Moving Hands

About a week ago, Roger Ebert, who is basically the overlord of the film criticism universe, wrote in his blog that video games are not art.

Ebert’s post is a response to Kellee Santiago’s talk at TEDxUSC that proposes that video games are art. Unfortunately, subtitles are not currently available, so I cannot respond to her video.

A cursory Google search reveals that Ebert has been writing about this subject for several years and that he has not budged in his position.

As a fellow film aficionado, I am rather disappointed in Ebert’s lack of imagination.

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I was approximately six years old when I began playing the very first video game that I can remember: Super Mario World.
I was immediately captivated by the visuals: its colors were bright and fun to look at, just like Captain Planet.
Narrative-wise, it was more like reading a book than watching a movie. I was following a definite storyline and could control the pace at which I played. I couldn’t press “pause” on Captain Planet, but I could put down Goosebumps or the Super Nintendo controller to play outside, then resume from where I had left off.
What really captivated me, though, was the fact that it was so interactive. Mario became an extension of my imagination: I had free will. I could choose to drop Yoshi into a pit to save myself or fall into the pit with Yoshi and die.

As a small child, I told my parents that I wanted to “make video games” when I grew up.
What I meant was that I wanted to design the storyline of a video game’s universe: I was fascinated by the fact that the narrative of a video game falls somewhere on the spectrum between “linear” (go rescue Princess Peaches) and “non-linear” (explore the Star World or take the shortcut to Bowser’s castle). Of course, six-year-old me would not have put it in quite those terms, but the underlying sentiment is the same.

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When I started college, I began playing games that were created before I was born. There were several reasons behind this: I could not afford a wii, I experienced intense nostalgia for the past, and I discovered that “old school” games can be incredibly fun.

This screenshot is from Thomas Disch’s Amnesia, which was released in 1986, before computers could display graphics.

Like Super Mario World, the narrative falls somewhere on the spectrum between “linear” and “non-linear.” You guide a protagonist through the city in a quest to regain lost memory, and there are several different endings. (Since the game is brutally difficult, most of these endings are not happy.)

Eye candy is a definite advantage in many areas: paintings, photography, film, video games.

But in video games, as in film, a narrative structure undergirds the visuals. Here I see a close parallel between video games and film: both are an interplay between the image and the narrative. Some films place more emphasis on the visuals; some video games place more emphasis on the narrative.
Many video games and films experiment with this interplay: there are some wholly visual films such as Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, and even though modern computers are capable of displaying graphics, some people still create entirely text-based games known as interactive fiction.

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Reading Ebert’s blog, one aspect of his thesis that does not quite make sense to me is the fact that he seems to be saying that, since one “wins” a video game, it is not art.

Frankly, this makes no sense to me, and, even if he had not admitted it, it is obvious that Ebert has never played a video game in its entirety.

I recently watched Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon for the millionth time. (I love it, but sometimes I really do wish that film classes would screen her other work.)
Even though I had seen the film more times than I care to count, I noticed something new. When the protagonist first approaches the house, before the dream sequence begins, a man can be seen walking away. This brought a new level of meaning to the film for me: I interpreted this man as being transmuted into the tall black figure when the protagonist begins dreaming.
When Maya Deren created the film, she purposely placed that man in the frame. It was I that had not seen him the first several viewings. Art ultimately exists in the eye of the beholder.

Likewise, when I finished Ocarina of Time for a second time several months ago, I saw new things that I had missed when I was ten years old. And, if I wanted to, I could have gone back to complete all of the side quests after rescuing Zelda. (I am not that type of gamer, though.)

The beautiful thing about art is that one can constantly revisit it and mine further meaning from it. An artist can place “signposts” that point to a work’s meaning, but the work ultimately exists in the mind of the audience.