Why gamers are worse than Roger Ebert
Gamers didn’t react too kindly to infamous critic Roger Ebert dismissing games recently – his blog post ‘Video Games Can Never Be Art‘ on the subject attracted 3000 comments. Rightly so – he deserved a good shoeing for some really ignorant rubbish. Today he offered a begrudging retraction of sorts on his blog…
I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.
I have no problem with Roger Ebert expressing his opinion. If he started embracing games I think I’d find the effect deadening to the critical atmosphere around the medium, and it might push it in a very specific direction. I wouldn’t expect a Roger Ebert to like games – Brit film reviewer Mark Kermode has similar opinions.
What does get up my nose is gamers, who have no excuse for not knowing their own medium, offering even more damaging retorts to Ebert than Ebert’s original criticism.
Many of the responses to Ebert seem to fall into certain categories.
Perhaps the most popular is the apologist response “You’re right that most games are rubbish but some, my personal favourites, are definitely art.” Many gamers cite Shadow of the Colossus, Flower, Braid etc, and dismiss the rest. It seems to me this response falls into exactly the same trap as Ebert – that which I do not rate or do not know I dismiss, the ones that I like are the only ones that are worthwhile.
It’s an attitude that doesn’t bear the merest scrutiny. It doesn’t allow for bad art, only good art. It runs the danger of having a checklist for ‘what constitutes gaming art?’ – evocative painterly graphics, an obscure or mysterious story, poignant music, and a pretentious tone. Things that somehow slightly resemble classic art – figurative painting, classical music, or pondering understated camerawork. Totally missing the point, and a desperately pathetic attempt to occupy the artistic high ground.
You don’t defend a medium by ditching the majority of it. I prefer Ebert’s attitude – at least he’s consistent and unpretentious about it.
The second attitude is the ‘Games are just fun, and on those terms it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it‘. Again, as someone who treasures videogaming and takes my fun seriously, I feel insulted by this response, because it basically dismisses my own experiences as irrelevant. Basically it is citing ignorance as a defence – ‘I don’t care what I don’t know, I just know what I like’. It’s the attitude frequently cited by people who don’t like art in the first place, and who rarely step outside the mainstream to experience the variety of it anyway. People who aren’t curious, who don’t want to learn and discuss something new. Gaming doesn’t need these sorts of people on its side.
There’s a version of this approach that is more palettable – it’s the ‘gaming is not art and doesn’t need to be.‘. I have some sympathy with this approach, as long as it doesn’t imply downing the critical tools and ignoring the issues and the experiences that gaming provokes. In some cases it’s the equivalent of picking up the ball and going home. It’s also counter-productive – does gaming need to find its own niche away from other things, and outside normal discussions? I would argue it needs to be absolutely central to any discussion of art and culture in the 21st century, if only to discuss why it falls outside the normal boundaries.
The other approach that gets up my nose is what I criticised Tom Bissell for – the approach by which story-based games occupy the artistic high ground while the gamey games are left to the kids. “Games with stories are just as much art as movies are, and sometimes better“. This ring-fencing is once again divisive, and leaves those of us who find all games of interest outside the loop. Again it is making the same mistake as Ebert – dismissing that in which it is not interested or invested. And it ignores what I consider the fundamental truth – that all games share similar narrative constructs, and the playing of them resembles a story no matter what the game, whether its chess, Tetris or Heavy Rain.
My worry is that we just replace Ebert’s ignorance with another slightly less ignorant replacement, and call that a victory. It’s not. It’s also not a victory to shrink from a difficult debate, or consider it unwinnable, because finding a way to clearly express and understand the complexities of gaming is undeniably valuable. But if what comes out of Ebert’s blog posts, and the responses (and some of them are thoughtful and considered), is that however frustrating the debate is, there’s always the merest chance of a greater understanding – can’t be a bad thing.
[ The pic is a chess set designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread ]
