Forum Overview :: Are Games Art? :: Re: There's also the fact that Ebert is a fuck ass.

[quote name="casual observer"]Yeah well, literature is going to stop being an art as well, what with being totally fucked by massive, popular, passive forms of entertainment. Video games'll get up there, but Ebert will probably have the excuse of being dead rather than being forced to admit his mistake. That weasely, roly-poly little imbecile. Let's put things into perspective. A video game is a form of (inter)active entertainment, where the 'reader', that's everyone from retards locked away for stealing quarters, to failed pseudo-intellectuals having a mid-life crisis at the age of 25, actually has to wrestle the story out of the (often) unyielding grasp of the medium. If you're Fabio it takes a whole lot longer to get the entire 'message' out of a game than it would if you were, say, Korean. Film is the opposite, the story is in motion constantly, the viewer is just watching shit happen to other people without any input on what's going on. You just have to sit there and digest the narrative, often as toxic as the popcorn kernel fragment stuck to the back of your throat. It's going to move on whether you want it to or not. The irony is that people often compare video games with film because they're both relatively modern and they're visual, but the languages they speak couldn't be further appart. A tangential discussion is why games insist on being linear (aside from it just being easier to make them that way) but y'all don't really give a fuck. A book, however, is an entirely different matter. You have to involve yourself with the book, you have to breathe life into it by interpreting and creating its imagery in your own mind, but it's still an essentially passive form of entertainment, unless you're reading a "Choose your own adventure!" hack job. You're being told a story, you're still along for the ride, but you're the one painting the scenery. This takes effort, a skill-set of its own, much like video games do, but with a much slower process, lacking the artificial adrenalin rush of putting a virtual 7.62 round into someone's skull. Another tangent is looking at Jack Thompson today and the church around the time of the renaissance; in particular a few of the characters from Don Quijote ("Who?" you might ask, to which I reply, "Fuck you, you uncultured peasant"). Books were accused of pretty much the same sins video games are getting sued over now. Regardless, the point is this. Given the fact that literature requires so much more effort than a film, and it's less immediately rewarding than a video, popular culture will lean away from books like they did from the old-fashioned storyteller; the guy who knew the Illiad by heart before it was ever written and recited with much flair. Literature's quickly being relegated to an intellectual elite, which just loves to jerk itself off at every opportunity with its own greatness, rather than producing something 'great'. So, where does that leave us with our type-writer-wielding asshole? Nowhere really, this was completely off to the side of him and his statement. What we -can- say, with the above dissertation in mind is that Film and Literature are already far enough from each other to allow Videogames to bridge the gap. So, Ebert will eventually be proven to be a hack, laughed at by generations wielding the indisputably perfect Dual Shock, learning how to do open-heart surgery, dynamically creating a new symphony called "Adagio for X-tetrahedron", or playing some WW2 game. Whether games are art or not isn't the point. As (I think it was fezzbort) said they're still young, they'll come around to being -regarded as- art eventually. Weapons, machines, buildings, and everything that's wrought with human hands has an aesthetic value, after all, and video games have no purpose other than to entertain; there's just no other way they can go but to become art, eventually. Look at such things as theater and film itself, they all went through the same process. Now all we need is Charlie Chaplin or Euripides to come around and whip things into shape. [/quote]