I think it is clear who wins.

Recently a friend (Sir Daniel of Hesford, esq.) brought something to my attention: an argument that was always going to be started by a critic with a significant reputation; an argument that I guess I have been less and less inclined to participate in the more that people lambast and rail against the medium of the videogame. I guess if you’re interested in art or games at all, you’ll have read Roger Ebert’s “Videogames will never be art” schpiel.

My first instinct when reading Ebert’s criticisms was to latch on to his honest statement that of course he is “hopelessly handicapped because of [his] love of cinema”. It was my first instinct to hold onto this like it was a zombie’s dismembered arm in Dead Rising and use it to beat his argument senseless. And then perhaps stick a showerhead in the back of its neck and watch the blood spurt out satisfyingly. Of course anyone who has spent their life in cinema, spends his time writing about cinema, and who has a deep love of cinema will always think it a better medium than anything else. It is a matter of taste, and you can’t argue with taste. No matter how much I expound the virtues of The Smiths to Mr Chris Tough of Westhill, Aberdeen, he’s still going to think Morrissey is an arse and his music is shit. He is entitled to that clearly batshit crazy opinion, and he can go back to listening to his Prog Rock with a smug self-satisfied look on his face like he always does.

I think perhaps it is slightly unfortunate for Ebert that he sounds like he’s never actually played a videogame at length, did not grow up playing videogames, has never had an emotional attachment to a game. Because my experience is different from his, and when I was a child I thought games were naturally as fascinating as cinema. I love cinema. I really love it. And I indulge in it far more than I do videogames. But some of my fondest life memories are of videogames and the stupid shit I did in them, sometimes stuff I know that the makers probably didn’t want me to do, but I did them anyway because it was fun. I spent hours parking yellow taxis on the rail track in GTA because I had a specific grudge against them for being a boring car and it gave me pleasure to see the train come along and create an almighty massive effing explosion of a pile of those yellow frakking bastards. No one at DMA Design probably concieved of my developing said obsession and carrying out my taxi pyrotechnics, but goddamn they made it possible. I salute you, sirs.

But that is not to say they are art, is it? Even Ebert doesn’t actually decide on what he thinks is art. The argument has become all fluid and wibbly. My brain unravels trying to think about what we are both trying to say.

However, as any philosophy student will tell you, ad hominem arguments (arguments which attack the person’s credentials rather than addressing the issues or content of the argument) are useless and create animosity that simply does not need to exist between those people taking part in debate. What is being said can still have value, even if the person is mental. For example, if your name is Johnny and you own “Johnny’s Ice Cream and Decapitation Parlour” and you claim that decapitation is horrible and mean and messy (just like ice cream) and should never take place – that doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong, it means you are a hypocrite. So Johnny’s argument has value, but Johnny clearly needs to be in a straitjacket (for thinking ice cream is a good idea). So I’ll side away from saying that Ebert is a self-important prickface and look at what he is actually saying.

Ebert is essentially arguing with a nice lady whom I have never heard of before, but she has the audacity to believe that games are art and are impressing the shit out of people, and touching people’s lives, already. The weird thing for me is that I cannot imagine a videogame not being art. I know this sounds naïve. I know if you look at a fricking blob going back and forth across a screen and compare it to Michelangelo it’s not going to look good. But if you think of all the things in the Tate Modern – I think Pong could be in there. Seriously. Someone designed that well – there is a simplicity of purpose and creative thinking that went into that programming. If art imitates life, Pong does it extremely badly in a very creative way, made with the best tools available at the time. If you need an emotional reaction to it – how about the feeling of effing shoving it down your brother’s throat that you won and he didn’t, haha what a retard I am the bestest of all suck it?

Okay, that is a very simplistic, some would say juvenile, way of putting it. So is looking up a quotation to try and prove your point, like

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs. – Edward Varese.

This picture inspires no emotion in me whatsoever.

But it’s odd to me to consider videogames as not art, when these days at least there is clearly an art department employed to make the environments in big budget games. These environments can be beautiful, detailed, fascinating, realistic or fantastical. One of the most talented artists in the business works at Rockstar Games – whose concept work I would pay to put on my wall. In titles these days there are often character artists, who design what entities (humanoid or otherwise) look like, and animation artists, who make them move realistically, or not realistically depending on what you want. There are voice artists and people who design the sound and music, all of which changes the atmosphere in minute and wonderful ways. Today, it is becoming more and more common to have a dedicated game writer, who writes complex dialogue and story – not only for one narrative, but sometimes multiple narratives, which branch off depending on choice. How could a team employed to make these complex, creative decisions not make something that is, just for one second, somewhere, art? How could these flights of imagination, laid out in game narrative form, not be, at one point in one of their forms, art? Think about the dystopian underwater Art Deco city Rapture, in Bioshock. Is it not a beautiful work of art, comparable to Bladerunner’s neon city? And you can not only look at it, but do things in it as well. How can that not be art? I cannot fathom how it cannot be art; to be able to travel through these virtual worlds is for me at least, a symbol of what humanity’s imagination can do.

