Brad Westness.com

There’s a lot of hullabaloo on the internet presently about some spurious claims made by famed thumb-haver Roger Ebert, in which he claims that “video games can never be art.” Everyone is attempting to argue with him by giving examples of games that have exceptional cinematics, sound, storytelling, voice acting, etc etc.

This is the wrong argument. The reason Ebert is wrong is that he’s using the term “art” to mean “art that I like.” His entire argument is essentially “videogames are not art because I don’t like them.” This is the same abuse of the word that your conservative grand father used to dismiss punk-rock, and that your blue-collar uncle uses to dismiss Jackson Pollack. Art, as a term, does not connote value or quality. It simply implies that something was created with the intent of “being art.”

I realize that defining art as “something that is art” isn’t really that helpful. But it’s about as good of a definition as anyone seems to be able to agree on. Merriam Webster says that art is “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; and works so produced.”

So the problem isn’t that Ebert hasn’t played the right game, or that he hasn’t considered this aspect of video games or that aspect. It’s that he doesn’t know what the word “art” means.