Should We Thank Roger Ebert?
Legendary film critic Roger Ebert has gone back on the warpath again, attempting to assert his viewpoint that "video games can never be art". He said it before, and a talk by Kellee Santiago at the TED conference in 2009 that disagreed with his viewpoint sparked this latest diatribe. There are a few problems with it, the first being that Roger Ebert doesn't know how to present unpopular opinions on this scale, but it goes beyond that.
In general most people will agree with him most of the time on his movie picks, and the few that disagree won't feel insulted by his words. But when he writes opinion pieces that in general put down video games as well as their fans, he's not ingratiating himself to anyone. He's not taking a side in some movies vs. games fanboy war (because there is no such thing). He is simply saying that video games can never hope to move people in the way that movies, paintings, sculpture, music, the written word, and other forms of expression have done.
But maybe we should thank him for saying it.
As gamers, we don't really challenge developers too much. Too often we reward mildly-interesting sequels with millions - billions, in some cases - in revenue, without ever thinking of what could have been if the developers were motivated to rethink their game entirely. Publishers make safe bets in making the games they think will sell, and those safe bets avoid risk and even up satisfying the people who have invested money in these companies. But gamers aren't investors - we're customers - and we often punish new ideas fairly often, from small innovations in sequels and licensed games to a shunning of the wholly-new efforts we've seen from independent developers. Sure, there are finally now millions of adults who grew up playing video games, and many of them are discerning enough to see the value in new ideas no matter how they come. Admittedly, sometimes innovation comes at the cost of accessibility or short-term fun, but seeing gamers reward new idea still happens too rarely.
If we don't challenge publishers and developers to make better games, who will? We vote with our wallets, sure, but a half-decent game with good enough marketing is still pretty likely to break even. It'll get a C or higher on Metacritic and will likely get decent sales, but even if it doesn't, one good runaway success every six months will cover the games that fail. If you don't believe me, let's do an exercise. First, count the number of major Wall Street investment banks that have folded in the last couple of years on your left hand. Now, count the number of major game publishers closing up shop in the same time period on your right. (Hint: the answer should be "several" to "zero".) Even the publishers that have put out one bad product after another recently, like Atari, are still in business. Sega's been largely unable to make its biggest franchises like Sonic work for years, but they're still around. Hell, Interplay's still in business, and they're coasting by on classic games like the Fallout Trilogy that sit in WalMarts and Targets nationwide. Frankly, as difficult as it is to be in the game-making business, from the perspective of major publishers, I think they're doing just fine. The results they're getting are paying off, so they have little motivation to really radically change the way they do things.
Well, where could the challenge come from? We probably don't need more action-packed, testosterone-fueled, third-person action games that just channel the exact same stuff we've been playing over the last decade. We need people to break free of the mold and make games more fun, more engaging, and more immersive. We need game developers to make art. And who better to spur them on than a guy like Roger Ebert telling them they'll never achieve that?
No, Ebert's ridiculous opinions shouldn't be respected by anyone that's actually paying attention. He couldn't be bothered to play Flower, and in all of his rants, he hasn't actually admitted to having played anything by name - one might even come to the conclusion that the best he's done is sat in front of video footage of a game with his little notepad, reviewing it like he would a movie, then calling it "pathetic" like he did Waco Resurrection (ok, true there), Braid, and Flower in his rebuttal to Santiago. He insists video games have high scores and competitive outcomes the same way football or chess does, but never mentions narratives, story, emotions, or feelings. Clearly, he's never experienced any of this in the unique way that a video game can deliver these things. It's like his knowledge of video games is limited to what he saw in arcades in the 80s and early 90s.
Maybe he deserves pity for not being able to understand video games, but that didn't stop him from knowingly talking trash about great games that he never played, or from directly insulting the people who wrote to him asking him to open his mind a little bit. In the end, we shouldn't listen to Ebert when he talks about games, as he's now probably getting a chuckle from being the world's most high-profile internet troll ever seen. We shouldn't egg him on or make him write another diatribe insulting gamers. In fact, I think we'll all be better off never having to read another Ebert article about video games ever again. He didn't grow up with them, so they are simply alien to him - much like they are to many of our parents and grandparents.
But we can still take something away from this. Game developers need to quietly try and prove him wrong, and gamers need to quietly reward those attempts. Kellee Santiago probably focused a little too much on critical acclaim and sales success in defending video games, as that made her an easy target for Ebert's crass dismissals, but she's got a point: if we want big publishers to make the kinds of games we want, we have to find them and buy the hell out of them. People like Roger Ebert may be one of the relatively few people that are really challenging game developers right now, but we can fix that by challenging them ourselves.
Don't just buy games that will distract you from real life for a few hours or a few weeks - instead, buy games that actually spark the same feeling inside you that art does. Ebert may say that video games can never be art (and then amends it by saying that in no currently alive gamer's lifetime will that be achieved), but the truth is that Roger Ebert will never understand video games, so he's unqualified to talk about them in this way. So ignore the troll, be glad for the indirect effect he'll likely have on improving the games you play in the future, and buy the ones that help make our hobby a fully-accepted part of everyday life for everyone.
