Ebert: OK OK OK SHUP

Why do you have to exclude something from art just because you do not enjoy it?

Also its probably good he is not into video games.  One less person who would be writing Walls of Texts on the forums.

He’s a classy guy, it’s nice to see there’s still a few of those around “in the media” these days. Unfortunately for all concerned his time among us is waning.
If he was so inclined I would love to see a yearly debate on games-as-art reflecting on the releases of the past year and how (or IF) they have enriched the medium. IMO having people of Ebert’s caliber challenging the industry to do better or just to consider how they can grow the collective culture is all sorts of good.

What’s elegant about it? He’s the same angry crank curmudgeon, saying “I am still right despite knowing nothing”

@geldonyetich have to disagree with you, nowadays even a piece of trash can be called art, so no matter how bad a game, it still can be called art.
Also the quality of art mainly depend on talent, not money. so a system that promote arts with profits will usually beat out a system that promote art through desire, because the number of talent will be drawn to the profit will be much higher.  A good example is the game industry in North/South Korea.

And bah, HTML tag fail.

wowpanda: @geldonyetich have to disagree with you

Curses, as it seems I’ve weakness enough to disagreement to spend all day propping up my fragile self-esteem.

wowpanda: nowadays even a piece of trash can be called art, so no matter how bad a game, it still can be called art.

On this point, we’re not in disagreement. I find modern art to be a tad too open to interpretation. However, the difference in palatable observation satisfaction is a difficult thing to have conveyed the first time I wrote, and the subjective nature of art appreciation makes damning modern art ethically difficult.

wowpanda: Also the quality of art mainly depend on talent, not money. so a system that promote arts with profits will usually beat out a system that promote art through desire, because the number of talent will be drawn to the profit will be much higher.

Call me a pessimist, but I think that talent has less to do with landing a high-paying position than social networking, and that the highest paid positions in mainstream game development are done by those who have next to zero artistic contribution towards the finished product. On other words, I find the artistic talent to money correlation to be very weak, as far as capitalism is (or ever was) concerned.

wowpanda: A good example is the game industry in North/South Korea.

This might be pushing the dearth of my ignorance, but I’m pretty sure North Korea doesn’t have much of a (video) gaming industry, if any.

<i>Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.</i>
 
I said something I regret. I don’t regret saying it, but I regret saying it.

Boanerges: I now return you to the geldonyetich vs the world debate, already in progress.

Fine, fine, just as long as I get top billing.

I have to agree with Amber here. To take an example from Ebert’s own blog post, Shakespeare wasn’t trying to create “highbrow” art. He was creating decidedly “lowbrow” content to appeal to common people.
 
Why?
To put asses in seats….to get people into the Globe.

CmdrSlack: I have to agree with Amber here. To take an example from Ebert’s own blog post, Shakespeare wasn’t trying to create “highbrow” art. He was creating decidedly “lowbrow” content to appeal to common people.   Why? To put asses in seats….to get people into the Globe.

To see it put this way, it’s like you’re saying he took the path of least resistance to pump out junk that any idiot would buy. True, his theater had the commoner’s pits, and many of his plays contained appeals they could enjoy. However, Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the playing company he worked with for most of his career) frequently was patronized by King James I Himself! I think your doing the Bard a great injustice to hold him up as the poster boy that makes mediocre crap acceptable simply because he made his work accessible to the masses.

NOOOOO!  Ebert until now you were the Glenn Beck of video game commentary. Why did you spoil it? All you needed to do was pull in the weak minded in a sort of anti-video game tea party and my life would have been complete!

In the end his ignorance defeats him. Attempting to find a definition of art which would exclude video games he tries:
“Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people.”
This is exactly what video games can do. Cf Raph’s story about a tree, cf Civ’s delightfully subversive takes on history (eg that women’s lib is great for repressive government because sending the women to work in the factories let’s you push more of the men to the frontline for your evil expansionist wars), cf the people watching of The Sims.
Please don’t bother us again, Mr Ebert, you’re a cultural snob who secretly despises most of the films you review but have to talk about them because the Albanian art house movies you adore don’t pay your bills.

The first version of this is still awaiting moderation, so I’m removing the links and reposting.
@Geldonyetich
Whether Shakespeare was a hack is for the most part irrelevant, as I’m all for accidental masterpieces rather than all those art novels which one is forced to read as an ordeal.  On this last point, it’s all I’ve ever heard say about Ulysses: unreadable, tedious, and written solely to show off Joyce’s erudition and purposefully mesmerize critics. To cast a wider net, Modernist authors’ list of sins is especially telling: unabashed elitism (Woolf, Joyce), unsavoury political ideas (Hamsun, Pound), eugenics (Yeats, Shaw), etc.  You could round them up and dismiss one after the other, except for one little point:  All these charges would have been enough to hang, in the eyes of posterity, every politician, financier, and factory worker from the 1920′s, but not a creator of art;  Ulysses, for example, is still apparently unassailable.  So I am glad to see Shakespeare, the greatest author in the English language getting accused of writing “for the masses”; it reminds me what art ought to be created for — and it isn’t the posterity of the artist.

re: Ixobelle
I said something I regret. I don’t regret believing it, but I regret saying it.

