Games Are Not Art, Says Movie Critic

Respected US movie critic, Roger Ebert, has responded to Clive Barker’s address at the recent Hollywood and Games Summit after Barker took exception to an article the critic wrote about a year ago in which he said video games could not be art. Does he know what he’s talking about, my first reaction is to say “of course not.” (Warning: possible highbrow content ahead)

I have to get this off my chest right now and declare my bias. Having read Ebert’s article, I get the distinct impression that the man is a narrowminded, middle-aged, snob who wouldn’t know a great game if it came up behind him and hit him with a control pad. I would also like to point out that I make no distinction between high and low art, to do so presumes that there is one kind of art for one kind of people and another for the rest. Its elitist and such a distinction is meaningless. Now that that’s out of the way lets take a look at what he actually says:

Point 1: Prejudice.
The first point of Barker’s which Ebert decides to tackle is that of prejudice.

It’s evident that Ebert had a prejudiced vision of what the medium is, or more importantly what it can be.

The implication in this statement is that all art, no matter its form, should be considered from a position which is a free of prejudice as it is possible to be. It is of course impossible to come to a piece of art without preconceptions of what it should be, the responses it should illicit, and the emotional and intellectual reaction it should inspire. Ebert’s riposte to this is to set up a straw man,

The word ‘prejudiced’ often translates as ‘disagrees with me.’

He’s merely making this fallacious presumption on the evidence that Barker obviously does disagree with him. All credit to him though he does actually admit that he’s prejudiced against games being considered as high art. He basically admits his snobbery.

I might suggest that gamers have a prejudiced view of their medium, and particularly what it can be. Games may not be Shakespeare quite yet, but I have the prejudice that they never will be, and some gamers are prejudiced that they will.

If he knew anything about games at all he wouldn’t even bother to compare them to the likes of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was adept at an art form which was thousands of years old when he practised it, gaming is new, only decades old and still in its infancy. To say that games will never be as refined, widely known, and masterfully presented as a Shakespeare play makes no sense whatsoever.

Point 2: Movement
Barker said:

We can debate what art is, we can debate it forever. If the experience moves you in some way or another … even if it moves your bowels … I think it is worthy of some serious study

This is because all good art (as I have mentioned before) illicits an emotional response, the bowel movement he is referring to is obviously a fear response, Art is about giving up control of your physicality to something external to yourself and allowing it to pull your strings. Ebert compares this to a medical problem he is currently suffering from and how it has moved him.

Perhaps if the experience moves your bowels, it is worthy of some serious medical study. Many experiences that move me in some way or another are not art. A year ago I lost the ability (temporarily, I hope) to speak. I was deeply moved by the experience. It was not art.

He’s quite right, his experience is not art, even though it moved him. His experience was not instigated by something created by another human being (as far as I know, I don’t see why anyone would want to deprive someone of the ability to speak, though I’ve never met Mr. Ebert). Art must be consciously created by one human in order to get an emotional or intellectual response from another. A sunset may be beautiful but it is not art, a photograph of the same sunset is. This answer was flippant and frankly beneath Ebert, I’m sure he could have done better.

Point 3: Reviewers Vs Players
Barker implies that there is an inherent bias in the media which reviews ‘high art’ towards more intellectual and highbrow pieces, pointing out that the New York Times very rarely reviews his books.

It used to worry me that the New York Times never reviewed my books. But the point is that people like the books. Books aren’t about reviewers. Games aren’t about reviewers. They are about players.

Barker is starting from the basic premise that art is about the consumer, be they a reader, listener, viewer, player, or cinema goer. Its about providing an experience to the consumer and is never purely there for its own sake. Art has a purpose beyond merely existing, and as Ebert implies in his rebuttal peopel should be changed in some way by the consumption of art.

A reviewer is a reader, a viewer or a player with an opinion about what he or she has viewed, read or played. Whether that opinion is valid is up to his audience, books, games and all forms of created experience are about themselves; the real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them? Something may be excellent as itself, and yet be ultimately worthless. A bowel movement, for example.

He even contradicts himself in the above quote, saying first that art is about itself and not the consumer and then saying that its consumers should gain or lose something from it. If the purpose of art is to change those that consume it then it is not simply about itself, it is about making that change happen in those exposed to it. As to the worth of art, all art is ultimately worthless. Who can put a value on an emotional response? Beyond the physical worth of the materials and the time put into creating it, art is only ever worth anything to those who enjoy it.

