Video Games Can Never Be Art -Roger Ebert

[luj1]

what this guy did was essentially say "you can put a fucking urinal in a museum and you idiots will claim it's art".

That doesn't require any talent or skill, so it isn't art.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

The TLDR of the article is basically that he used to think that adding more and more interactivity to a game would make the storytelling better untill he played The Last of Us (the original one). He thought that the story was one of the best that he had seen in a video game

Opinion discarded

 

[JarlFrank]

https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-english-dictionary.php?parola=ars

ars
feminine noun III declension

View the declension of this word

1 skill, craft, art
2 trick, wile
3 science, knowledge
4 method, way
5 character

 

[Machocruz]

So really why would most writers spend months just to get a single location and a handfull of characters right, when in that time they could do a book or even a TV script and get much more recognition and success than they would making that new AA rpg.

Along those lines:

I have never, to this day, seen good original video game world building. Nearly every cool game world got taken from another media. This is fine since it is hard enough for a game maker to deal with the variables of game design, programming, and art let alone ‘interesting game world’. Might as well just steal what works.

Don't know if I agree with the first two sentences, but I do the rest.

 

[The Dopamine Cleric]

Yeah Super Mario World isn't very original.

All you have to do is take drugs.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Don't confuse the two, kids.

This is art:

Spoiler

This is not art:

Spoiler

 

[taxalot]

I could print this, frame it, and make a good argument that it is.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Attempt #2

This is art:

Spoiler

This is not:

Spoiler

Will the spectre of Ebert tinker with my uploads again?

 

[Carrion]

Random thoughts on whether games can be art or not:

1) Who even cares anymore?

2) Bringing up someone like Dostoevsky is a discussion like this is not only pretentious but also completely misses the point. To determine whether something qualifies as art or not, you shouldn't look at the highest forms of art but the lowest. Take movies, for example, since Ebert is in the title. How bad does a movie have to be until it ceases to be art? Is a typical Hollywood movie art? I don't know, but I'd say that games like Planescape: Torment, Grim Fandango and Alpha Centauri possess more beauty and resonate more with me on some emotional or intellectual level than a random Hollywood flick ever could.

3) It may not look like it at first glance, but in the signature of the member Ol' Willy there's actually a piece of real art from some of the greatest German artists of the 20th century.

 

[Sigourn]

Wish he had been alive to experience The Last of Us 2, that would have changed his mind.

 

[taxalot]

I do not get the comparisons.

When paintings came up, did anyone bother comparing them to songs ?
When movies came up, did anyone ponder how they were in front of novels ?
When statues appeared, did someone thought of comparing them to songs ?

It is a ridiculous debate. Art is a personal feeling ; works in that media should only be compared to other works, and not even.

"Video games are art ! Look at Shadow of the Colossus !"
"but what about football manager is it art"
"....yeah it's a video game..."

It's a meme by this point, but first we must define what's a video game. Video games is Pac Man, Hearts of Iron, Detroit:Become Human, Disco Elysium and Clash of Clans. It's a catch all term that is now meaningless.

 

[luj1]

When paintings came up, did anyone bother comparing them to songs ?
When movies came up, did anyone ponder how they were in front of novels ?
When statues appeared, did someone thought of comparing them to songs ?

Because you are talking about the classical arts, e.g. painting, sculpture, music, etc. which are fundamentally different

Movies and video games are pan-art, they incorporate all the various elements of other arts

 

[taxalot]

When paintings came up, did anyone bother comparing them to songs ?
When movies came up, did anyone ponder how they were in front of novels ?
When statues appeared, did someone thought of comparing them to songs ?

Because you are talking about the classical arts, e.g. painting, sculpture, music, etc.

Movies and video games are pan-art, they incorporate all the various elements of other arts

Really.

Songs, pictures, and statues all incorporate storytelling.
Songs and text describe scenes, that could be paintings.
Novels can include songs, without the music, of course.

Everything is interconnected, and I thought we clearly agreed by this point that a media was more than the sum of its parts. Movies are more than photography, dialog, and music.

 

[Thac0]

I dont get the "video games arent art" crowd. Video games do absolutely contain art. The music in video games is undoubtedly art, the visuals are, the writing is if the game is good enough. Its hard for the raw mechanical side of a game to be art, but it occassionally happens aswell when a progression mechanic really empathises the emotional message of a game. I would count the stuff with the tatoos and the death system of the Nameless One as art as an example. Why would the sum of its parts be lesser than the individual parts?

When a movie is analysed we judge the artistic merits of its individual aspects - picture, sountrack, writing and acting - but also those disciplines exclusive to the film like cinematography, editing and effects. And we judge the final product as art. I see no reason to give a game different treatment.

