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Bo - An opinion is something better got than given, when given something best not gave in full.
More specifically, when I would have responses to something I share, I do not feel a response to my opinion a necessarily integral part of the process.
Nor even a useful one.
However, since it wouldn't be a proper party without you, I'll see if I can humor you into saying what I know you have to say:
In as much as lone may mean by "It's Ebert." to say "It's an old man, in the nearness of death, whose familiarity with the subject is not only limited, but in all probability dated by a decade or two, and who has in his old age probably come to see video games as a way for his grandchildren to bilk money from his children," I'd agree with him.
It's also a surpassing irony, one I'm fairly sure he's failed to see, that a film critic should accuse a creative field of greed.
However, there's substance to what he's said, in a few ways that shouldn't be overlooked.
First, though, I should probably make clear A.) I'm only going to get more thorough (read: long) from here, you have been warned, and B.) that I don't believe art has a subjective definition, as some here have expressed. I believe it is a field, a corner of human endeavor, and it performs a function, serves a purpose, does a deed, and specific functions, purposes, and deeds are not nebulous things - they can be flexible, but at some point they have limits to what they can conceivably include.
Beauty is subjective, and art is often beautiful, but all that is beautiful is not 'art', essentially being the model, with a healthy dose of: what you like and what gets to be defined as art are in no way synonymous.
Video games, so near as I can tell, very clearly are included, for instance, but trees are not - art is something that is created with the express purpose of conveying, to form a loose (and weak) definition with which to work. Chess may be played artfully, to use Ebert's example, and someone may even loosely say that there's an 'art' to playing chess, but its function is to be executed, to be gone through, and a game of chess cannot actually function as art -- but it is from this very apt, very true point that Ebert proceeds to make one of his biggest mistakes, forgetting to consider the game itself, in broad spectrum, the game as an entity.
The game was created, was evolved, was lived almost as purely and humanely as a Homeric epic poem - over time, and through the hands of many men, and kept alive only in their heads, and invested with their values, and conveying always a certain sense of things to its new pupils - and then The Odyssey became a solid thing, a whole thing, something not transferred from person to person via memory, a thing you could walk into and move about in, turning back at any point to see that where you last were is still there - and chess became a game that, from the hands of the many, crystallized in its studious perfection.
Well, those are the ancient examples, and now (and for a long time) poems have gotten to come whole into the world from the drives of one being, and exist as that from thence forth - and very recently games have gotten to do that too. Chess is a very nearly perfect thing, and is a marvel to consider, and indeed, as great art often does, inspires many other works and forms of art regularly, but now a game comes out and is presented to the world in a very plainly artistic manner - which is to say like a peacock preening to get f*cked.
The game may be played through, and is there to be executed, but in a way much less general, and forced, than calling the game of chess a work of art, there is an individual creation, arranged and designed, with the express purpose of being experienced as itself.
The primary thing a work of art exists to do is exist as it is; everything else, we do.
Games are not 'beaten', in the common parlance, or 'won', in Ebert's excuse for why a game can't be art, so much as they are gone through and experienced.
When Ebert lamely expresses the idea that 'art has not rules' and 'games have rules', I can only somewhat dryly respond that 'art' has no rules, yes, not beyond its definition, but that artworks have rules.
Every novel has rules, defined by the author, of how you must experience it. They have chosen words, and set them in an order, and defined how you must proceed. Every painting is ruled by the particular intentions of the painter in how you will perceive the scene, what lines your eyes will follow as it explores the painting, what colors will attract you and which ones hide from you, and how you will feel about its subjects - and every game has its rules, because without rules, limits - set, defined parameters - games do not function, anymore than any other form of art does.
Every single work of art has its own set of rules;
The point of a piece of art is that it defines, and rules, the way we experience it - that's how it gets to affect us.
Shot for shot, word for word, stroke for stroke, and now digitally-rendered-bouncing pixel-breast for pixel-breast:
The final point to be made in an attempt at convincing summary of why video games are art is that not only does it share all the basic criteria met by every other art form, but it also offers ways to experience things nothing else does, and expands the roster of wards placed in the human heart (before I wax too poetic, most games suck more dick than a vacuum in the hands of a desperate man with crabs; but so do most poems, and presumably someday video games will get old enough to know that all those sins against quality are one day forgotten, which is how an artform develops a 'canon' of what's worth remembering.)
Somehow one has to wonder whether Ebert knows that 'video games' no longer means 'Pong', and occasionally even possess a point beyond passing the time between now and death.
So, from the personal side of things, outside of quibbling over definitions, I am not what could be called a 'gamer', but I have played a fair number of games in my life, and I have experienced a great deal more of what else we call 'art' in my life, and I have found that the experience offered by the best of the games I've played is synonymous with that of the rest.
The most important of them are probably these: FF IX, Zelda: Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask (in particular of the series, as 'art'), Silent Hill 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Halo (f*ck the other two), Morrowind, and (mhm, that's right) Ico.*
What I've said also mostly applies, I think, to two other hotly debated fields: hip-hop and comic books (I think 'graphic novel' is a cop-out).
And what goes for those two, also goes for video games: That, though they are evolving much more quickly than most forms ever got to, they are also all very young, and inexperienced, and it's not so much questionable to me that they are artforms, but rather how much of it yet could be considered fruitfully as art.
*You'll notice that (probably because I mainly trained my sensibilities in other arts) I've chosen mostly games that are 'deep' and 'break with convention', or that have blatant 'artistic aspirations', and I think that's in part because things that aspire get to achieve, but I also think I should amend it slightly with artful games that limit themselves more explicitly to straight-forward entertainment: Mario 64 (which is pretty astounding, really), Grand Theft Auto 3, God of War and Prince of Persia (both of which weren't really my thing but I respect them and enjoyed them immensely for what they were), and others I won't bother to think of now, but do let me end on the game that's my freebie draft that no one else need care about:
Beetle Adventure Racing.
("you're still in the game!")
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