Roger Ebert

>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.
What did he mean by this, Sup Forums?

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He was right. he may be a pleb when it comes to film but here he was spot on.

Truer words have never been spoken about vidyashit.

it's true, games are more comparable to drugs than art

MGS1 and MGS2

he's not wrong
most games are garbage, and most people play that garbage. 99% of the market are cawadoodies, FIFA and mobile / facebook games

>Old fat guy with no experience or knowledge of games talks shit about games.

What a shock.

He also whined about how Friday the 13th was incredibly sexist and how going to see it made you sexist if you went to go see it.

He knew dick about most subjects he talked about.

He's not wrong, even Sup Forums will agree with the guy. The only people who disagree are redditards and tumblrinas.

>games merely a hair's breadth away from being a respected medium
>Pokemon Go released
>games catapulted backward thirty years

T-Thanks Nintendo!

kek, nice one

Geralt wants a word.

He's right. Video games are mindless button mashing entertainment, so you can get from one cut scene to the next.
Go back to mashing buttons pleb.

>listening to the man that liked Home Alone 3 more than 1 and gave The Phantom Menace 4 stars

I really miss watching At the Movies with Ebert and Ropert. Youtube reviews just don't do it for me.

Everything about the Witcher series, from the setting to the writing to the characters to the """""fantasy""""" is an ode to the modern day butchering of medieval customs, both in the real medieval world and in traditional medieval fantasy, for the sake of making money off of disenfranchised young males.
It should come as no surprise that both the writer of the books and the developer of the games are both from Poland, a country with a cultural and historical heritage that has been annihilated throughout history by various parties.

The poles have abbrogated the creation of a truly compelling plot based off of actual traditional European fantasy (like what Tolkein masterfully pulled off with Rings) in favor of boring overdone monster-hunting schlock by characters with anime hair.

The fact that you Sup Forums kids still defend this garbage is staggering.

he's right, he doesn't really condemn the physical medium but the fanbase

You can say the same of pretty much any Tolkien fantasy.
Books, TV series, movies or vidya.

He also absolutely hated Freddy Got Fingered so you just KNOW he's a pleb.

Shock games shut him the fuck up

Yeah, but how fat were the dumps he took?

MGS3 says hello

>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.
What a fucking pleb.

Kek. U mad Sup Forumsirgin?

>Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.

>"Fanboys" is an amiable but disjointed movie that identifies too closely with its heroes. Poking a little more fun at them would have been a great idea. They are tragically hurtling into a cultural dead end, mastering knowledge which has no purpose other than being mastered, and too smart to be wasting their time. When a movie's opening day finally comes, and fanboys leave their sidewalk tents for a mad dash into the theater, I wonder who retrieves their tents, sleeping bags, portable heaters and iPod speakers. Warning: Mom isn't always going to be there to clean up after you.

Why does he hate nerds so much?

video games are better suited for competition than art

ive never really enjoyed a cinematic plot-driven 1-player game as much as ive enjoyed a simple, gameplay driven, multiplayer game

i dont agree with him that video games are a complete waste of time, casual competition is a good bonding experience among friends, there's a reason chess and poker have lasted thousands of years

I agree, card games don't educate you about culture but they're a fun bonding experience. Ebert never complained about them. I think his problem was seeing video games as a pretender to cinematic artistry when really they're a thing to themselves.

But that parrot in the shower

Who actually thinks video games are art though?

They're a consumer plaything. They're as much art as a deck of cards.

Because he's right.
About this, at least.

I bet he also hates playing sports

Videogames such as counter strike and Street fighter are sports

As with all Art you leave it to the French to show you how to do it.

i play vidyagames and he is 100% right. i would not call what i am playing "art" and anybody who does is most likely a fedora tipping redditor

>Ebert will never experience the euphoric feeling of killing Jian scum

>Implying he isn't stuck cycles of guilt over some review he regrets

What is artful about star wars episode 1?

I think the fascinating thing to me is that even independently produced games are totally without artistic vision or even intention. Every other art form has people really pushing boundaries at that level but in videogames it's just people remaking Mega Man over and over.

There's literally not a single video game with more depth than a Harry Potter movie but for some reason gamers buy into this idea that they're art. I kind of think that's why entertainment as a whole is really going for a much lower standard these days. People expectations for art have been managed to the point of mental retardation.

He was an old man who came of age watching movies. People his parents age mostly believed that films rotted the brain and were inferior to books. People his great grandparents' age believed that fiction novels were utter trash, and did not belong on the same shelf with history and science books.

