Donkey Kong, 1981
I recently read an article by the esteemed Roger Ebert entitled "Video Games Can Never Be Art." Ebert's core declaration is this: "No one in or out of the [gaming industry] has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." Regardless of what you may think of video games, I think it can be agreed that this is a distressingly strong assertion. All art is, after all, subjective, even within the fields Ebert mentions. Generational differences play a large part as well - I imagine that Dickens might have a hard time accepting the novels of Cormac McCarthy (an author that Ebert specifically praises in the article) as "art". Then again, Dickens might not even think of his own writing as art; only relatively recently have we been so keen to draw a line between what is and isn't art across all media. My point is that Ebert is positioning himself as a voice of authority on what can be considered art - an egregious error as it is - and views video games with a fairly narrow mindset.
More after the jump!
