"Videogames will never be a legitimate art form" - Roger Ebert

>"Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Alejandro Jodorowsky informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."

Viewing this quote from a more serious angle, do you think he was right?

faggot doesn't have a jaw lol

Art is about the artist's vision and games are about agency. A player can be an artist but a game can't be art.

>some old jawless faggot makes a claim on a topic on which he has no experience, knowledge, or authority
>people are still mad about it

hes right

Reminder that this is the closest that vidya has got to being art

>Never played a video game but knows they can't be art

>"I've never met a black person but I know they're not human"

What does it mean to be "Art". Michael Bay is an artist.

he was a relic of an older generation who talked about something that he had already judged before considering it any further, so he was wrong as fuck

Who cares

Why did people take Ebert seriously? He gave 5 stars to The Phantom Menace and loved the live-action Garfield movies enough to write an entire review of the second from Garfield's perspective

> never, as Alejandro Jodorowsky informs us

I hate people who talk like this

This guy looks BOGGED.
Maybe we should listen.

I hope he was.

Was Ebert a visionary? Was he the first to herald Garfield as an artistic work unmatched by any other? It took us over 30 years to properly appreciate the pipe strip.

He meant because the appreciation of art is always passive. You sit and watch a movie. You sit and read a book or a poem. You sit and listen to music. You, the viewer, the reader, the listener, you GIVE YOURSELF to the experience of the artist.
Video games aren't like that. You run around, you control the experience, you do this or that, you take an active part in it. There might be elements of art within video games, like the music or the art, but the overall experience itself is not art because it's not passive.

It's pretty reddit-tier. If what you're saying has any meaning on its own you shouldn't have to attribute it to anybody unless somebody asks. But I think that's just an extension of the Sup Forums mentality, what is being said matters, who said it does not.

having such a narrow definition of art is anti-art, ebert was a hack

>because never, as Alejandro Jodorowsky informs us

it was "Rick Wakeman" in the original quote

why lie about something like this?

Same thing was said about literally every new medium

I don't care, I don't need other people to validate what I enjoy

People shouldn't even WANT games to be art. The second games become art, they'll become unfun, walking simulators. Imagine every game being like We Happy Few. No one fucking wants that

Grow a chin ya pinhead

>Art is always a passive experience
Wtf I hate art now

>talked about something that he had already judged before considering it any further
He'd fit in well here.

That line of reasoning doesn't make sense. Not only is your analogy true in this instance, you never have to meet some thing to know about its nature. You don't have to meet a polar bear to know it's a bear. Plenty of historical and physiological accounts can testify to that fact, and thus you are justified in believing it despite never experiencing it yourself. I'm sure you know snakes are venomous even though you've never met one to test it.

art is subjective

Video games are toys for children

if he's so smart, why is he DEAD?

Literally who cares lol
The man's dead

WTF YOU'RE WRONG DAMNIT VIDEOGAMES ARE ART TRY PLAYING MASTERPIECES LIKE LAST OF US AND BIOSHOCK INFINITE BEFORE SAYING SHIT LIKE THAT YOU FUCKER

>trying to legitimize products designed as entertainment as art

>Roger Ebert anything

so your telling me that playing music isnt art, but listening to it is?

How many years did it take for movies to become art?

what'a wrong with his face

all of the "gamez r art" fags BTFO

Yes.

What are his credentials on judging video games as an art form?

Didn't art snobs say the exact same shit about cinema back in the day?

Art is for fags. Show me any painting that isnt drawn by a fag.

Who gives a fuck if vidya is or isn't art?

Interactive exhibits can't be art then.

Who actually cares about video games being art and why do they care?

is he smiling in that pic or is that just how he looks

Once again some useless "art" "critic" who can't even define art, calling other art forms not art.

It really depends on how you define art, and not in a bullshit copout way. Impressionist art is globally accepted as being beautiful today, but was mocked as unfinished garbage when the movement began.

Also look up "The Fountain," a Dadaist work that is literally a fucking urinal. It's considered art because someone took that urinal out of where it originally was and put it in a new context.

Granted that's painting and sculpture, not film. It could be that film has different standards. However, I still think video games will be art the second a majority of the art world believes them to be. It's a tautology, but that's how art works.

Video games are toys for children. If they're art then Monopoly and Jenga are art, and if that's the case then you've destroyed all meaning of the word. Either way they are not something to be given respect by educated adults. Has there ever been an attempt at making a serious "art" game that didn't turn out to be a pretentious pile of shit?

Decades actually, funnily there were the same kind of people shitting on movies because "muh theatre", just like people shit on vidya today.
Huh, I wonder if people will shit on VR when it becomes a thing.