Point 4: Narrative.
Can you have art without a fixed ending or resolution? Barker says yes and so do I. Ebert doesn’t think so and brings Shakespeare into it again, not realising that more traditional forms of storytelling art; literature, cinema, and drama, are far removed from games. The consumer should be taken on a fixed path through the piece and only gain from it that which the artist has decreed, rubbish. Games reflect reality to a far greater degree than other more linear and non-interactive art in that with a good game, the journey is just as important as the destination, if not more so.

I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn’t taken the damn poison. If only he’d have gotten there quicker.

Ebert’s reply proves once and for all that he has no idea what he’s talking about in relation to games:

He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would “Romeo and Juliet” have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. “King Lear” was also subjected to rewrites; it’s such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare’s or Barker’s, is superior, deeper, more moving, more “artistic”?

Games are created by artists too. To a level of depth that should encompass everything the player may choose to do in the game. Every cause and effect in the game is crafted by the artist, at a very basic level you are not changing the game at all. You are merely a participant, like an actor in one of the plays that Ebert mentions. You may be able to choose different endings through the choices you make whilst playing, but you are still restricted to the endings which are already there. On this basis, a well made game should be considered a higher form of art than literature or any of the other linear storytelling arts, purely because the artists have to consider many different ways to tell the story rather than the single path of a book or play. Ebert gives away his misunderstanding of games as art through his failure to recognize that the rules are different for games. The art in games is not solely in telling the story but in setting the rules so the player can tell themselves the story.

Point 5: Infinite Emotional Journeys

We should be stretching the imaginations of our players and ourselves. Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.

The technicalities of creating such a game world are staggering. Ebert even thinking that such a thing is possible leaves me in no doubt that he has no grasp of what goes into making a game. There is only one medium to date where a human being may experience every emotional journey available, and that is life. Even then the majority of us only experience a fraction of the possibilities in our lifetimes. What Barker is suggesting is that games strive to offer the player a life, in all its flawed glory.

If you can go through “every emotional journey available,” doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time, I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?

Does living one lifetime devalue every experience in that lifetime? If you think the answer is yes, why bother? Again Ebert claims that Art’s purpose is to lead the experience down a predefined path to a foregone conclusion, this may be because he’s used to dealing with books and movies and tries to apply the same rules to games. He also makes the mistake of believing that the player is free to do absolutely anything in the game to change the end result, in his eyes this makes the player as much the artist as those who created the game. What he seems not to realise is that the paths through a game’s story are predefined, there are simply more of them and they may end up at different destinations.

Point 6: Escape

I’m not doing an evangelical job here. I’m just saying that gaming is a great way to do what we as human beings need to do all the time — to take ourselves away from the oppressive facts of our lives and go somewhere where we have our own control.

Quite, all art is escapism of a sort and we all need to escape the daily grind in one way or another. Some of us play games, others read books or go to the movies, Yet more may jog or go the gym. Where I think Barker gets it wrong here is when he talks about control. In a game we may not have anywhere near as much control as we do in the real world, we have fewer options available to us. We can only do what the rules of the game allow us to do. Its not about escaping into a world of infinite possibilities, its about escaping into a world where the rules are known and outcomes can be reliably predicted. Eberts argument against this point sounds like a child who knows he’s losing an argument and resorts to name calling:

Spoken with the maturity of an honest and articulate 4-year old. I do not have a need “all the time” to take myself away from the oppressive facts of my life, however oppressive they may be, in order to go somewhere where I have control. I need to stay here and take control. Right now, for example, I cannot speak, but I am writing this. You lose some, you win some.

He doesn’t even answer the point. It may simply be that his escapism isn’t something he recognises as such, and he brings up the fact that he cannot speak again, fishing for sympathy maybe?

Rounding Off.
As I said at the beginning of this article, Roger Ebert is a respected film critic, and with good reason. What he doesn’t know about films and film-making could probably be written on the head of a pin. He also knows a good movie when he sees one. He is however a snob, as is amply demonstrated by the last three paragraphs of his article. He sounds like one of those people who says “I’m not a racist, I am friends with black people, but…”
His comparison of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup to Barker’s The Undying is irrelevant and misguided. Video games aren’t made for people like Roger Ebert, not to put to fine a point on it, he’s too old to appreciate them. Film was the up and coming artform of his era and that is his forte. Games are the up and coming artform of our era, critics like Ebert should stick to what they know and leave the games to those who understand the artform.
(Hat-tip: Kotaku.)

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