I don’t think videogames are art, either. I think once you start making something “art” you get a flood of obscure, pretentious, boring works that are designed more for an art culture than for a decent audience. That art culture segregates the audience and kills the media. Who honestly watches arthouse films except a small well-to-do audience who watches them not so much because they are good, but because its one of the things they are expected to do?
I see games like science fiction, mysteries, or westerns. It’s possible to have  a very high level of craftsmanship, but being in a genre is a vaccine for the worst effects of the art crowd.

Vetarnias: @Geldonyetich Whether Shakespeare was a hack is for the most part irrelevant, as I’m all for accidental masterpieces rather than all those art novels which one is forced to read as an ordeal.

The question of if Shakespeare is a hack is hardly irrelevant: Shakespeare’s masterworks for the ages establish irrevokably that he was most definately not a hack, and this is why I find it just a tad presumptious to suggest his only motivation as to put butts in the seats of the Globe Theatre. If that was all he wanted to do, there’s far easier ways to go about it than writing ageless masterpieces.

Vetarnias:
On this last point, it’s all I’ve ever heard say about Ulysses: unreadable, tedious, and writtensolely to show off Joyce’s erudition and purposefully mesmerize critics. To cast a wider net, Modernist authors’ list of sins is especially telling: unabashed elitism (Woolf, Joyce), unsavoury political ideas (Hamsun, Pound), eugenics(Yeats, Shaw), etc. You could round them up and dismiss one after the other, except for one little point: All these charges would have be enough to hang, in the eyes of posterity, every politician, financier,and factory worker from the 1920′s, but not a creator of art; Ulysses,for example, is still apparently unassailable.

These far reachign tangents show an impressive breadth of knowledge, btu we seem to be losing focus on the matter at hand. These seems to be this certain assumption that when somebody wants good art they might be referring to high art, but I assure you that this is not what I was intending to say. I have nothing against work which is accessible to the masses. I have everything against work which sold out. There’s a fine but vital difference there.

JuJutsu: “This might be pushing the dearth of my ignorance, but I’m pretty sure North Korea doesn’t have much of a (video) gaming industry, if any.”Dude. That’s the point he was making.

I’m pretty sure North Korea’s barely or non-existent video game market has more to do with North Korea simply not having a society whose mindset is not all that compatible with video games more than a direct correlation of monetary incentive.

Well, there’s Ebert for you.  He’s retracting nothing; he’s just saying he shouldn’t have said something he would later be asked to retract.
But I think a few of his points make sense. No matter how much you rig the definition of art to make sure that video games get excluded, nobody can quite come up with a canon of video games as art.  He says “Myst” is from the infancy of the genre, but that was released twenty years after arcade Pong, and a decade after the NES was released in Japan. By saying Myst belongs to the infancy of the genre, he is excluding anything from arcade games, to Colecovision, to roguelikes.  It’s as if he were saying that films from the silent era (which ended a full 30 years after the invention of cinema) could not be art, purely as the result of unfavourable comparison to what came after them; or that The Canterbury Tales is not a masterpiece of English literature because the English language had not fully evolved to Shakespeare’s standards when it was written.
But let’s also consider board and tabletop games, where we could come up with something of a canon by drawing a list of relatively old games that are still widely played (chess, checkers, mahjong, etc., even card games, but also Monopoly, Clue, Risk, Battleship, Scrabble, AD&D, and so on). On the subject of board games alone, its pedigree is definitely as old as film; if you add traditional games such as chess, mahjong and games of dice and cards, you can go back centuries, even millennia.  But has any of those ever been called art? We’re talking about games with a proved track record and quasi-perfect mechanics, but no, I’ve never heard anyone say: “This chess thing is a really good game, and it’s also art.”  I have seen chess sets called art (recently, one of those Bolshevik porcelain sets from the 1920′s), but not the game itself.
But now we get video games, and everyone save Ebert is saying “this is art”, which, to me, appears as quite an absurd dash to legitimize something precisely because it has become exceedingly popular; if someone was doing it when Atari consoles were about, I have yet to hear about him.  What concerns me especially is what criteria are at work in calling this “art”.  From Ebert’s admission (and this man Barker’s assessment), the important word is narrative, which I suspect is why chess or Monopoly were never considered artistic: they don’t have a narrative, except if you consider making the other guy lose as a narrative.  So we already get an inkling of the bias involved in deciding which games will get called art, and which won’t.  Narrative games will; strategy games won’t. No matter how good SimCity might be, it’s a strategy game, and has no narrative; hence, not art. Final Fantasy games, on the other hand, would probably make the cut.
This goes a long way towards explaining why I don’t want to see video games called art.  Not just because, as Dblade says, that pretentiousness starts seeping in when you start calling them such (poster child: Braid), but because the criteria of art being applied to video games are alien to the nature of video games.  Entire game genres, no matter how successful they are as games or how much of a pedigree they have, get excluded because they do not have the inherent characteristics to be called art.  Games without narrative, like Pong, or SimCity, or Hearts of Iron; games that leave themselves open to player manipulation, or rely on player interaction for their success, like sandbox MMO’s; in the case of aesthetics, games that do not put an emphasis on graphics, like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft.  Left with Ebert’s criteria for what art should be, we’d reach the inevitable conclusion that the more narrative — and, in particular, the more linear — a game is, the higher it scores on artistic merit.  Which is both reductionist, and, in the case of linearity, fallacious.  The quality of a game is not something to be wholly assessed by watching a walkthrough on YouTube, which is pretty much what Ebert would reduce it to.
If we do want to consider games as art, the sole criterion should be their success as games qua games; but I don’t see this get bandied around whenever the discussion is raised.