Because art fags need something to legitimize going 100K into debt

video games are a legitimate fart form

so making a painting or sculpting a statue isnt art, but doing nothing beyond judging it is what makes it art? what a retarded train of thought

He had to have his lower jaw removed because of cancer.

video games are hybrid art forms, roger ebert is just saying they aren't art cause he doesn't like/understand them
something being art isn't based on how much you like it or not

people call their drawing of their fucking furry oc art these days who even cares anymore

Video games may eventually become art. But it won't be in our lifetime.

I respect his views on film, but he never played enough games to have a really informed view on them

Yes. So, even if it's sped along, it will likely be many decades until video games are seen as art. VR even more, as nobody seems to have really adopted it

>Huh, I wonder if people will shit on VR when it becomes a thing.
VR is a thing although it's first gen, and even the big names in the industry say it'll take 10 years of tech research to fully develop and Google's VR film Pearl won an Emmy. So it's already art by industry standards!

>If they're art then Monopoly and Jenga are art, and if that's the case then you've destroyed all meaning of the word.

So are movies art or not then? The word seems pretty meaningless already if shit like Alien Covenant and Transformers can be considered art. If movies can be art, but they are not art, then your argument falls apart.

Considering how many people don't class photography as art, even nearly 200 years after the first photograph, he's probably right.

From The New Yorker, 2013:
In the months before his death, Ebert revisited a controversial topic in his life: video games, and whether they are or are not art. "He actually started playing some," said his wife. "He played Candy Crush and tried out one of those city building games." He remained unconvinced that they were art. "Are video games amusing?" he asked. "Sure. Are they art? Certainly not. And they never will be. Compared to film or music, they are mere trivialities."

Aging hobbyists who need to vindicate all the time they wasted writing about/playing video games.

Vidya contains music, visual art, storytelling, acting, writing, even dance in many cases. I don't see how something can combine together just about every art form and somehow end up not being art. It just seems so obviously incorrect that I don't really even see how it's a tenable claim.

>mfw it will be just like that scene in Back to the Future where the kids laugh at Marty for using his hands to play a game

>never played any games besides ping pong or tetris maybe
>claims to know what is art and what not

>Monopoly and Jenga are art
I'd say that Monopoly and Jenga aren't by themself art, but playing them is.

maybe he should have tried silent hill 2

Games are art, the definition of art shouldn't have to do with quality.

Gaming's big issue is that most legitimately talented people don't work in the games industry. The games industry is a shitty industry to work in and your talents are better off elsewhere. A talented software engineer isn't gonna be fucking around with Ubisoft when he can be a lead engineer at a bigger company like Microsoft or Apple, a good writer is going to be writing anything but videogame plots, a good visual designer is gonna be doing art for movies or marketing, you get the point.

>"He actually started playing some," said his wife. "He played Candy Crush and tried out one of those city building games."
>He played Candy Crush

This is like watching Twilight and a random BBC documentary, then declaring that film will never be art.

The irony is cinema likewise being dismissed in its infancy. It was surprising that Roger would fall for the same foibles as his forebears.

Game design has been an artform for all of history, but the argument about it is dominated by pretentious cunts who want to justify liking games, and pretentious cunts who want to justify disliking games.

There are two classifications of objects in my mind, and they often overlap through subjective views: Art and Tools.
When people create an object that they use to survive or to create a better quality of life for themselves, they're making a tool.
Art is something that a person makes to express outwardly a part of themselves, something they desire to do, not out of a necessity.
So in my own personal view, art is something you want to make, a tool is something you need to make.

But the overlap comes in when different people view the same objects. To a normal businessman, a wristwatch might just be a tool to tell the time, albeit one that cost him a fair amount of money. But to the watchmaker, that shit is an actual work of art. Even for something as simple as a hammer can be art when viewed by the blacksmith who made said hammer.

Whether a piece of art is "good" or not is an entirely different argument and needs to be treated as such.

He took the bogpill

You should actually read his reviews for Flower and Braid. It's more intelligent than anything any game critic has ever said.

I remember he called Braid's story "a wordy fortune cookie" while every other reviewer was praising it as intellectual.

This is not his opinion at all. You're pulling shit out of your ass.

He defined how reviewing should work, not just in movies but it influenced other forms of reviewing. For example before Ebert movies were rated in a type of vaccuum. After Ebert they were weighed more in contrast to similiar movies. So Garfield the movie would be weighed against OTHER talking animal movies. Super hero movies would be weighed against other Super Hero movies. You wouldn't weigh Garfield against Batman. Before him for instance it was considered acceptable to dismiss any action movie because it didn't have the emotional depth of a drama. Ebert changed the game. That's more raw power than everyone that ever worked at IGN combined.

