This was touched upon in The Videogames Tab a bit, and I promised to start a thread on the topic, which has been discussed recently in large part thanks to Roger Ebert's blog entry on the topic, in which he dismissed the notion of video games as art.
He wrote a follow-up which some interpreted as a retraction of sorts, but which reads to me more like him saying "shame on me for wandering into this minefield." He doesn't actually recant anything, but merely suggests that he should have kept his opinion to himself, which strikes me as a really weird thing to say at that point in the discussion.
But there's some confusion as to what terms are even being used in these discussions. Ebert cites counter-examples of what are allegedly artful video games ("Braid" for one), but dismisses them as poor. But by making his case in this way, he reveals that he is including a qualitative baseline in his definition of "art," which seems odd, to me, unless one thinks there is no such thing as bad art.
Things get more confused in the follow-up, in which he seems to suggest that the mere malleability of story in a game disqualifies in, which seems to be dismissing games-as-art on a conceptual level. Then he says they might be art someday, which is making the argument from quality again. It's kind of a mess, argumentatively speaking.
So, though Ebert is the jumping off point for this discussion, I think we might do well to abandon whatever muddled terms he's using. Heck, it's worth asking both questions:
Can video games even technically be art? If not, why not? And if they can, do they need to be a certain type of game, or reach a certain level of quality to qualify? And if so, which games, if any, have reached that level?
He wrote a follow-up which some interpreted as a retraction of sorts, but which reads to me more like him saying "shame on me for wandering into this minefield." He doesn't actually recant anything, but merely suggests that he should have kept his opinion to himself, which strikes me as a really weird thing to say at that point in the discussion.
But there's some confusion as to what terms are even being used in these discussions. Ebert cites counter-examples of what are allegedly artful video games ("Braid" for one), but dismisses them as poor. But by making his case in this way, he reveals that he is including a qualitative baseline in his definition of "art," which seems odd, to me, unless one thinks there is no such thing as bad art.
Things get more confused in the follow-up, in which he seems to suggest that the mere malleability of story in a game disqualifies in, which seems to be dismissing games-as-art on a conceptual level. Then he says they might be art someday, which is making the argument from quality again. It's kind of a mess, argumentatively speaking.
So, though Ebert is the jumping off point for this discussion, I think we might do well to abandon whatever muddled terms he's using. Heck, it's worth asking both questions:
Can video games even technically be art? If not, why not? And if they can, do they need to be a certain type of game, or reach a certain level of quality to qualify? And if so, which games, if any, have reached that level?