I wish someone had told this to Robert Ebert:
Playing a video game is no more art than watching a movie. Ebert is conflating is how the audience experiences the medium with the medium itself. Creating a video game is as much an art as creating a movie.
Ebert's whole argument was "if you can win it, then it's not art." Chess is not an art. Football is not an art. OK. But the workmanship of a chess set can be art. The architecture of a football stadium can be art.
Someone once told him to play some video game--I think it was
Flower. You can't win at Flower, so according to Ebert's argument, Flower can be art. He dismissed the idea entirely and mocked it: "Who decides who wins at growing a flower?" And he missed the point entirely. No one decides the right way to play. No one decides when you've won. Flower is art.
Ebert didn't care about dialog with his audience. He didn't want to learn. He was a curmudgeonly old asshole who late in life found some drip of relevance by pissing some people off, and he milked it as long as he could.