@Geldonyetich
On the subject of Shakespeare’s hackery, I think it all boils down to the author’s intent versus posterity’s assessment of the work. There’s precious little that is known for certain about Shakespeare, so he might have been writing for the money, cranking out works he did not really believe in, simply to fill seats at the Globe; that critics for the next five hundred years have been saying that he was damned good at it is another matter.  But that Shakespeare was good at what he did does not exclude the possibility that he might have kept his eye on the account books the entire time. Hence my term, accidental masterpiece.
I know the myth of the lonely author living in abject poverty for the sake of his (always misunderstood and ignored during his lifetime; poster child: Van Gogh) art is a pleasing cliché, but it isn’t always true.

Amber:
He stepped back from the front lines, he conceded defeat in the face of massive numbers, and the best you can do is keep gnawing on his bones because he still holds the opinion he originally had?

Well, this *is* the internet.

Amber: And for fuck’s sake people, he backed off.  He stepped back from the front lines, he conceded defeat in the face of massive numbers,

 
He really didn’t, though. He said “I’m right but I’m not going to argue my point, because I don’t want to lose.” He’s not admitting defeat, and he’s only backing off in the sense that he’s declaring that he has no interest in arguing his side.

@Brask Mumei
I noted aesthetics briefly, which I admit could apply to certain games; but something like Dwarf Fortress, which is stubbornly attached to ASCII (and this would be its only aesthetic consideration), works all the same.  It could also be music (Age of Conan’s best aspect).  Or even atmosphere (Clue managed this particularly well for a board game).  But even those I would consider secondary to the game mechanics themselves.
I’m not sure how Go or other games were regarded by the ancients; undoubtedly at least some of those games had a religious (or at least ritualistic or symbolic) significance behind them, which might well be how art entered the equation.  But recent games?
Oh, and “if we make something populist, it isn’t art because it is populist” isn’t one of my tenets; it’s one of Geldon’s, I believe.

CmdsrSlack: See, but that’s not what I said. What I said was that, in the eyes of critics, he was a great artist. His work is considered “highbrow.” At the time however, his work, especially a comedy like Midsummer Night’s Dream, is decidedly “lowbrow.” It doesn’t make it any less good, but to some extent MND is full of eloquently worded dick and fart jokes. If you’re going to make an appeal to authority by listing important people who gave him money, that’s fine, but let’s call a fallacy a fallacy.

Sure, but what does high art or low art have to do with good art? What I was trying to do in replying to you is head off an easy way to misconstrue what you were saying.
The thing is, from what you head said about Shakesphere, it’s a very a slippery slope: just because you’re developing for casual players it means that you don’t need any standards on the grounds that “casual players are idiots, they don’t know good games, so they’ll buy whatever and we don’t have to try as hard.” It bothers me that it seems like this is a common misunderstanding among developers.
I believe the artist has a moral responsibility to try harder than that. That this puts me in disagreement with slick business operators is an unfortunate reflection of the brazen falsehood of our time. I really don’t believe any of Shakesphere’s genius was “accidental” as something that good is a likely to be an accident as I am to win the lottery as many times in a row as Shakesphere released good plays. If more game developers had this understanding, perhaps Ebert would have even less a leg to stand on than, “I don’t play games, so what the hell am I doing commenting about what they are or are not?”

I’m pretty sure North Korea’s barely or non-existent video game market has more to do with North Korea simply not having a society whose mindset is not all that compatible with video games more than a direct correlation of monetary incentive.

You got to be kidding me. Do you know how big video games are in S. Korea? And you know the North/South Koreans are all KOREANS right?

Asians have a much bigger interests in video games in general. In North Korea, even though people having trouble get food, they do have arcades: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2008/09/inside-north-korean-arcade.html

If Kim can relax his control on the economy a little bit (i.e. by allow people to take profits), North Korea will have a booming art/game industry. Just look at China.

Amber, he did not back off.  He basically said, “You all are fools for having that opinion, and I still have mine, but I was stupid for saying it because you fools can obviously not understand it.”
I don’t respect anyone who holds that high of an opinion of himself.  Honestly, if he had just shrugged and said, “Well, we are all welcome to our opinions, no problem,” that would have garnered respect from me.

Probably because I’ve seen a number of creative works out there which had a massive budget thrown at them, and sucked, weakening that correlation irrevocably.