Roger Ebert has written a bit about whether or not games can be art – his conclusion is that they can’t be. Of course, I disagree.

His most recent entry into the debate is a response to Clive Barker’s comments here.

Barker: “I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn’t taken the damn poison. If only he’d have gotten there quicker.”

Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would “Romeo and Juliet” have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. “King Lear” was also subjected to rewrites; it’s such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare’s or Barker’s, is superior, deeper, more moving, more “artistic”?

While games are rarely created by a single person anymore, many of the best games are the vision of one person, brought into reality by a group of people who share similar goals. I think you can say that they are collaborative in a way that is similar to movies. The lead designer of a game, let’s say, is the director. The actors, cameramen, effects artists, director of photography, etc. are the various people who work to make the director’s vision come to life. In games, you have modelers, texture artists, level designers, system designers, and programmers who all help you bring your vision to life.

The collaborative process is no different. So, it’s not that it’s a *single* person’s vision. But there is an “artist” at work.

In a movie, the “artist” presents the viewer with a linear narrative, which the viewer then interprets. Because it’s a linear narrative, you can usually be pretty sure of the viewer’s response, but there’s often differences in how people interpret things based on what they bring to the viewing – each viewer has perspective, experiences, and expectations that the other viewers do not. While I wouldn’t say it’s an ‘interactive’ experience, there is definitely some back-and-forth between the viewer and the artist to arrive at the final perception of what the experience actually *was* in the end.

In a game, the exact same thing occurs. The difference is while the movie delivers a single path through the experience, a game presents a “possibility space,” to use Will Wright’s term, where the player has options to shape the experience. In some games, the possibility space is very large (the Sims), while in others, it is very nearly linear (Final Fantasy). In the Sims, there is almost no prescripted narrative. I can do anything, and put my characters in nearly any situation. In Final Fantasy, while I can affect the mechanics of the game, the narrative is relentlessly linear, and there is almost nothing I can do to change the course of events other than die or not die.

Here’s the thing – if I make a movie about ‘the human experience,’ and my ‘human experience’ differs from yours, you may not get it. You may not be able to relate to the experience, no matter how universal I’ve intended it to be if our perspectives are substantially different.

In a game, let’s take the Sims again, you can create something that’s a statement about the ‘human experience,’ or make a statement about consumerism in modern society, and in the game, people can bring those different perspectives to bear, interact with the game in a very different way, and still reach the same sort of conclusions about the experience, because they’ve “solved” the mechanics of the game in a different way.

To hit another quote from the article:

Ebert: …the real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them? Something may be excellent as itself, and yet be ultimately worthless.

Yes.

This has been another installment of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

To be more precise, though, yes, of course:

• Sim City taught me a lot about not only city planning and management, but strategic organization under time pressure, and how various logical systems can interact with each other. I’d say without question, it’s made me more intelligent.
• Various adventure games – many of the Sierra games (Space Quest, etc.) and games like the Monkey Island series – ‘taught’ me to be witty, or empathetic in the same way that movies do.
• Ico, as I’m sure many people have pointed out to Mr. Ebert, has probably made them more philosophical, and if not Ico, certainly Shadow of the Colossus has made people question whether they’re doing the right thing or not

Those are but a few examples. The point being, to someone who’s grown up with games, that’s a question that doesn’t even need to be asked. The mere fact of his asking shows that he lacks an understanding of the medium’s potential. That’s no slight against Ebert. For someone of his generation, I’d bet he has far *more* understanding of games than most. That he believes games have more in common with sports isn’t all that far off. Many games, the Maddens, Counterstrikes and Starcrafts of the world certainly are more sport than not.

But the point is that the medium has tremendous flexibility, and the “sport”like games are merely one instance of a tremendously vast and varied medium. I would never say a game like Grim Fandango is anything like a sport. It’s a linear, self-contained narrative that happens to have some interactive elements. Half Life 2 is not a sport, but if it doesn’t evoke the same bleak dystopia that Children of Men does, I don’t know what else even comes close.

I’m glad Roger Ebert’s talking about games. Hopefully, our medium will find its own voice – it’s own Roger Ebert to have the same kind of lasting impact that he’s had on movies.

Still – doesn’t mean he’s *right*.