Reading the essay by that guy, his vision of what a game is seems to be deeply disconnected from reality. He talks about being able to win or loose like in a baseball game, as if games were still pong where two people execute a simple test of skill to determine the winner. But gaming has developed a lot further than that by now, and is easily able to qualify for my personal definition of art: Being able to carry an emotional message in it that can persist past the exposure to the work itself.

 

[luj1]

Because you are talking about the classical arts, e.g. painting, sculpture, music, etc.

Movies and video games are pan-art, they incorporate all the various elements of other arts

Really.

Songs, pictures, and statues all incorporate storytelling.
Songs and text describe scenes, that could be paintings.
Novels can include songs, without the music, of course.

Everything is interconnected, and I thought we clearly agreed by this point that a media was more than the sum of its parts. Movies are more than photography, dialog, and music.

So what's your point? I don't disagree. A painting or sculpture can work without storytelling though. I'm talking about stuff which cannot. Games are made of other art such as 2D drawings, 3D-sculpted objects, music, sounds, etc.

 

[urmom]

Art has narrative, or has narrative built around it. So do games.

 

[Silverfish]

First off, Roger Ebert was a failed screenwriter who couldn't even hack it working with Russ Meyer. Let that sink in, Ebert couldn't make topless women enticing. His views on what constitutes art are about as valid as Chris Farley's on clean, healthy living.

Second, while his reasoning is wrongheaded, he is technically correct. Video games are not art. Neither, however, are film, television, books or albums. All of those things are just methods through which art can be created. Ebert's a film guy, so using that as my example, Tarsem Singh's The Fall and Michael Bay's Transformers are both movies, but only one of them is art. The same applies across the board.

 

[The Jester]

 

[Metronome]

It's strange how the people who defend this kind of thing tend not to believe in free speech.
Yet the people who would take it down are almost always advocating for it elsewhere.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

iirc, Roger Ebert liked The Cosmology Of Kyoto.

 

[Jvegi]

I always said that for games to be considered art they have to evoke "deep" (complex, thought provoking) emotional response through deviced that are unique to them. So basically gameplay.

And there are some games I've played that do this. Like Cart Life.

So I think they can be art, although if you use some other definition it might not fit.

 

[DalekFlay]

Ebert's a film guy, so using that as my example, Tarsem Singh's The Fall and Michael Bay's Transformers are both movies, but only one of them is art. The same applies across the board.

"It's only art if I personally like it and get something from it" is the kind of argument someone makes when they think they're super smart but actually have the philosophical depth of a puddle.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Art and Professionally Trained:

Spoiler

Not Art also Kicked out of Art School. But did well in politics until the winter:

Spoiler

Art schools are a waste of time. I went to one. They're utterly pointless. I learned more about drawing from Game Art than I did in a traditional setting.
The worst part of art school was the cryptic as hell briefs that made no logical sense and no one was going to give you a hint. Everything was left up to interpretation and your interpretation assuming you weren't a degenerate was normally wrong. Anything taken for face value was wrong. Anything involving heavy heavy amounts of cryptic thought was praised and encourage. The entire point of modern art is alienation. Instead of putting art out in the plazas and the fields like they once did they now hide art in the galleries and put their prices so high that no one can afford it. Modern art is elitist.

The reason why video games are shunned is entirely down to the fact that the every-man can have it. This is why hipsters saw the industry and thought hmm that's one thing that the every-man still has we need to take that from them as well. Thus the indiepocolypse. I do really worry about our future if it means we're going to have these groups constantly wanting to mutate video games into something else. Games are not Art because Art is pretentious wank we have no reason to mimic. Lucky for us Art doesn't sell.

 

[cretin]

When movies came up, did anyone ponder how they were in front of novels ?

yes they did. Quite loudly, and for a very long time. It was digital and the internet that finally nailed prints coffin shut.

 

[cretin]

Art schools are a waste of time. I went to one. They're utterly pointless. I learned more about drawing from Game Art than I did in a traditional setting.
The worst part of art school was the cryptic as hell briefs that made no logical sense and no one was going to give you a hint. Everything was left up to interpretation and your interpretation assuming you weren't a degenerate was normally wrong. Anything taken for face value was wrong. Anything involving heavy heavy amounts of cryptic thought was praised and encourage. The entire point of modern art is alienation. Instead of putting art out in the plazas and the fields like they once did they now hide art in the galleries and put their prices so high that no one can afford it. Modern art is elitist.

Much of this could be said about any school, really. The only sensible system of learning has always been the apprenticeship.