Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form...

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

...Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

...We come to Example 3, "Flower" (above). A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?


...The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Have you seen half of the movies that come out of Hollywood? Who cares what the hell Roger Ebert thinks about it. He's an old man who doesn't want to change with the times. Let him think whatever he wants.

But anyways the question is stupid...who is anyone to define what art is? One of "defining" qualities of art is that you can't define it, if someone sees it as art, then it is.

While I agree with the open interpretation of art, I think that art is a central characteristic of the human experience, so we as humans have a perfectly valid reason to ask what it is. It is not a question with a clear answer, by any means, but a valid question nonetheless.

There are many, many replies to Roger Ebert's reeking ejaculate, from measured Judo-inspired reversals of momentum to primal shrieks which communicate rage in a harrowing, proto-linguistic state. Thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago chose to respond to him, which gave the whole thing a kind of symmetry, seeing as it was her TED speech that drove that wretched, ancient warlock into his original spasm.

That was very polite of her, behaving as though she were one side of a conversation. For what it's worth. Which isn't much, honestly, because this weren't never a dialogue. He is not talking to you, he is just talking. And he's arguing

1. in bad faith,
2. in an internally contradictory way,
3. with nebulously defined terms,

so there's nothing here to discuss. You can if you want to, and people certainly do, but there's no profit in it. Nobody's going to hold their blade aloft at the end of this thing and found a kingdom. It's just something to fill the hours.

Also, do we win something if we defeat him? Does he drop a good helm? Because I can't for the life of me figure out why we give a **** what that creature says. He doesn't operate under some divine shroud that lets him determine what is or is not valid culture. He cannot rob you, retroactively, of wholly valid experiences; he cannot transform them into worthless things.

He's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the human drive to create, and dreadfully so; a monument to the same generational bullshit that says because something has not been, it must not and could never be.

(CW)TB out.

lying in the reeds