (I use Bioshock Infinite as my mainstream, well-known, one-of-the-best video games ever example. I know it's not the best ever - probably - but it's the one that has probably touched me the most, especially among main stream games, so I use it. Obviously, your own favorite artistic video game is just as applicable.) "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." An interesting quote to use to support his argument: I'm sure 20 years after the first rudimentary written language was scratched out no one could name a great novelist, and 20 years after that first photographic plate registered something kind of resembling it's subject no one could have named a great filmmaker. Indeed, this article was released at a very inopportune time; had it been a few years later, Ken Levine would have been one of a growing number of video game artists whose names have become more mainstream and may be called "great". (It's interesting to note that Ken Levine himself has said the video game medium is still figuring itself out even as he and his games help raise the bar for what a video game can be.) Perhaps the best point, though, is that every medium's path is temporally sinusoidal. The novel was virtually killed by the short story for quite awhile in many places, and we all know poetry was forgotten by the masses in many different periods. Heck, film itself is currently in great upheaval around the action blockbuster and 3D - wasn't it Scorsese and Peter Jackson who recently commented the next generation of movie theaters will be reserved for Transformers and its kin, while "serious" movies will be demoted to home theater releases...or not made at all. So film's future is uncertain, but bleak according to its masters, while video games' future is uncertain, but very promising, according to its masters. Dunno about Mr. Ebert, but between those two options I'd certainly go with the future of video games.

[Dezerte]

Expression is art, and can exist in any medium.

The man in question is just stubborn and dislikes change.

[Hraklea]

The guy who wrote this article is retarded.

The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

He's basically saying that vídeo games are not art because he doesn't like them, and that he doesn't like them because they are not art. Again, this guy is just retarded. I wonder why anyone would give attention to someone like that.