Artistic importance, and what's considered a masterpiece is subjective. Ebert is the past, but a critic in the future will think differently. Maybe in 20 years, Journey will be considered a masterpiece. I don't know.

A lot of buzzwords there buddy. you need to define depth and compare what depth in a video game is to a movie. Because you are comparing two mediums that are hugely different from one and another

I admit that I find more enjoyment in video games than I do in movies. But at the same time I am not gonna pretend that this industry has gone down in quality over the years. But the things you wrote is a huge pile of shit.

A game like Journey has probably more "depth" than all of the Harry potter movies. He does a lot of things right as a video game and that is mainly letting the player be in control of the whole experience.

Fuck off with your level headed response fag

yeah i think the push to make games "artistic" is a mistake

i mean i cant really think of a reason why games couldnt possibly be a good format for story telling, i can only point to the games we have and say that they dont compare to the art of filmmaking even though they are trying to

Someone's never played Kentucky Route Zero.

>final fantasy tactics
>vagrant story
>planescape: torment

just because children play video games doesn't mean the medium is childish.

>final fantasy

>a film critic who penned such great works of art like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and who's more recent films of the year choices are Juno and Crash
It baffles me that he was so revered
99% of movies are mediocre at best serve to neither culture or civilize us

Crash was great though.

In a world where this, Bastion, Journey and Limbo exist, i'm pretty sure he's been proven wrong

Ebert on his review of "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"

>"Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art."

Not the first time Ebert's arbitrarily decided something wasn't art. It's just this time he died before he could realize he was wrong and write up a piece about it.

A video game is not meant to be a film that you can interact with, the idea that games needs to compete with films on narrative to qualify as art is an incredibly misguided point of view and sets video games up for failure. The point of a game is that It is interactive and immersive, therefore an artistic game would be one in which those unique aspects of the medium are emphasised

Unlike cinema, games require a level of skill from their audience in order to get the full experience. A game punishes you for ineptitude by witholding itself. Cinema can be viewed by anyone and understood by anyone (assuming itnisn't total pretentious dreck).

What I'm saying is: Git gud scrub

Bastion has awful Writng and Journey and Limbo have zero writing. Just atmosphere.

Viewing games through a cinema lens will do them as much justice as the reverse. No one complains about how the Godfather has no playability ot lack of multiplayer...

>needing writing
Wewlad

>writing
There you go applying cinema rules to games again. The gameplay is the writing. YOU, the player, control the flow of the story. This is true even if it's a linear story.

>The gameplay is the writing
But no it isn't, lmao.

>implying FFT is not the best storytelling of all the final fantasies

lmaoo

>japanese "writing"

He's absolutely right
The only (solo) video games I've never regretted playing were the MGS games and Earthbound

i disagree user, since often times you'll be in a fight where you're scripted to lose despite the fact you could wipe the floor with the enemy. it's supposed to make you feel a sense of dread but you never actually feel it, you just get irritated.

Sup Forumsirgins BTFO

he was and still is 100% right; anybody who argues this fact is fucking delusional.

based larry and jeff getting those double dubs

You just aren't used to art from a superior culture senpai

nice little ad hom you got there

I like witcher games but I completely agree with this post.

I always lose my sides whenever a game like Spec Ops The Line comes out and gets praised as some breakthrough for narrative gaming

and it's all one dimensional 80s action movie morality bullshit.

Or when Bioshock gets praised for rehashing dollar store YA dystopia novels

He meant even blow ke mon blo wont save you

>people say MGS are well-written games
youtube.com/watch?v=ydRjUQq_Ipc&t=221

savage and spot on

that's like saying it's the most well written episode of naruto

>abbrogated the creation of a truly compelling plot based off of actual traditional European fantasy (like what Tolkein masterfully pulled off with Rings) in favor of boring overdone monster-hunting schlock

>tolkein
>compelling
>actual traditional european fantasy.
>overdone monster-hunting schlock.

Look broski, the witcher might be Y.A. trash in it's novel film. But don't act like the lord of the rings isn't 3 books of uncompelling songs, trees and descriptions of lineages no one gives a shit about.

>generic male power fantasy
>good

Fucj off lol

Like a 7 year old trying to describe a bad Tom Clancy novel

fuckin' brutal

Please. I love the Witcher too, but the story is only good as far as video games go. When compared to films, it's about the same quality as a good popcorn flick like Indiana Jones. It's not quite "The Lives of Others" or "Citizen Cane."

For one thing, it's fun

>Oh, it's brutal!
I can hear his voice

This is the same man who gave The Phantom Menace a 3.5/4 so his word doesn't really mean much.

