Explain to me again why we’re having this argument…again?

As most of you probably know by now, the internet exploded last week when Roger Ebert dropped a new blog post entitled “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” a follow up to his 2005 article on the same topic and a response to a TED talk on the subject by thatgamecompany’s Kellee Santiago. I know the title is a bit obtuse, but here’s the gist; video games are incapable of becoming art. Period.   Nerd rage ensued, blogs were launched, inhalers were puffed. There have been no shortage of thoughtful responses, But I thought a few more salient points could be made.

1) It should be noted at the outset that Ebert is a movie critic. From all appearances he has not played a video game in a very long time, so his criticism is somewhat akin to a well known book critic disparaging Michael Haneke’s cinematography even though he hasn’t seen a movie since Pinocchio, but hey, he did see a few clips of Cache’ on YouTube. It’s not that he can’t have anything to say at all; it’s that his viewpoint, notably the stridency of it’s tone, becomes suspect in direct proportion to his refusal to interact with the medium he so blithely dismisses.

2) I would expect someone as clearly intelligent as Ebert to know that in the early years of any medium, the self appointed Cultural Gatekeepers of other, established mediums, nearly always look down uppity newcomers as being ” not Art.” So it was with the novel, which was clearly inferior and only suitable for flighty women and men of questionable taste and intelligence. So it was with Cinema, which was far to rigid and mechanical to convey the emotions and physicality of the stage. And so it is, in Ebert’s view, with games, which are too “interactive” to have the singularity of vision that art requires. Every medium was so stigmatized in its infancy, and it would be refreshing to see Ebert taking this to heart and encouraging game creators to new heights of creativity, not denying them the standing he gives to a painting of a Campbell’s soup label.

And now on to the debate we should actually be having; are video games capable of being great, or high, art? Most honest minded observers would say yes, they absolutely are capable of doing so, but they would also observe, perhaps begrudgingly, that most video games, as they stand today, range from pure garbage to incredibly enjoyable pulp. There are certainly exceptions (glance through the comments section on Ebert’s article and you will see Rez, Ico, Bioshock, Okami and Shadow of the Colossus referenced ad infinitum) but the fact remains that gaming is in it’s infancy and is still finding it feet.

But wait, you may say, games have been around in one form or another for over 50 years! How is that an infant? Well, young grasshopper, it would once again be instructive to look at other mediums in comparison. For example, verbal and written storytelling go back thousands of years, as do painted and drawn images. Theater, as it is classically conceived, as been around since Ancient Greece. And, not to beat a dead horse, but movies have been around since the late 19th century. So yes, video games have only been around for 50 years, and video game genres as we understand them only date to the 80′s. This is not an excuse that games do not need to mature, but but rather that they need time to mature and develop their own language and standards.

For instance, look at early films. I mean early, silent film, man-playing-a-piano-furiously-in-the-corner movies. Seeing them now, they can seem painfully simple, ham-handed, and even clumsy. They cameras rarely move outside of a single wide shot (much like a play) and the emotions are all drawn with the broad strokes necessary to convey feeling to the back of a crowded theater. All of these things now seem backward and unnecessary because of the new vocabulary of moviemaking that was developed over the ensuing 80+ years, such as pans, cuts, transitions, etc., and it is this vocabulary that allows movies to stand on their own as a viable artistic medium. Problem is, no matter how great games look, many of them still rely on text blocks and cutscenes (formats native to other mediums) to convey story, mood, and emotion rather than the gameplay itself, which is the defining characteristic of video games: they are “interactive media.”

It would seem, then, that the onus is on developers to create games that begin to develop a vocabulary unique to games and on gamers to demand those experiences. Nothing else will push the industry past it’s pulpy, immature roots. It is encouraging, then, that cheap, powerful tools (like unity and XNA) have become available to the masses, and we are seeing a stunning amount of content being created by indie developers. Much like the printing press and digital film before, this democratization of the creative process will only improve games in the future.

Links:

http://thatgamecompany.com/general/right-moving-on-my-response-to-ebert/

http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-ebert-is-wrong-in-defense-of-games-as-art

http://www.switched.com/2010/04/20/roger-ebert-vs-game-designer-can-video-games-ever-be-art

but first, a definition

As I learned at an early age (much to my prepubescent excitement), a geek was “a carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.” Some time in the 1970′s, however, with the rise in personal computing, the etymology changed to refer to someone who had the unfortunate trifecta of poor hygiene/fashion sense, a severe lack of social skills, and an unhealthy obsession with computer programming/tabletop gaming/LARPing/etc.  Moving forward into the present-day, the term “geek” has undergone a shift, a transformation if you will. Suddenly a geek is someone who is obsessed with anyone, be it food, knitting, or even sports (see any fantasy football league if you doubt me).

Now some may take offense to this change, proclaiming loudly that “That is our word!” And to a certain extent I can sympathise. I have been reading epic fantasy novels since I was a mere hobbitling, know most of the names of the cantina occupants from Star Wars (the real one), and I prefer my anime subtitled, thank you very much. But that being said, the democratization of geekhood is a good thing for all of us. Whether we are talking about coding textures in a video game or cooking 80 briskets in order to get it just right (as America’s Test Kitchen recently did), that obsession, the thrill of submerging yourself deeply into a subject that (comparatively)very few others  are willing to go is the same.

In light of that, I hope the topics on this blog will be both wide-ranging and thought-provoking, covering not just science fiction or fantasy media (although that is much of what I read/watch/play) but also cooking, sound design, handicrafts, world history, and whatever else seems to strike my fancy.

This should be fun.

And P.S. – The Big Papa thing? That was a nickname that got thrown around when my wife was pregnant with the first of our two daughters, now 3 and 2 respectively. Being a dad and a geek simultaneously is an interesting experience (I spent many months geeking out about childbirth in particular), and will hopefully provide some interesting material as well.