— 1 December 2005

Roger Ebert and David's butt

Roger Ebert, noted movie critic, talks on his web page about games and their artistic merit. In his column Answer Man, a reader responds to an earlier quote from Ebert in which he states that he believes games to be an inferior medium to literature and film. Ebert elaborates a bit in his answer and writes:

Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

I am inclined to agree with Ebert that we have still not yet seen a game that beats the best of other media, artistically, although some great leaps in the right direction has been made. However, I strongly disagree with his argument that games, due to their interactive nature, lacks “authorial control” (which is his argument why games never can be as good an artform as literature and film.) Here’s why I diagree:

First of all, games are definitely not the only media that requires audience interaction. On the most primitive level, one can argue that viewing Michelangelo’s David (for instance) is an interactive process. Let’s look at the following imaginary scenario:

An art student walks into the Galeria dell’Academia to take a look at the status of David. On the way out he meets a friend who excitedly asks, “Have you seen David yet?”

“Yes, I have,” the student answers – and continues, “but I didn’t like it much. It’s just a butt.”

The point here is that the viewer is interactive in the manner that he or she needs to walk around the statue to fully absorb it. Sure, I know that this is an extreme example; video games require a level of interaction that tops statue-peeking any day. But try this: put David on one end of the interactivity spectrum and ICO on the other end. Then try to find exactly the level of interactivity where the author’s control becomes so “weak” that any work produced at the same level of interactivity will automatically be artistically inferior.

No one would argue that Michelangelo lacked artistic control when he created his work. Equally stupid is the argument that a game creator lacks artistic control, just because the consumer has some level of interactive freedom. As soon as you create content, you are in control of that content, period! Furthermore, the design of game play and flow of game narrative are fully in the designer’s hands, no matter what Ebert says.

Ebert has a point though. There is a contradiction between strong storytelling and interactivity. Many games evade the problem by making the narrative extremely linear and allow only very limited or no interaction with the story. As soon as a game allows the player more freedom, problems arise – and serious ones. However, I am inclined to believe that many or all of those problems are possible to overcome. Ebert’s conclusion is wrong though. It might be hard to make a game with the same artistic merits as the best of film and literature, but to say that it’s impossible?

I get the impression that Ebert’s view of video games is biased by movies – and movies such as “Doom”, “House of the Dead”, “Mortal Kombat” and so on. It is sad though that he is not taking games seriously. Movie makers such as Uwe Boll already does enough to drag games into the public opinion gutter. The industry would benefit from support by guys like Ebert and some day they will inevitably come – in hordes.

— sicher