So Ebert says games aren’t art. That does not make it true. I say games are art and last time I checked, I was beating Michelle Obama, Oprah and Taylor swift in Time’s 100 most influential people list.

I just can’t imagine any better comeback than that. In Ebert’s defense, he grew up in a different world than we did, and it’s basically his job now to be the curmudgeon and tell us to get off his lawn. It’s okay, he just doesn’t understand, and if we didn’t have things like that to struggle against what would be the point of living? You play video games for the express purpose of a struggle to surmount.

But hey, instead of just saying “Ebert is wrong” why not invite him to sit down for a discourse on the subject, it’s not that he is incapable of seeing video games as art, it’s that he just doesn’t understand the medium, he needs to be taken through it. It’s probably too late for him to learn to play, but maybe he’ll take it up if someone influential like the PA guys sit down and have a learned discussion with a melange of $20 words (inflation…) to help him discover the hidden gems of video gaming. Ebert can’t talk now anyway so what else you gonna do?

So what’s the Citizen Kane of video games? Do we have one yet, or even some contenders for the title? Has anyone done a documentary on the art of the video game? And I don’t mean just the visual aspect of it, I mean the totality of the medium as the art form.

What about martial art? Is that not an art? Or is art in the form of skill not the kind of art we are talking about? When I rocket jump in tf2, a high, curving arc of bodily ballistics, drop in on a group of people and proceed to handle them all with the grace and style 1000 hours of practice brings, is that not art, to the eyes of someone who can understand it? Ebert says Michael Jordan doesn’t consider basketball to be art. From Michael Jordan’s style, I bet Ebert is wrong. Basketball may not be art, but Jordan was poetry in motion, the master with 10,000 hours of mind/body training, and that’s why he ruled the sport.

You can say that all sculpture is art simply via the fact that sculpture is made for art – but toilets are made the same way porcelain sculptures are cast. A ming vase is a treasure, a flower vase from target isn’t even noticeable to your eyes. You can’t just point to a few examples and say “that is not art, so nothing like it is or will ever be.”

Babe Ruth is remembered for his records and his style. He will *always* be remembered as long as there is an interest in baseball, no matter how badly his records are broken, because he was the motherfuckin BABE, sun. When Steroids McRecordbreaker is remembered throughout history, are people gonna talk about how he’d step up and call his home runs on the way to the ‘record’?

There have been, throughout human history, countless artists and artistic creations made. Most of those will never be known to anyone but those who made them and maybe a few of their friends and relatives. What we see as ‘art’ today in museums is the pinnacle 0.000000(whatever)01% of ALL OF HUMANITIES ARTISTIC CREATIONS EVER TO THIS POINT IN TIME.

I notice the best examples of why video games aren’t and will never be art that EBert can come up with all stem from his knowledge of a TED presenter talking about why video games are art. Where’s his own research into the subject? Where are his experiences of what is considered the greatest video games?

You have a pretty poor opinion about a subject you don’t know well. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they all contain shit. I’m not making a case that any video game now is going to be in the Louvre next to the Mona Lisa, but I’m never making the case that they will or wont be. When was the video camera invented, and when was the ‘greatest film’ made?

Art is ‘supposed’ to provoke, it’s ‘supposed’ to make bold statements, or at least that’s what we tell people about art. But hey, look at the huge fucking discussion this shit provokes.

You could say that pornography will never be art, but you’d already be wrong. Past masters of the art of Japanese woodcut made porn. They were obviously labors of love as well as lust. Just because prurient interests are expressed does not invalidate the ‘art’ aspect.

The video game as a medium is still in its infancy. Shakespeare rode on how many thousand years of linguistic evolution?

Even science is art. Is not E=MC^2 beautiful? In less than an inch, Einstein proved that matter and energy did not exist independent of one another. If art is supposed to provoke and make bold statements, you can’t get more provocative and bold than changing the world and the course of history using less than an inch of ink.

Art is a very human, very personal thing. You can objectively explain the form of it, but you can only subjectively explain the ‘meaning’ – and the meaning is always different from person to person, and even your explanation of your meaning will be interpreted differently from the actual feeling you experience. You can’t make someone else have your experience with art that makes it art to you.

If dancing is art, so is martial arts, so too can be video games. You wont understand cubism until it’s explained to you, but once you know how to look at it, it can be amazing.

Video games may not mean art to Ebert, but art means something different to each and every one of us.

Next he’ll probably argue that tattoos can’t be art, either.

Fans of early 20th century design and graphics, take note.

I never liked Enemy Territory’s assertions as well as those of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and it’s clear that the former is the object of reverence here, pausing to interject a bit of player economy a la Counter-Strike. We played RTCW until the sight of the the menu screen provoked uncontrollable bouts of vomiting, and still managed to tuck in a round or two between convulsions. It’s entirely possible that I’ve reached some kind of lifetime Wolfenstein quota.

Most gamers my age cut their teeth (and then vomited uncontrollably from the motion sickness) on Wolfenstein 3D. The original. The Pre-Doom ages. I was 14, and it was already old then but I got it for my Mac and played until I was cross-eyed. Thankfully modern-day truly 3 dimensional shooter games have figured out how to not make people vomit from just the game mechanics (it’s possible the fact that my computer could only render it in postage-stamp size had something to do with it) – the smooth motion of the game, so utterly unlike anything in human experience just set laser beams abounce in my inner ear. I don’t think I was even able to finish the game.

Fast forward 16 years: not gonna play the new Wolf. Why? Same reason I didn’t play Doom3 more than the first level. They’re BO-ring. Trying to figure out the stupid puzzles implemented by game designers (seriously, how many versions of pull that lever or find that key to continue are there going to be?) and the monotonous enemy combat (fuck up, reload, try a different tactic, rinse and repeat until you pass with enough health and ammo to be sure you can pass the next challenge) just doesn’t do it for me.

Team Fortress 2? Now, when I play that, I get to actually figuratively piss in someone’s cheerios every time I send a rocket flying up their ass after bouncing them into the air with my first rocket. See, you can’t piss off a computer (at least not yet) so what’s the point of trying to subjugate “AI” enemies? All they do is cheat, because there’s no other way to beat a human, or just use overwhelmingly massive force against you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my rockets have a date with a team full of noobs.