Read any of his reviews
Every criticism he makes is banal and usually not pertinent to the overall film.

He's a overrated hack, and the fact that anyone took this fuck seriously in the first place is baffling.

except it is nothing at all like any other jrpg. it doesn't use the same, tired cliche characters everywhere. then again that's the same shit people who've never played it would say about anything they dislike.

>I don't understand why those people are not doing what I do to become more empathetic. I'm sure empathetic and not at all an old man who is unable to deal with new things...
>Like chewing for example.

Not to take anything away from the Witcher games, but they also had the crutch of the books to lean on. Not saying the books are anything special cause they ain't, but the universe, lore and the characters were already created for them. Hell, they straight up reused plot points from the books. Maybe it's not such a bad idea to adapt an already established universe.

Complaining about video games not having the same artistic qualities as an another artform makes no fucking sense.

Nobody listens to a piece of music and critiques it as a painting. Nobody reads a book or looks at a painting and says the acting in it is bad.

>it doesn't use the same, tired cliche characters everywhere
I realize you're probably defending your favorite game, but please get a hold of yourself. FF is about as cookie cutter anime garbage as anything else.

He's absolutely right, but at the same time he comes off as pretentious and not someone you'd want to associate with outside of professional engagement. Reason being, he is guilty of the same crime he accuses fanboys of: he dedicates his life to analysis of grown men playing make believe, without actually making the world a better place himself.

He meant that games themselves are not art, and he's largely right I think.

Games have artistic qualities like architecture, writing, music and sound, and of-course visual design, but those qualities don't mean the game itself is art. It just has art in it.

For a game to be art the way the player interacts with the game would need to be important and indispensible to the game's "message" and would also need to be something that can be conveyed only through the medium of "gaming" and not through another like film or music.


You see, Citizen Kane is considered art for the way its scenes are woven together and how they are FILMED. This is an aspect of the film that can't really be directly translated to music or even to drawn art. Films are motion, after all.


The Pink Floyd album, "Dark Side of the Moon", is all about sound, but there are no visuals. The sound of the music can't be replicated with the written word, any visuals will be unique to any given listener, and though the music could be played in a film the music's artistic qualities are entirely separate from any film it might be added to.

When you frame the essential characteristics of film as the most desirable, then one should expect film to always retain the upper hand.

You need to instead reframe the premise, e.g. How can film ever achieve the level of interaction, the sense of achievement, the feel of satisfaction, the camaraderie of vidya? It can't, thus film is forever BTFO along these measures.

Ebert was a retard autist who made his entire life revolve about something that was inconsequential. Movies and games are both inconsequential, ways to entertain yourself and nothing more. The moment you start acting like watching movies is gonna make you a better human being is the moment you know you fucked up.

If he had been born a century earlier, he'd probably apply that same logic to films compared to books and sperg out how "moving pictures" are just "for lazy people who have no mind's eye" or something.

10-15 years ago he would be dead wrong but since people started to try and push games into the art territory, they forgot why a game is called a game.

The only things games are good for:
>Visuals
>Sound
>Gameplay

Most game stories used to be crap because they knew people were playing for the gameplay.
Now we are stuck with games with pretentious writing 101 cliche garbage, no gameplay and graphics most people pcs can't even handle to max.

People forgot why games were good. As soon people stop trying to legitimize their game addiction to society, calling games art, the sooner we can go back to have real games with real gameplay instead of play x to pay respect.

>make a bait for Sup Forums on Sup Forums
>unsurprisingly effective

>VtMB
>KoTOR I and II
>I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

>you're better off spending hours of your life watching blockbusters and reboots.

Is this art?

It has compelling group gameplay and that's all it's good for.
If you consider the act of playing or owning a game with good group gameplay art than nobody can say it is not art.
T-thanks postmodernism.

t. Focault

Whether or not something is art is a matter of intent.

There, I said it.

>never had to play as the old dutch cheeto piece.

Stay privileged, fuckface.

The fat dead guy who said The Raid sucked? Who cares what he meant.

>Ebert and Ropert.

It was called Siskel and Ebert, millennial scum.

ITT: fa/tv/irgins appeal to authority in order to justify a newer artwork getting more attention than their dying old one.

I have literally never met a single person who was even moderately interested in books or film while also holding a strong interest in video games. There are some with the former two interests who may play a hugely acclaimed game every couple of years perhaps, but I have never met someone who indulged all 3 hobbies regularly.

Face it gamers, you're a lower species.