But Ebert wants complex ideas, emotions, a reflection of society, a greater meaning. I believe those are there, but it would be really feeble to try to convince him personally otherwise. Before I go further, I guess it would be good to remember that cinema has had almost ninety years to build its claim to the “art” throne. Videogames have had about twenty and are making more money than movies now, which is causing a lot of resentment – and a reason to degrade videogames and their worth. And how about these new movies with 3D animation? Is that art? Cos I hear they are using that right now to make movies – videogames were using it years before and still being compared to a fucking cave painting. Oh wait – people are still comparing games to cave paintings.

Perhaps our problem here lies with the fact that we unavoidably end up comparing videogames to cinema, when they are very different from each other, and fulfil a different need. They are both visual mediums, capable of affecting us emotionally. But one is a very passive medium. Cinema, no matter how much critics claim you can “participate” in a picture, is just some flickering lights on a wall that you have no choice but to receive. You take the director’s vision, or you can get stuffed. With games, you as an “audience” can have a limited creative input too. Most of the time you are playing the game the way the designers intended, but you can do things that they never did, and you can experience things they never intended to happen too. Depending on how much freedom the designers give you, you can have free creative choice on a canvas they gave you. The interpretative freedom you have with a movie also happens with games, but on an exponential scale that depends on your own imagination. Within a game’s framework, your own curiosity about the game’s workings and environments play a huge part in your understanding of what is going on. Of course, this means that if there is a specific vision intended by the designer, you as a player can spectacularly arse it up. But I think for me, that is part of the journey, part of the art. And I think for most gamers, it’s not specifically the winning that we like, it’s the journey. Otherwise, why buy a narrative lead RPG when you can play an FPS and win by kills? People even demand a narrative with their FPS these days. Imagine that.

What is important here, is to remember that games are just different. They are different than any creative medium we have had before. You wouldn’t expect a literature critic who had never seen a movie before to have an in depth grasp of the finer parts of understanding film. Likewise, if you had only seen Uwe Boll movies your entire life, you’d be forgiven for thinking that cinema is a shit medium and that movies cannot be art. I conclude that it is therefore stupid to make an absolutist statement about the status of anything as art. Even Uwe Boll could make a good movie in the future that you thought was “art” even if that is as likely as me turning into a lesbian and shacking up with Natalie Portman and her nice little Yorkshire Terrier Charlie.

That dog is the shiz.

If I were to try to convince Ebert of the error of his ways, which I know I could not, because he has made up his mind, here are the games I would cite. I’d choose Half Life 2, which for me has more of a ring of Orwell’s 1984 (in parts, I’d say it’s better) than almost any other game I’ve played, and it boggles my mind when I try to address the creative vision encompassing making it. I’d choose Portal, again another Valve game, which not only examines the way we look at science and experiments, but also examines our emotional attachments to things, specifically, why do we get emotionally attached to inanimate objects? (You know the one I mean.) I felt sad and alienated when playing Shadow of the Colossus, and the landscape is unequivocally a beautiful work of art. I was pretty moved by Aggro’s drop to the depths below. Bioshock’s examination of Ayn Rand’s work Atlas Shrugged was vivid and thought provoking, even if the moral choice mechanic was a little clumsy.

Ebert ^ LOL

All of these games are pretty sophisticated. There are probably ones I have forgotten, which you will of course remind me of. Having spent most of my higher education studying classical literature I feel like I understand what is art, even if I don’t actually. And I think games have always really been art, simplistic or not. Perhaps in the future, cynics will change their minds, but right now I find it pretty hard to care about persuading non-gamers or cinema critics to put games in an ivory tower, because I feel like they are already there, and their place there is completely unthreatened by people like Ebert. This idea that games are art will only get stronger, and in time people will wonder why on earth people bothered to rail against the idea. There are institutions who have included a serious study of games as art for years now. And may I remind you, that every medium has been looked at snobbishly by others in every time period, and sooner or later, someone has to eat their words. Although, it is my strong personal opinion that women should not read novels. It overheats their brains.

Last week you could have boiled a kettle off me.