And you're talking about that he liked some silly movies and thinking that's an attack on him.

>candy crush
NO FUCKING WONDER

>He played Candy Crush and tried out one of those city building games.

At this point he had to be doing it out of spite, there were tons of walking simulators out in 2013

When you are making something it is in process; it could be art but that depends on those who are viewing it at the time. The artist creating the work will not deem it as such until it is finished.

But yeah, isn't wrong.

how does he not drool all over the place with his mouth open like that

"Roger Ebert will never be alive again"- Me

>But the overlap comes in when different people view the same objects. To a normal businessman, a wristwatch might just be a tool to tell the time, albeit one that cost him a fair amount of money. But to the watchmaker, that shit is an actual work of art. Even for something as simple as a hammer can be art when viewed by the blacksmith who made said hammer.

I don't know if you're into art history, but you just described Readymades. You have great insight if you didn't already know they exist!

>The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art".[1] By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the Found object became art.

game design is a craft, not an artform

>"a wordy fortune cookie"

He wasn't wrong.

I COULD SMEAR MY SHIT ON A WALL AND ITD BE MORE ARTISTIC THAN THESE TRASH GAMES

Man this guy's ugly

Candy crush is what the video game's critics that we have push. He also played Flower because it was hyped up as the greatest game of all time by 'game critics'. This is the state of video game's critics. When the greatest movie critic asks them what their master piece's are they tell him to play Flower and Candy Crush.

Think long and hard about what the mean's about the state of game criticism. Than compare that to Ebert's legacy.

the big question is: what defined art in his opinion?

Was it just various technical aspects that simply isn't possible (or really shouldn't be) in videogames?

Because... I hate to sound like that guy but if we're talking about pure passion and certain intangibles like that, Cuphead feels like a strong contender. It dedicates itself to being a game but still does such beautiful visuals and was fueled by dreams. and Microsoft even getting dragged into those dreams.

>sculpture is a craft, not an artform

All right, fuck the semantic argument shit.
You are chosen to present ONE game to Ebert in order to change his mind, which one do you pick?

>b-but he's dead
Time travel, dude.

i think he's right and then he compromised himself with that later part.

Nothing, because Ebert's argument is entirely rooted in semantics and as such needs to be attacked in this regard.

>b-but film wasn't respected at first
Film was held back by technical limitations, but even then you had Birth of a Nation in 1915 and tons of great movies in the 1920s. Pong came out almost 50 years ago. Where is the Citizen Kane or the Metropolis of video games?

inaccurate comparsion
not that games can't be art as a whole, the actual technical job of game design is more like building a house

Planescape

You just described the reason I don't read pseudo intellectual novels by gaming "critics."

Although I do think there's a loophole a truly dedicated individual could have used to show Ebert why people like gaming.

>"Shoot 'em Up," written and directed by the gung-ho Michael Davis, is the most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, "Sin City," which in comparison was a chamber drama.

>That I liked "Shoot 'em Up" is a consequence of a critical quirk I sometimes notice: I may disapprove of a movie for going too far, and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far.

If VR had been around a few years earlier, and Platinum had made a spectacle fighter you could play in the first person...

Will he actually finish the game on the difficulty I prescribe?

Video games can be ...

>an advanced form of interactive storytelling
>a virtual stage for roleplaying / acting
>an aesthetic experience (video, audio)
>a competition/sport, where the beauty of the player's skill can be said to be "artistic"


Think of a Virtual Reality made with the visual talent of Raphael and the musical talent of Mozart. It is a possibility, therefore video games can be art.

I don't really care for this guy or the whole subject for the matter since art is highly subjective.
But you can't be anything else than mad over the faggot wasn't even informed enough to play some real games and not mobile trash made to suck money out of retards

his arguing is rooted in "I don't like it so it's not art"
single player story-driven games definitely qualify as art technically
so you aren't really going to convince him of anything, there's few games with stories that appeal to people who aren't sheltered tweens

well, as I mentioned earlier: Cuphead.

I feel like that's one of the closest things we really have to a pure artform.

It doesn't bog itself down too much with story, it focuses on being a game, but it has a very powerful style to it.

I think, in a way, if I were to give definition to what made a game art, it would be how it focuses on being a game and working that with the style of the game itself over several minute to even hour long cutscenes. I mean maybe they could work that in but it feels like it disrupts the flow of gameplay and what makes a game a game.